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The Complete A-Z Of Scottish Football Scandal And Corruption

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With Dominic McKay now in the door at Celtic Park I thought it was a good opportunity to re-post this article. 

Consider this our own open letter to him. 

I had a conversation some years ago with a guy I know in England who was largely oblivious as to the reasons why this blog and others spend so much time focused on things other than our own club.

I told him that Scottish football has suffered a trauma; that trauma was because of the events of 2012.

For many people, it was like ripping aside the curtains and letting in the light.

Many had lived in ignorance at how corrupt our game was … that year changed a lot of minds.

I filled him in on some of the details of that trauma, but what I realised was that there had to be more to it than that.

And the idea dawned on me; how about a simple guide for everyone who wants to truly understand what has gone on here over the years?

Over on Fields, I once put together two parts of what was intended to be a three-part piece on how the SFA almost destroyed Scottish football.

I never wrote the third piece because Dave King was still at Ibrox and the story was not yet complete.

I considered re-hashing that piece with some additions … I rejected the idea outright.

I thought the idea of doing an A-Z was a nice, neat one, with a pre-defined road-map.

Shortly after that conversation, I gave it a go … over a few months I wrote four of these articles.

This is the first time all four segments have ever been pulled together in one piece.

I thought it was the right time for this.

I thought it was time to remind them all what real scandal and corruption looks like.

A is for Administration

A word the media seems only to vaguely understand; it is a process which ends in one of two ways.

It ends with a club coming out of it, or it ends in a club dying.

Hearts exited it.

Rangers were swallowed up in it and vanished down the plug-hole.

They did not survive.

Administration is in here not because it a scandal in itself, but because the media and others continue to deny what happened at Ibrox.

But it did happen.

Rangers left administration and went into liquidation.

Clubs that come out of administration do not get relegated; Sevco has long claimed to have been “relegated” but the SFA rulebook does not allow for any club to be sanctioned by demotion to the bottom tier just for running into financial trouble.

Rangers did not survive.

One of the real scandals is that administration is far too common in Scottish football; it would be far less so if clubs could be convinced to adopt Financial Fair Play procedures which protect them and sporting integrity in other countries; almost every league in Europe in fact.

We are no closer to that than we were when I first wrote this piece.

B is for Bryson

Sandy Bryson was the SFA registrations officer who was supposed to make sure that all the contracts the association held were up to snuff.

When the side-letters held by Rangers were revealed he should have declared every one of the contracts in those players names to be null and void; there’s a phrase for you, eah?

That would have overturned the results of hundreds of games and would have resulted in the retrospective stripping of titles and trophies.

Instead he appeared before the LNS commission and gave a highly suspect interpretation of the rules; the long and short of it was that the registrations were valid at the time of the games because the side letters were not known of.

The logic of this is easy to understand but almost impossible to reconcile with fairness and justice.

In his world, if a crime is committed it is only a crime if the authorities knew it was being committed at the time.

Otherwise, there’s no case to answer.

Incredibly, that was the second major scandal he was involved in at the SFA.

He was at the heart of the Jim Farry / Jorge Cadete case way back when … and he would have been next on the witness stand in that case, and certain to follow his boss out the door at the SFA, had Farry’s lawyer not convinced his client that he had no choice but to step down and plead no contest.

Fergus always smarted about not getting Bryson too; he knew what had to be done there.

The history of our game would look very different if he had.

C is for Craig Whyte

The man who needs no introduction.

No person in the history of football has ever gotten so much fun out of a quid, nor spread such joy to the people around him.

The events of 2011-12 – his reign of error – was truly game-changing.

Some of us think the club would have fallen anyway, but he added that special touch that means so much … he gave it the public face we never could have dreamed of; a smirking used car salesman, a back-street boiler room wide-boy, Del Trotter without the three-wheel van or any of the scruples.

He was the owner they deserved, and proof that a good layer of bullshit can cover a multitude of sins.

And oh what bullshit it was.

Oh what sins they were.

They said he was a billionaire, but his “Glasgow headquarters” was a room with grates on the windows and a single file cabinet behind a locked door.

They said he was an international jet-setter, but the building he closed the Rangers deal from was a portacabin in a field full of cows.

The media reported all of it after the fact; the Bampots were way in front of them.

The Scottish public still doesn’t know the half of it.

The Bampots dug up so much dirt you could have buried a hundred bodies in it.

From the multiple variations of his name which appeared on documents, different dates of birth, from his involvement in land deals, his links with other football club scams and even a period as a gold-trader who caught the eyes of the US Justice Department and the FBI, Craig Whyte’s story is a book just begging to be written.

Of course, you would need good lawyers if you ever wanted to have it published … but let’s face it, the guy is never going to get on the stand, put his hand on a bible and swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth is he?

Except that … yes, he did that too … and in a high profile trial he smirked his way through the proceedings and was found Not Guilty.

Sevco fans fume about that to this day … but it was never actually clear what crime he committed.

Rangers were in a desperate state long before he arrived … all he did was put his hand on the wheel and it was still there when the club hit the wall.

Indeed, when you consider who came after him he almost looks like a model of probity …

D is for Doncaster

Neil Doncaster is perhaps more to blame than anyone else in the game for what was allowed to happen in 2012.

He was one of the earliest people to be informed of what was going on at Ibrox, when Craig Whyte met with him shortly after Rangers was knocked out of the Europa League.

There is no question that he was well aware of their predicament in November of 2011, because that month he told the SPL board that they would have to shelve the proposals for FansTV, which was the brainchild of Hibs’ Rod Petrie.

Doncaster said there had been a “change in circumstances” affecting one of the clubs.

It was around that time that he urged the signing of a new TV deal with Sky, one that included the notorious “four Old Firm games” clause; or so he later stated.

