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Five Ways To Hell: How Helping Ibrox Has Put Our Game At Risk From UEFA.

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Phil Mac Giolla Bhain’s latest piece is one of his most explosive in years.

The issues that it raises must be taken seriously.

It deserves to be the subject of many pieces in the next few days, not just one, because the points it raises are both broad and deep.

Phil is one of the few card-carrying NUJ members who covers Scottish football and takes the job seriously, and he does it from another country. He is one of the few who has the foresight to ask the right questions to the right people and the answers he gets are often illuminating.

I don’t think any answer he’s had in some time is quite as illuminating as the one he got from UEFA recently when he sent them a series of questions in relation to Resolution 12 and the notorious Five Way Agreement.

UEFA’s reply was short and sweet; they have no knowledge of that lethal document and thus cannot answer questions in relation to it.

This is a classic case of putting a big explosive in a small package.

That single paragraph reply might be one of the most dangerous communications UEFA has ever sent to an inquiring journalist on a fishing expedition. It is dangerous to everyone in the game here.

What UEFA has said seems impossible on the surface of it.

The Five Way Agreement is one of the most notorious documents in the history of the Scottish game.

It is the foundation stone of the Survival Lie, which itself lays down the necessary grounding for the idea that the Ibrox club was relegated and not made start at the bottom like all new clubs do.

But these are the least of the things in which UEFA should take an interest.

As Phil has pointed out, the Five Way Agreement probably violates Article 12 of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play guidelines because it effectively treats the current Ibrox club as a direct continuation of Rangers; this is explicitly excluded by UEFA because they don’t accept debt-dumping.

I suspect there are far worse violations of the UEFA statutes in there.

The Five Way Agreement was the brainchild of Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan; it was the document they created to force the Ibrox NewCo to accept certain of Rangers’ sins.

It started out as an act of extortion on the new Ibrox club, which is probably against the UEFA regulations in the first place.

But what actually happened was that Charles Green cleverly saw the Five Way Agreement as a device he could use himself.

Once he and the club’s board pointedly refused to submit to title stripping as one of the conditions of the deal – the governing bodies had demanded that, initially – he realised that, in fact, the SFA and the SPFL were desperate to see an Ibrox side up and running and playing games and so he turned the thing on its head; it’s why the earlier drafts are vastly different to the latter ones.

He leveraged them into remaking it in a way that benefited him and the club.

It started out as extortion and finished up that way too; what happened in the interim was that those doing the extorting at the start were the ones being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste at the end.

One of the provisions was a guarantee of no title stripping; this effectively settled an issue that was still to go before a tribunal. Worse, it split the club’s responsibility for past crimes into two separate strands; the Craig Whyte acts and the non-Craig Whyte acts.

In short, it gave the current Ibrox club a pass on certain offences whilst making them responsible for others. UEFA would never have allowed that had they been presented with it.

They allow national associations a little autonomy but they don’t allow the governing bodies to run them like banana republics which can contravene their own rulebooks at will.

The governing bodies freely admit that entire sections of the rulebook were ignored and new rules created out of thin air, unconstitutionally, to accommodate the “smooth” passage of the second Ibrox club.

Nearly all of what happened in that time was unprecedented.

Looking at it now all of the myriad contradictions are obvious.

Let’s take something as prosaic as the Scottish Cup position.

They were given a “non-seeding” for their first year in existence; they didn’t start where the club which had won the league the year before should have started; as a third round seed.

That club had gone. That seeding no longer applied.

Yet, at the same time, they were “awarded” the Scottish Cup’s that Rangers had won and by the same body that, for the benefits of that competition, treated them, essentially as a new entity.

There is no instance of anything remotely comparable to that happening in Scotland or, I’d think, anywhere else in the European game.

It is unique. And it is absolutely not legislated for anywhere in the rulebook.

Nowhere at all. Yet it happened.

So one imagines that, as it did, the provisions for it must be written down somewhere, and there’s only one place I can think of where that would be.

It’s in the document signed by what, at the time, were the nation’s three football bodies – the SFA, the SFL and the SPL – and the “two Rangers”; the one represented by the administrators and the other by the board of Charles Green’s Sevco Scotland Limited.

Between stuff like this, the ignoring of massive debts and what amounts to a Get Out Of Jail Free card for sins committed by Whyte’s board – a decision which basically means that the Whyte Precedent can be used by other clubs in perpetuity – it’s no wonder that the signatories never sent this abysmal document to the games leaders in Nyon.

UEFA would have sent it back with so many red-pen score outs and objections and qualifiers and dismissals that Ibrox fans would be lucky to have seen games that season at all.

UEFA would have pointed out that accepting the Survival Lie meant acknowledging it in full and dealing with the full measure of it. They would never have allowed exemptions or free passes.

If the SFA was accepting Green’s club as a new one UEFA would never have permitted them to suffer a single punishment. They would have torn that shabby document to pieces.

The Five Way Agreement is the big undetonated bomb at the centre of our game. If UEFA decides it wants a look at it – and why should they not? – who knows what the Hell they might decide to do?

Because what Phil’s article makes clear is that this is very much UEFA’s business; the Five Way Agreement is the document that effectively prevents the SFA from pushing forward with their investigation into the issues raised by the Resolution 12 team.

In short, that document has given the Ibrox club a legal protection that UEFA itself would never have granted to any club, anywhere in the game. The issues relating to Resolution 12 were “Craig Whyte acts” … that’s the Ibrox defence.

A UEFA member club – Celtic – has been denied justice because of a grubby backroom deal which Ibrox claims gives them immunity.

As that case was supposed to be passed on to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which falls under UEFA’s aegis, they are fully entitled to look at the document that prevented that … and to rule on it.

Because this takes power away from them.

It permitted a national association to create ad hoc regulations and force them through without the member clubs having any say in it.

It brazenly ignored existing rules and created new ones in their place, and nobody but those involved in drawing that document up ever had as much of a sniff of it.

This makes Scottish football a tinpot dictatorship. UEFA cannot allow that to go unanswered.

It puts our governing bodies outside of the mainstream, a law unto themselves, outriders, breakaways, rebels.

We simply do not know what the consequences of that might be, but we know that if UEFA starts digging they will have to go all the way.

Between Parkhead, Hampden and Ibrox – for I do not believe for one second that we weren’t fully aware of that document and that our approval wasn’t crucial to its existence – our “leaders” may have put all of the game in the firing line, and for what?

To wash away Ibrox’s litany of sins.

To force the rest of us to suffer in the mess they’d made.

To make us all culpable, not in the crime but the cover-up.

It has long been thus.

They behave abysmally and the rest of us pay the bill for it.

That document is a cancer at the heart of our sport. It needs to be cut out and dragged into the light so we can get a good look at it, and then decide on our next move.

The rent is overdue on this one, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming.

That day may be closer than anyone has hitherto believed.

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