The Governing Bodies Should Be Punishing Ibrox. Instead They Do Them Favours.

The Ibrox club is lucky that it inhabits an essentially lawless world where those in power can do whatever they please and be pretty much certain never to face consequences. That’s not just an acknowledgement about Scottish football but the wider world.

Even as I write this, a Prime Minister who lied to parliament and broke the law clings to office and refuses to resign.

Standards in public life have tanked. He sits atop a government that has allowed more corruption and dishonesty than any other in living memory.

We have a media up here which has spent the better part of a decade endorsing lies. Its ranks are filled with ex-Ibrox players who took their cash in the form of loans, all the better to defeat the Exchequer. In this environment, all manner of things flourish.

Tonight the SPFL has agreed to bring forward the game between the Ibrox club and Motherwell by a day. It is a symbolic gesture, nothing more, but of course both sides are dressing it up as a victory for common sense. Ibrox doesn’t really have a choice. It’s not the game they wanted moved, and it’s not the timeframe they wanted either.

The SPFL has put a good face on it, but the simple fact is that they have been seen to do a big favour to a club which has no respect for them or for the regulations that bind every other one in the country. Nobody is unaware that the dispute between the two parties still rumbles on. Ibrox has acted in an appalling fashion and put other clubs at risk.

At the time of writing, they are also subject of two separate police investigations over the behaviour of their fans. The SFA are said to be ready to warn them against their future conduct, but that warning has no teeth and everyone knows it.

Only in this environment could a club which has behaved with staggering arrogance and shocking recklessness, a club which has proved that it does have the least concern for the welfare of the game, ask for and be seen to have been done a favour by the same governing bodies who it has spent the better part of two years trying to wreck.

I mean, its directors still serve on the very executive body that only a year ago it made a full throated effort to destroy. That is a sign of an unhealthy state of affairs. For whatever reason, our governing bodies just don’t want to face this club down.

They were entitled to nothing here, not even basic courtesy, because that’s precisely the level of regard they have for everyone else; none, zero, nada, nil.

They should have been told that their request had been rejected.

Their managing director should have been long ago removed from the SPFL board for bringing it into disrepute.

That he remains, and that the SPFL wants to seem fair minded is far more than their club deserves.