In fact, we have good reason to believe that the clause did not reference a set number of games but was, in fact, security against circumstances where “either Celtic or Rangers was not in the league.”

A memo to that effect has been circulating in certain circles online for many years and is definitive evidence that the SPL hierarchy signed that deal, with that clause inserted, to blackmail clubs who might not be keen on the idea of an Ibrox NewCo in the top flight.

Doncaster’s scam was defeated by the clubs on a straight vote with only Kilmarnock demurring.

His Scottish football career ought to have ended that day, but he remains at the heart of the game.

Celtic has enabled Doncaster’s survival for reasons known only to those inside Celtic Park.

One day that will have to be explained.

One of the great ironies is that we were forced to defend this joker when Sevco and Hearts came after him with their false claims at the end of last season. This blog found itself in the perverse position of supporting a man who we would otherwise have wanted to see sitting outside Hampden with his boxes waiting on a taxi coming.

The Celtic bloggers believe Doncaster to be a scandalised character who ought not to be in office … but none of us was willing to participate in a witch hunt based on bogus charges, and especially not one that was led from Ibrox, and based around paranoid claims that Celtic has too much influence.

Sevco made a lot of noise, but when their dodgy dossier was produced it turned out not to have a smoking gun … it was, in fact, an empty bag of wind.

E is for EBT’s

The alpha and omega of Scottish football’s modern scandals.

The tax schemes set up by a non struck off financial advisor and former porn star, Paul Baxendale Walker, should have been watertight.

Baxendale Walker always said he had built it that way and that the club screwed it up with how they implemented it.

Whether he’s right or wrong, it was a disaster.

Confusion still surrounds exactly what happened here, and even more swirls around the fact that the EBT scheme was not just one tax scam but two; the main scheme which ran for about ten years and the Discounted Options Scheme – the wee tax case – which preceded it.

The man who’s signature is on the DOS paperwork has his own section of this article; he was the SFA President when the story broke.

The scandal was uncovered when police raided Ibrox during the Stevens Inquiry into transfer deals and bungs.

They were investigating the dodgy deal which took Boumsong to Newcastle whilst Sounees was manager there.

The investigation didn’t find any evidence of a fraud in that case; what it found instead was the whole EBT scheme, and they handed it over to the Treasury.

Souness was in there; the closest they came to dirt on him was finding out that Rangers paid him an EBT years after he left the club.

It was, and remains, unexplained.

The Scottish press has never asked why he, and Walter Smith, were given cash bungs long after departing Ibrox.

That’s just one of the many unexplained things from that period.

In order to hide as much detail as they could from HRMC , the scheme had involved players being issued with “side contracts”, something the club had flatly denied when the tax man asked them about it.

That dishonesty constituted fraud, something the club’s own lawyer was at pains to point out to them when the Discounted Options Scheme was rumbled.

Those side contracts were also never disclosed to the SFA, something which should have rendered all the games involving the players who had them null and void; thankfully for all at Ibrox, Sandy Bryson was on hand to offer his own unique interpretation of the rules.

Nevertheless, EBT’s destroyed Rangers.

When the club entered administration, HRMC rolled the EBT scheme up with the with-holding of PAYE by Craig Whyte to make themselves far and away the largest of the creditors, and that gave them total control of the process.

They rejected any offer of a settlement, preferring to have the corpse of the club as a warning to others.

F is for Fit And Proper Person

One of the most scandalous things about the SFA is their sheer laziness and their utter ineptness when it comes to offering scrutiny to even the most obvious issues.

This is never clearer than in their policies on what are called Fit and Proper Persons.

Many folks actually misunderstand this issue; there is not an actual “fit and proper person” test.

That would imply that the SFA does some work in this regard and I would certainly never want to accuse them of that.

In fact, that’s just the trouble; they don’t do any.

In fact, what they rely on is that dishonest people will be honest enough to tell the governing body that they are dishonest.

If that sounds absolutely ludicrous it’s because it is.

The SFA’s “fit and proper person” regulations are built around the idea that people who have evil designs on football clubs, or who are unsuitable to be in charge of them, should let the SFA know that in advance. Then the governing body can decide whether or not they should be disqualified.

In effect, the SFA has a self-certification system.

Try that in any other walk of life; see how much chaos it causes.

And of course, it has caused a fair old amount of in football here as well.

David Murray is a peer of the realm but he ran Rangers so dishonestly than the club went bust mired in scandal.

Craig Whyte who bought it from him famously had a string of issues in his past including directorship bans.

The guy who bought the assets of Rangers, Charles Green, was a fly-by-night chancer every bit as dodgy as Whyte himself. He appointed a convicted criminal to the board, only for that board to be ousted and taken over by another convicted crook who we’ll get to in a short time.

All of them presumably self-certified which suggests that perhaps the rules are in need of some tightening up.

Or, in fact, simply being turned into rules instead of a giant Get Out Of Jail Free card for anyone who fancies taking over a Scottish club.

Vladimir Romanov, the former owner of Hearts, had issues of his own, apart from being as mad as a march hare and from time to time other clubs in Scotland dabble with the devil; Ibrox seems to be unique in attracting so many dodgy characters, but it’s actually not.

You’d think after the first couple of these folk at that ground that the SFA would have taken steps to make sure others didn’t follow them … but of course, as long as someone is promising to restore the Grand Old Days Of Yore they can breeze through the system, even if, as with their former chairman, Dodgy Dave himself, the ink was still drying on a plea deal.

What all this means of course is that Scottish football is probably the widest open in Europe to organised crime syndicates and other assorted dodgy folk who want to use clubs as conduits for dirty money and all manner of other schemes and scams, and there are plenty of them if you know what you’re doing, everything from robbing the tax man to bleeding out the clubs themselves.

