This morning, Keith Jackson produced one of his embarrassingly weak stabs at the Ibrox club, over the news that they are refusing to comply with the SPFL’s contractual obligations in relation to the league’s sponsors. Jackson seemed to find it all terribly amusing more than something that should be a genuine cause for concern. Not everyone will be so ignorant.
Ibrox enjoys this; it enjoys playing with fire knowing that it’s the rest of us who’ll get burned. Their flirtations with the reaper over the size of their debts is only one manifestation of a recklessness which would endanger the rest of this game if everything went wrong. This messing about with the league’s commercial departments are another.
How dare the Ibrox club lecture the league on the poverty of one commercial deal whilst they work to undermine another? They dare because they can. They dare because spineless wonders like Jackson don’t push back on it, and neither do the other clubs.
How can Stewart Robertson sit on the SPFL board again after trying to bring it down just a year ago? How has he got the brass neck to take that seat when he attacked some of the chairman around that table in the most deranged fashion?
Here’s a better question; how is he allowed to? Why didn’t the SPFL sanction him and the club when they attempted their coup last year? This website and others warned that failing to do so would simply embolden those at Ibrox to push ever harder for their own special treatment, convinced that they alone can do as they please.
Their winning the title has only added to their egotism and arrogance; the attempts to charge media outlets was proof enough that they no longer feel constrained by any of the understandings that underpin the game here.
Their attack on a sponsorship deal which benefits every club in the setup should be the moment that we stop pretending that they can be trusted to act in the common interest. They can’t. They behave outrageously. They push every boundary. They will continue until they are stopped, and our so-called governing bodies let them away with murder.
This time the clubs who have to grab this by the throat if the governing bodies won’t. They can start by imposing those sanctions on Robertson which they should have last time, and kicking him off the SPFL board, offering his place not to Celtic as the ridiculous and corrupt custom, but in a free and fair election for someone who wants to come in with a plan.
Ibrox has threatened the integrity of a major SPFL contract.
It might be a lousy deal, but how much lousier do you think the next one will be if the club that plays there can undermine it in this almost casual fashion? It is high time somebody put a stop to this.