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.