The SFA regulations are an open invitation to roll up and take the cash.

G is for Gordon Smith

In the fullness of time, I do believe that the SFA will have to make a full accounting of the decision to appoint Gordon Smith as its CEO.

His loyalties were never in the slightest question; they were to one particular club and not the game as a whole.

His appointment as Chief Executive at the national association was a scandalous one.

His tenure was a disaster.

One story from that period will be covered later; that we have a few to choose from speaks volumes about the guy and the decision making process which led to him getting the gig.

The SFA published a detailed critera for the job as CEO when they advertised the post.

At the time, the SFA seemed to be a reasonably sane organisation; this was the first sign since Farry that there was something dark and rotten behind the scenes.

Because Smith ticked not one of the boxes on the SFA’s personal profile, the one on which they were basing their hiring process.

He was an ex footballer who had become an agent and then went into broadcasting.

His pro-Rangers credentials were solid though, and that appeared to be a key factor in appointing him, which can be surmised by a book that was published a matter of weeks after he took the job, a book about the club in which he had contributed a chapter.

And what was the chapter about? It was about the SFA’s “historical bias” against the club, an assertion so laughable I still don’t quite believe he made it.

Smith’s myopia involving Ibrox was, and is, legendary.

During UEFA’s first investigtions into sectarian singing at Ibrox he started by trying to drag Celtic into the debate and then finally settled for asking what was wrong with some of the songs the club had been cited for.

It so exasperated even Jim Traynor – yes, no joke – that he famous asked, live on the air, “What part of F the Pope do you not believe is sectarian, Gordon?”

Smith’s tenure ended in some controversy, with Livingston chasing him because he had personally intervened in a disciplinary case to have their striker banned for diving; Smith had been a spectator at the game and highlighted the incident himself, after it had been missed by all the officials.

The club was alleging misuse of office when he quit all of a sudden.

It was also around about the same time as the EBT story was breaking; perhaps he feared having to do something about it.

H is for Hugh Dallas 

The departure of Gordon Smith, for whatever reason, brought a new CEO to the SFA and no sooner was that guy in the job – his name was Stewart Regan and people forget just how good a start this guy had – but he had to deal with two major crises and I still suspect that the source of both was the same.

The first involved the referee strike, the second involved the SFA’s head of referees; his name was Hugh Dallas.

Darling of the media, hated by our fans.

Dallas gave one of the most celebrated refereeing performances of all time against Celtic, on the day Rangers clinched the title at Celtic Park by 3-0.

He was hit by a coin from the crowd that day after sending Stephane Mahe off.

Within sixty seconds of getting to his feet he had given the Ibrox club a penalty.

I have rarely seen such a one-sided display.

I have spent years telling people that it was one of the most biased things I’ve ever witnessed.

I have always believed Dallas was the guy who instigated the refereeing strike, at a time when Celtic were justifiably concerned about things that were going on.

It came after Dougiegate, when a linesman resigned because he and the ref had gotten together and lied to our club about an incident.

We still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it when the media was told that our “harassment” of officials had prompted them to consider withdrawing their services.

Everyone at Celtic Park knew we were being smeared and used as a deflector shield for some of the real issues refs had with the Association; in truth it was all about money but they saw a chance to attack us and use us as a means to get their cash.

Regan saw through it.

He said he would call in foreign refs if that’s what it took. And then into the mix, came Dallasgate.

It catapulted Phil Mac Giolla Bhain to his early prominence.

He was the one who broke the story; it came from inside the SFA itself, which has always convinced me that someone wanted to bring the real motivations behind the refereeing strike to our attention.

The news that Dallas had sent a sectarian email on an official SFA server was dynamite.

What followed was allegedly even more incredible, as Dallas offered to bring the refereeing strike to an end if he could keep his job.

There was no chance of that; the outcry was more than he was ever going to be able to survive.

Regan impressed everyone with the way he rejected Dallas’ pleas and removed him from the post.

Or so we thought.

The SFA was pulling yet another flanker on us, as we discovered later.

Dallas later turned up as one of UEFA’s top refereeing coaches … that could only have happened with the full endorsement of his old bosses at Hampden.

They had fired him, but made sure he had a soft landing.

They made it clear, not only to us but to the whole of European football, that they considered sectarianism as no big deal but something that had to be danced around for PR purposes.

I cannot think of anything more disgraceful.

I is for Independent Inquiry

Celtic knows that a lot of what went on in the EBT years and since has left stains on our national sport.

They know that cheating that goes unanswered or unpunished leaves the whole game in turmoil.

They know that what went on over Resolution 12 was corrupt … although we never did press for the full answer.

They know that governing bodies were up to their necks in what Whyte did, and they know what those same governing bodies tried to do in the aftermath of it.

And because they know all that, Celtic pushed hard for an independent review of all these matters, one that did not have a set remit but which could move backwards and forwards up the timeline, which could have settled all these issues in one go.

An independent review would have left no stone unturned.

It would have answered every question that Scottish football fans had, and would even have had the power to recommend sanctions.

And all of this was clear to the SPFL when they agreed that the inquiry should take place … but the SFA decided that it would not, and that remains the position right now.

Scottish football needs this.

It needs closure on all these matters.

Almost every club knows this deep down, but not one of them is prepared to support us in public.

The media was overwhelmingly hostile to this idea.

What a surprise that they rushed to support Sevco last summer, on the flimsiest grounds.

J is for Jim Farry

No examination of Scottish football scandals would be complete without looking at the man who Celtic removed from office at the SFA in a high profile court case.

Farry is the ultimate cautionary tale to all corrupt executives who think they can act with impunity.

Celtic’s apparent inaction over other issues can sometimes be seen as weakness; in fact, it’s simply a question of leadership.

The club itself still has immense power when it chooses to wield it.

And at the time we had a chairman, in Fergus McCann, who was more than willing to take issues to the courts when he believed there was a case to answer.

Fergus had no problem engaging in litigation; that, after all, is what a company pays its lawyers for.

When he challenged the Bosman ruling by taking a compensation case to court involving John Collins going to Monaco – Fergus argued that since Monaco was a tax shelter outside the EU’s jurisdiction that we were due a transfer fee for that – that should have been a warning to our enemies not to screw with him or the club.

It was a warning that went right over Farry’s head; the crazy thing about that was that he had already incurred Fergus’ wrath with the exorbitant fee the SFA charged us over the use of Hampden and the fine we got for allegedly “tapping up” Tommy Burns.

Our man was just waiting for an opportunity to settle some scores with him.

When we paid Sporting Lisbon for their striker Jorge Cadete we were in the midst of a bitter league race with Rangers, and there was a crucial Scottish cup game with them to boot.

We were surprised when his registration was delayed and then delayed again.

It would be weeks before the player pulled on the Celtic shirt for the first time, in a 5-0 league win over Aberdeen at Parkhead.

McCann was smarting over it and he wanted answers.

And so he asked the SFA to explain it.

When they offered him lame excuses and made their contempt clear he did what he always did, and he put the machinery of the law into motion.

If anyone thought he was bluffing they were wrong.

Farry ended up in front of a court where his performance so appalled his own legal team that they told him that it was over and that he should plead no contest and resign at once, which is what he did.

We would all later have cause to regret that Fergus did not go the full road and really clean out the Augean Stables by getting rid of Bryson and a bunch of others at Hampden at the same time, but the point had been made and we had shown our teeth after a long period of slumber.

It was one of the most significant moments in our history because it showed that when we were willing to fight for our place and for our rights that we could win.

K is for King

 To understand everything that’s presently wrong with the SFA, and to see how little has changed since the 2012 crisis, you don’t have to look any further than Ibrox and its former chairman, Dodgy Dave King.

He ought never to have been allowed to hold office at any Scottish club; for openers, he was on the board at Ibrox when the first club there collapsed.

That, on its own, should have been disqualifying.

The SFA was scandalously lax in letting King and Murray have seats.

But the issues with this guy don’t stop there.

The sheer number of things that should disqualify King would take your breath away.

His tax convictions in South Africa are part of it, but so is the litany of other crimes over that which he only pled guilty to have excluded from the record; these include bribery, forgery and money laundering.

Before he rolled back into Ibrox, he purchased the Charlotte Fakeovers documents; essentially a blackmail file, which he used to his advantage against the previous board.

We know there was compromising stuff in there which enabled him to control goings on at Hampden.

On top of that, he carried out a public plan to destabilise the club via the media, in an effort to devalue the company share price so that he and his cronies could get the shares on the cheap; an offence known as tortious interference.

We now know that his “concert party” warned him that the nature of the deal would violate Takeover Panel rules.

King continued to defy the City of London from the helm of the club.

For months he was in open breach of UK court orders and attempting to circumvent the law of the land as the governing body stood idly by and watched.

King was eventually “cold shouldered” by the City of London Takeover Panel … he was the first such person to be so-punished.

The SFA allowed him to stay on at Ibrox for many more months.

The more you saw of King at that club – including using the media to launch his attack dogs on anyone he didn’t like – the more it resembled a crime family more than a football organisation.

And the SFA allowed him to get away with it all.

L is for Lennon

In this history of Scottish football, I do not know any man who has been more maligned, slandered, leaned on and misrepresented more than Neil Francis Lennon.

The way he was treated across all of Scotland was disgraceful enough, but his persecution by the governing bodies was notorious.

The SFA allowed Lennon to suffer appalling sectarian abuse at every ground without uttering a word, but every time he broke the slightest rule they went after him for it.

Things got so bad that Lennon hired a lawyer, the late Paul McBride, to represent him in his dealings with the Association.

Things came to a head twice.

The first was when Lennon was sent to the stand at Tynecastle and the SFA imposed a six match ban; the club was especially concerned with the behaviour of then SFA President George Peat (more on him later) who took a more personal role in the investigation that the rules allowed.

The second incident was much more serious, and with graver repercussions.

It came about after Lennon’s touch-line flare-up with Ally McCoist.

This saw the SFA threaten him with an eight match touchline ban; McBride reacted furiously and said that it was a disgraceful position to take.

At the hearing, Lennon’s ban was dropped to four games but Celtic’s fury reached its height as McCoist was cleared and two Rangers players had red cards rescinded, effectively leaving Lennon as the only “guilty” party from the event.

McBride went on to call this decision “dysfunctional and biased.”

It was ever thus.

Lennon continued to be the subject of SFA witch-hunts; another ban came about because he celebrated a win at Ibrox by giving some verbal back to the “fans” who had spent the entire 90 minutes singing about being up to their knees in his blood.

M is for Media

The mainstream media in Scotland is a big part of everything that’s gone wrong with the game.

They are complicit in much of the scandal I’ve written about here and elsewhere, characterised by their ignorance, their biases, their cowardice and their sheer laziness.

They are hand-fed dogs, who bark only on command.

They are neutered. They are weak. They are gutless. They are a disgrace to the name journalism.

And if they were doing their jobs I wouldn’t be doing this.

Any list of their most egregious offences would be too long for this article.

Their greatest hits include the persecution of Neil Lennon (“he brings it on himself”; it including death threats, bombs being sent to his home and the club, attacks in public and whilst doing his job and enough sectarian bile to drown a Russian tank division all the time, every time, whenever he steps out onto the touchline or onto the park); ignoring decades of sectarian singing and bigotry at Ibrox; the promotion of the Survival and Victim lies; a total unwillingness to engage with the fans on the issue of SFA reform; their “succulent lamb” culture; their promotion of hatred; their anti-Celtic editorialising; their shameless promoting of men like Dave King … I could go on.

But it’s their complete unwillingness to do even the most basic research that sees them embarrassed again and again and again.

The Craig Whyte episode – the “billionaire” with “wealth off the radar” as Keith Jackson called him – is perhaps the worst of them, but it was by no means the only humiliation suffered by the mainstream press as a consequence of their blind acceptance of PR and self-spinning.

As the Ibrox clubs could not have gotten into such a mess without the SFA, the governing bodies would never have engaged in their own self-destructive course had the media been awake and on the job. The MSM should have been minding the people’s business … instead they were shilling nonsense for whoever had, or wanted, the Ibrox keys.

They never scrutinised any of them, nor pressed the SFA to.

They continue to allow those who brought our game to the brink of disaster to get away with it.

N is for Nimmo Smith

The most grotesque stitch-up, the most corrupt verdict, the most scandalous whitewash in the history of football; this was our very own Widgery tribunal.

A crime had been committed but there were no guilty parties, and the full story was kept just off the page.

Indeed, the guilty paraded their way through the tribunal as if they’d set it up, and they were basically allowed to write their own version of reality.

Everything about it stank and still does.

For openers, the SFA was allowed to interfere in the process in a way that was completely unacceptable.

They were supposed to be the appellate body but their own decision to let Sandy Bryson testify and to allow Campbell Ogilvie to speak, as well as helping to limit the scope of the inquiry itself by having the Wee Tax Case folded into the big one helped to keep the association out of the mire.

The whole thing was a scam.

Bryson’s testimony still defies belief, which is why he got his own segment of this A-Z, but no less perverse was the final verdict which is that LNS acknowledged that the club had lied, it had with-held registration paperwork and it had engaged in a tax scam to win football matches … but that, in fact, the whole thing had not conferred any “sporting advantage” and so there was no case for stripping the tainted titles.

It still astonishes us today.

The incredible thing about the LNS scandal, of course, is that it was all a scam from the beginning.

Because we now know that the shameful Five Way Agreement gave Rangers a blanket immunity by guaranteeing that title stripping would not occur.

The whole thing was window dressing.

The whole thing was a fraud.

The LNS inquiry is one of the running sores that continues to haunt the game.

It was not real justice and nor was it ever intended to be.

It was designed to trick us into believing the governing bodies were serious about giving us the fairness we were entitled to.

O is for Ogilvie

Mr Conflicted himself.

He was President of the SFA when the governing body “discovered” that Rangers had concealed documents for years.

But he was also at Ibrox when this process began; in fact it is his signature on the bottom of the piece of paper that set EBT’s up in the first place.

Ogilvie was more than aware of what was going on.

This guy should never have risen as far as he did; his success in the SFA is a testament to how rancid the association was and is.

Regulations expressly forbid anyone being on the board of one club and holding shares in another; whilst he was a director at Hearts he had a holding in Rangers.

He later passed them to his wife, which was also against regulations.

The EBT scheme for which he was responsible – the Discounted Options Scheme – was the first brick to fall out of the wall at Ibrox.

HMRC identified that scam early in the day and they sent a tax bill to the club demanding payment.

They had discovered the “side contracts” although the club had denied they existed.

Rangers own lawyer recommended that the bill be paid; they had been caught red-handed and everyone involved knew it.

Is inconceivable, then, that Ogilvie could have been in ignorance about those self-same “side letters” which the club had concealed not only from the tax man but from the SFA.

He was Vice President of the association at the time, and knew the club was in breach of their rules.

By the time he moved up the whole world knew about EBT’s.

The Discounted Options Scheme haunts them to this day.

It is the subject of the Resolution 12 case, and Ogilvie didn’t just know of its existence but brought it into the world.

He is no longer at the SFA, but he still has his company pension and the scandal of his tenure stills stinks out the corridors of Hampden.

He has never been asked the hard questions those events demand of him; he would probably not be honest with us if he was.

P is for Peat

As bad as Ogilvie was, and as toxic for the game, but for the EBT scandal he would actually have been a far better – and perhaps even fairer minded, on the surface anyway – president than the man he replaced at the helm of the organisation.

George Peat was a disaster from start to finish and his rise to the top of football in Scotland is an indictment on how backward and self-serving the SFA is.

The old “blazers brigade” ran things for far too long.

Peat ought never to have been near the SFA Presidency.

He started his journey up through Scottish football at Airdrie, a club he helped drive to the wall.

Their liquidation was an outrage he should never have survived.

Yet he somehow found his way onto the board at Stenhousemuir; that was necessary if he was to maintain his climb, as without a club he could not have continued to serve on the SFA board. Of course, regulations stipulate that anyone who was involved in such an affair could not serve on a Scottish football board … that was completely overlooked.

To understand this you have to understand that for decades the SFA has been run as an old boys network, with the same faces moving up and helping their mates along the way.

The succession was planned well in advance, and those who were pegged for the senior offices were hand-picked for the jobs.

It was a time when moving up was predicated on how many years you’d served.

That kept the same people in charge year on year, with only their positions changing.

In no other organisation could a man like Peat have succeeded.

At the helm of the SFA we continued to stagnate as a national side – he appointed both Burley and Levein – and accomplished absolutely nothing to credit him.

His biases and preference for Rangers was well known all the way down the line, but his shameful posturing and anti-Celtic agitation of that time, and during the referees strike, was not even disguised.

In the year they reached Manchester, he offered to cancel that season’s Scottish Cup Final to help his favourite club without even bothering to ask their opponents Queen of the South.

His entire tenure disgraced the nation.

Q is for Quitters

When Gordon Strachan left the Scotland job the SFA spent months fumbling about trying to find a way to get Michael O’Neill to take the job.

He wouldn’t.

They then turned to a short-list of two; Walter Smith and Alex McLeish.

Both men have something in common, above and beyond being former Ibrox managers.

Both quit the Scotland job once before.

We actually went crawling back to two men who had already chucked it, when they had exactly zero interest from anywhere else in the football world.

Desperate stuff, and clearly a sop to angry Sevco fans who wanted “one of their own” in the job after Strachan went.

But these two?

There was nothing at all to credit either of them.

Smith at least had the good grace to say no; he knows when a job is too big for him and that one was.

Any job would be too big for a guy who’s football philosophy was old in the 80’s.

McLeish was never going to turn it down; he is sitting on an EBT time-bomb and his SFA salary came in handy when the taxman chapped on his door.

He hadn’t been involved in football since he was fired by Zamalek – after just ten games – in 2016.

His time at Notts Forest ended even faster; they got shot of him after just seven games in 2013 … he won one.

In much the same way as the media had already become a repository for out of work Ibrox players, the SFA now fulfils a similar role for their out of work bosses, it seems.

But what made this episode especially egregious is that neither man showed the slightest loyalty to the country or any appreciation of the honour of being national coach before … and they were both offered the chance to take the reins again anyway.

R is for Regan

It was amazing to me that Stewart Regan lasted as long as he did.

He should have gone in 2012 when he and Neil Doncaster talked the game into the gutter, with Regan actually saying that a failure to get Sevco into the leagues would result in “civil unrest”; an astonishing piece of fear-mongering and grandstanding which made Scotland sound like an uncivilised backwater.

This guy started so well.

He refused to give in to the referees when they threatened to go on strike.

He made sure Dougie McDonald and Craven were seen off the premises.

He fired Hugh Dallas.

For the first time ever it seemed as if we had a guy in that office who we could work with.

But as time went by, it became clear that Regan was a bigger threat to the integrity of our game than any of those who had come before.

And he was the one who would have killed it stone dead had he gotten his way.

After the scandal of 2012, he went into overdrive trying to protect his “legacy” when it was already in ashes.

He refused Celtic’s demand for an inquiry into all that happened on his watch and he finished up involved in the farce that I talked about previously; his failure to appoint O’Neill after a months long pursuit was shocking and humiliating for the whole game, but worse was the mess he left behind him.

He has not one legislative achievement to his credit.

He made Gordon Smith look like a success.

He was a gutless fraud who treated fans and clubs with absolute contempt.

He talked down the commercial viability of the sport to an extent that was breathtaking.

He sabotaged the very department he was meant to be in charge of, and left the whole association mired in a scandal that has never gone away.

He is the worst person ever to hold the post.

S is for Sectarianism

One of the biggest scandals in the history of Scottish football is also the one they most hope will go away; sectarianism.

It takes many forms and it’s been around forever.

Whether it was one club having a No Catholics signing policy or the litany of bigoted chants that have come out of various stands over the years, at various clubs, the SFA never once took seriously their responsibility to deal with this issue.

They wanted to ignore it, and they did.

Eventually, UEFA stepped in to deal with it and issued warnings and sanctions.

The SFA still refused to act.

So lax has the association been that the government stepped in to pass a law.

They still occasionally threaten the passage of another.

Sectarianism is still rife in Scottish football; one club – the Ibrox one – even stirs it with the way it behaves and some of the public statements it makes.

Getting the governing body to sort it out is something we stopped hoping for long ago, and where they fear to tread politicians have trundled in with big feet.

The media is even worse.

If they never had to mention it again that would suit some of them just fine.

Many have made a career out of being deaf, or seeking some kind of moral equivalence between our supporters and those elsewhere who obsess over being up to their knees in blood.

It’s the problem that will not go away no matter how others might wish that it would.

For a brief period of time, after The Famine Song, and when UEFA really stepped up their campaign against it, it seemed that it might be on the wane … but you only needed to listen to the crowds at Ibrox before the virus to know it isn’t.

It was back with a vengeance … and wait to hear how loud it is when those fans are back in the ground again.

T is for Turnbull Hutton

If ever a single word summed up the crazy summer of 2012, it was the one the late chairman of Raith Rovers said standing on the steps of Hampden on the way in to vote on whether or not to let a brand new club start in Scotland’s second tier.

The SPL had already voted Sevco out of their league; Regan and Doncaster were determinedly ramping up the pressure to have them start in the second tier instead.

They had tried bribery.

They had tried intimidation.

They had produced Scottish football’s original “dodgy dossier” and leaked it to the press.

It spelled out the catastrophe that awaited the game if the new Ibrox club was made to start at the bottom.

The whole thing was transparent cobblers, of course, because anyone could tell that having Sevco climb the divisions would have spread more money to those leagues than many of their clubs would ever have seen.

The nonsense that the top flight would miss a club calling itself Rangers for four years (hilariously, it turned out to be five) was equally barking; the fans had been the ones who insisted upon it and the clubs had followed suit.

It was fan pressure that was holding back the tide as much as anything, but fans on their own could never have gotten this done.

We needed a leader, someone who would say what was in all of our minds, someone with the gravitas to make his voice heard.

The wait for such a figure seemed to be taking forever, and then, all of a sudden, there he was.

It is difficult to state the enormity of what Turnbull Hutton did for Scottish football that day at Hampden.

He paused in front of the media and agreed to talk on camera.

“I think Raith Rovers’ position has been perfectly clear,” he said, in reference to the club’s official statement which had said they intended to vote no to Regan and Doncaster’s grubby stitch-up. “We’ve been lumbered with this,” he said of his fellow SPFL clubs. Then, getting to the heart of it, he said what few had been willing to. “There are rules and we feel that those rules should be followed … (Sevco) should apply for the Third Division.”

He could have left it at that, and none of us would have thought less of him, but he was angry that day, as we all were, and what he said next changed the whole debate.

When he was asked for his take on the declarations of doom he was unequivocal that he did not believe a word of it.

When asked if he felt his club and others had been “railroaded” he agreed.

“Railroaded, bullied, lied to … we’ve been lied to by the SFA, SPL … we’ve been bullied, threatened. It’s not football as I know it … it was a ridiculous document that came out last week whereby the threat was there that if you don’t vote for an acceptance into the First Division (for Sevco) that a breakaway SPL 2 will come along and those that didn’t vote won’t be invited … What kind of game are we running?”

The interviewer asked him what he thought the answer to that was and his response became the by-word for the whole affair.

“Corrupt,” he said.

Thank you Turnbull, thank you for saying what the rest wouldn’t.

Scottish football will never forget your courage or determination to stand up for what was right.

In the following years he would see his club subjected to further harassment, this time due to Ally McCoist’s tub-rattling which resulted in attempts being made to burn Raith Rovers’ stadium down … through all of it, the man never flinched from telling it like it was.

The game misses him and that kind of integrity.

U is for Unspoken Truths

One of Scottish football’s least lovely traits is the way in which those in it would rather not discuss difficult, or complicated, issues.

A whole slew of things are never explored properly as a result, and problems which lie unresolved have a tendency to get bigger.

For openers, there is Neil Lennon and the sectarian abuse he is frequently subjected to.

This is a subject Scottish football wishes it could ignore, and so it frequently ignores it.

It’s something the game wishes it could forget, and so it conveniently does, until some ghastly incident or other pushes it back into the public consciousness all over again.

Then there is the sectarian singing that for years has poured forth from the Ibrox stands; everyone knows this is an issue, but nobody wants to bring it up.

Increasingly, the general behaviour of those same supporters has been a real cause for concern.

The press and the governing bodies are very good at ignoring that too, and when they can’t they blame other clubs fans.

The greatest unspoken truths revolve around 2012 and its aftermath; the media’s failure to confront the Survival Lie is probably the worst of them, although everyone knows that Rangers died.

But that few are willing to accept that Lord Nimmo Smith was a sham, that it has left stains on the game and that the roles which were played by people like Campbell Ogilvie need to be properly explored is equally dire.

Everyone in Scottish football knows it was rotten … a lot of people are still not prepared to say it.

Our game is full of unspoken truths.

Things will never get better until they are acknowledged and faced up to … and said out loud.

V is for Victim Lie

Back in 2012, when the decision was taken that Sevco should start its pitiful footballing life in the bottom tier, there was very little argument about that outcome anywhere in the game.

Even the Ibrox fan-base was reasonably sanguine about it.

The reason for this is that most people acknowledged the Death of Rangers and accepted that the NewCo would be a brand new club.

Even Sevco fans understood this simple truth.

Yet Charles Green had no sooner gotten his hands on the assets than he was pushing what we call the Survival Lie.

Rangers had not died at all.

He had saved them, using those big Yorkshire hands of his to heal the club and take them forward up through the ranks.

Green knew his audience well.

On the club’s first game he stood on the touchline and said that Scottish football had stabbed them in the back.

He called the SFA and those who ran the clubs “sectarian.”

His assertion was based on a simple truth, one of those Unspoken Facts which people in charge here don’t want to acknowledge; if Rangers and Sevco were the same club then what the SFA and the SPL did to them was illegal.

Think about that.

Is there a more dangerous assertion in Scottish football than the idea that Rangers was destroyed by the rest of Scottish football?

That a club that ran into financial trouble was thrown down through the leagues out of jealousy and spite?

Their fans have been fuming over this for nearly a decade now, and they aren’t ready to make nice.

Scottish football continues to push it every single day that it supports the Survival Lie.

Nobody wants to confront the myriad contradictions of that particular fiction, and that means all of us are living with the consequences of the other big lie that toxifies the sport.

The Ibrox fans really do believe they are the only people who suffered here, that the suffering was forced on them, that it was a product of hatred.

We can’t move forward until that is spiked.

W is for Whitewash

There are a number of major events in our sport where instead of disclosure and fairness the governing bodies slapped on the whitewash.

Foremost amongst them is Lord Nimmo Smith which we now know was a sham from the off.

It was a disgraceful set-up.

The SFA, which was supposed to be the body of appeal, was allowed to give evidence; all that evidence did was clear Rangers of the central charge and steer them clear of serious punishment.

Campbell Ogilvie was never called to account.

The scope of the inquiry itself was shrunk so that it did not include the Wee Tax Case, which a court had already found was illegal.

Smith was not encouraged to draw a distinction between the two separate schemes.

Everything about it was slanted, and bent, and on top of that what we later learned was that it was all underpinned by a segment of the Five Way Agreement which gave the new Ibrox club a guarantee that it would not lose historic titles or trophies.

The whole LNS inquiry was a fraud.

It was not the only time whitewash was liberally applied to matters at Hampden.

Remember, when evidence emerged that Craig Whyte had been working with Charles Green the SFA refused to investigate the affair.

They instead turned the whole thing over to Sevco itself, and they chose what parts of it to look into and what parts not to; the result was the Pinsent Mason report which, of course, found no evidence to support the claim, although both Whyte and Green had admitted to knowing one another and meeting to discuss their plans.

When Dave King was approved to join the Ibrox board, as chairman, the SFA refused to clarify the means by which that decision was reached.

Mike Ashley won a court case seeking a judicial review of the matter; he demanded that the SFA publish the details of that finding in public, but they never have and probably never will.

Who knows what grubby deal was done to allow him to play the fool at the top of the Marble Staircase?

The SFA is very good at covering its own back.

There’s always enough whitewash to go round.

X is for Xenophobia

Scottish football will moan loudly that it has no problem with xenophobia, but that’s basically untrue.

It exists here as it does everywhere else.

The most prominent sign of it is the treatment handed out to Neil Lennon, but it also applies to the way James McCarthy and Aiden McGeady were treated when they opted to play for Ireland.

Ask McCarthy and McGeady about it; they could tell you.

Gordon McQueen was only one of the voices who spoke out against them both before they came to play against Scotland.

Branding them traitors, he said “I’ve got no time for these players. You’re born in Glasgow but then you go and play for somebody else? What’s that all about? I’m not having that at all. Will it be hard for them coming back here with Ireland? I really hope so. I hope they get a horrible reception because they deserve it.”

It’s funny but I don’t recall him ever saying that about Stockholm born Richard Gough, do you?

Anti-Irish racism is not the only sort out there though.

The media’s response to Ronny Deila was disgraceful; the perception that a Norwegian was not cut out to manage in Scottish football was widespread amongst the press corps.

This is not the only example of a Celtic appointee being treated this way.

Wim Jansen was labelled “the worst thing to hit Hiroshima since the atom bomb” and Dr Jo Venglos was slaughtered.

The undertone of racism was there in those cases.

On top of that, we have a peculiarly British sentimentality about the integrity of our own players and our own officials.

Scandals have hit every major association in Europe; it is not only arrogance that promotes the idea that “our officials don’t do that.”

It’s racism too.

The belief that foreigners are more corrupt, their refs more susceptible to bribery and that their players more readily dive.

Scottish football is full of stupid attitudes like this.

Never has this been clearer than in the case of Gordon Smith and his comments, whilst SFA Chief Executive, in regards to Saulius Mikoliunas and his alleged dive when Lithuania played against Scotland back in 2007.

Speaking after the game, and in his official capacity, Smith said things that should have had him fired.

“I was disappointed in Mikoliunas,” he said. “It could be that he reverted to what is acceptable in Lithuania because he was playing for his national side, even though it’s unacceptable here.”

But he wasn’t content leaving it there either, he also had words for the referee in that game, who was from Slovenia.

“”I don’t think the referee helped the situation, either, possibly because he comes from a country where that sort of behaviour isn’t so frowned upon.”

When that is the attitude at the top, how can we possibly keep it out of the stands?

Y is for Yob Culture

A recent one this, and a worrying one.

Whether it’s the throwing of coins or other objects, bringing flares into the grounds, the singing of racist and sectarian songs, attacks on rival players, fans, managers or officials, there is more of this in the game than ever before.

Events at Hearts – Hibs a few years back should have been a catalyst for real changes but it didn’t happen any more than it did after the Scottish Cup Final of 2016.

Yobbish behaviour is not unusual in Scottish football, but back in the old days it was at least tackled by the governing bodies, the police and the clubs themselves.

That doesn’t happen any longer, and the SFA hides behind its regulations which pretty much absolve clubs of any blame for their supporters do, whether that’s throwing things or rioting on the pitch.

The consequences of this look likely to be paid by all of us; if football cannot police itself then the government has made it clear that they’ll do the job instead, with the passage of Strict Liability laws which force action on everybody.

Z is for Zombies

What’s dead but still walks around? Rangers.

Apparently.

If you believe Scottish football’s governing bodies and the media.

They are the zombie club.

This is what we call the Survival Lie, the notion that Rangers somehow escape the liquidation process and lives on.

It has fed into the Victim Lie which I mentioned earlier in the piece.

The thing of it is, this matter was resolved.

Everyone involved knew the score.

Rangers players who left the club upon the liquidation knew their contracts had been terminated because the OldCo was dead.

Former directors, even Walter Smith himself, said goodbye and accepted the truth.

The media wrote obituaries and published photos of Rangers crested coffins being lowered into the ground.

It was an accepted fact that nobody was arguing with.

And all of a sudden history was being rewritten.

Reality was being unmade.

The world was being turned upside down and everything we’d been told was true was being described as a haters lie.

Rangers had “survived”, seemingly by a miracle although nobody was ever told what the miracle was.

Nobody in the media has ever explained what changed, and the SFA was not encouraged to offer clarity.

But suddenly they were all singing a new song.

That song destroyed trust in the mainstream media.

It revealed the governing bodies in the worst possible light, as people willing to push convenient fictions no matter how much damage they did.

The Victim Lie is just part of it.

Nobody has ever explained, for example, why Sevco started in the early rounds of the Scottish Cup, or why Rangers was allowed a vote on allowing Sevco into the SPL, or how Rangers and the mysterious Club 13 could have existed at the same time, or why an SFA member club needed a new membership.

The Zombie Club scandal is probably the biggest lie ever forced on football fans anywhere and the notion that football clubs in Scotland can’t die is a flat contradiction of our graveyard full of them, including Gretna and Airdrie in the modern age.

It poisoned the well of Scottish football discourse forever.

It will have dangerous consequences far into the future, because it encourages debt dumping and makes real the notion that clubs can spend their way to success and simply re-form when the rent comes due.

Nothing could be more damaging to the long-term future of our sport.

And this is Scottish football, and where it stands, at the end of season 2020-21.

Scandalous, isn’t it?

Now that you’ve read the article, take the quiz and see how much you remember from it … 

1 of 14

Which word is the media resistent to using about the events of 2012?

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