Ibrox’s Retail Partnership Scammed Its Own Fans. But They Are Blaming The Unseen Hand Again.

Few will be surprised by the news today that the club at Ibrox was, in partnership with its “kit suppliers”, involved in a scheme to keep prices of replica gear high. The story that JD Sports and Elite are, along with the club, facing what amounts to a racketeering charge – they call it price fixing, but that’s what cartels do – is not a great shock.

Nor is it a great shock that the useful idiots – in this case perfectly represented by McFarlane in The Rangers Review, sister publication of The Celtic Way, and both owned and produced by Newsquest (and the assistant editor of both is the Ibrox blogger) – are out in force to “interpret” these findings in such a way as at least part of the story is obscured.

We are told, for example, that the charge against the Ibrox club only represents a small timeframe and the sale of a miniscule number of home shirts. True, I’m sure, at the moment. But we’re also told that JD and Elite have basically copped a plea here and are “co-operating” with the authorities. I fully expect that co-operation to uncover more.

Ibrox denies it made any money out of any of this, either with what they are accused of or with what Elite and JD were doing in the wider sphere. If you are sitting there dumbfounded at that I don’t blame you.

The whole purpose of a kit and merchandise deal is that you all share the spoils … even if they were entirely innocent (hard to believe) in the way their lapdogs claim, the idea that they made no money out of what Elite and JD Sports were doing is transparently absurd.

Their club was involved, even if only peripherally, in keeping the price of merchandising as high as possible.

They operated along with their partners here in a scam against their own fans, it’s as simple and as blunt and as brutal and as nasty as that. I am certain that it’s not the only example of them having done something like this.

What is it Jason Bateman’s character says in the first episode of Ozark, in response to the rhetorical question a Mexican cartel boss asks him about the store clerk his father once witnessed taking cash out of the till and slipping it into her pocket?

“It’s not the first time she stole. It’s the first time he caught her.”

As this site and others have said over and over again, the one constant with being an Ibrox fan is the club having one hand in your pocket. The board which introduced the MyGers scheme – as good a means of sheering sheep as I’ve ever seen – isn’t going to baulk at making sure that its customer base pays the maximum price for every bit of tat on the shelves.

That this has now reached the Competition And Markets Authority – basically the organisation which makes sure consumers don’t get ripped off like this – should be a moment where their fans re-evaluate the relationship between themselves and their boardroom. This, of course, is the same boardroom that charges its fan media, and the mainstream press, £25,000 for access.

I mean, you hardly need to go digging for examples here.

But you know what they are doing instead of holding their club to account?

They are looking for someone else to blame, some proof that the investigation itself is motivated by something other than civic responsibility and the protection of their own rights.

Because on the board of the Competition And Markets Authority is none other than Murdoch McLellan, the chairman of the SPFL. Which of course, has their antennae twitching, as the club is in a full-on battle with them over the sponsorship issue at cinch.

Am I saying these things are totally unrelated?

I have no way of knowing how long the Competition And Markets Authority have been investigating this, but it seems perfectly clear that it’s been a while and that does raise some interesting questions, such as whether or not Ibrox’s efforts to discredit McLellan and remove him from the SPFL board are part of this, not that the press will dig into that.

Yet it is this fact, that McLellan is part of their organisation, that some Ibrox fans want to focus on.

Not the idea that their board might have exposed itself to even greater danger by specifically targeting this guy via the dodgy dossier and the cinch case … but that he might, simply out of spite, be targeting their club in an investigation which actually protects them as customers.

The truly dire thing for Ibrox is the potential size of the fine; the CMA can impose one of up to ten percent of a company’s global turnover.

JD have said that they will make a provision for a £2 million “hit” in their own accounts to be published this year … Ibrox is scrambling to find out whether any fine would be based on this year’s figures or the one for the year in which their little scam took place because that could be a difference of £5 million or more.

Regardless, it’s a headache they don’t need.

Their fans could do some genuine digging into all this and be honest with themselves that their club is squeezing out of them every penny that it can … or they can look to external enemies, and ignore the possibility that their own board’s conduct is responsible for creating the chaos in which they operate.

You’ll notice that Celtic’s commercial department does not run anything like this.

There was no Ashley case, no Puma blow-up, no problems with with inferior quality kit, no competition investigation or any of this never-ending list of problems and issues and legal challenges.

At Ibrox, this is business as usual.

And as usual their fans want to blame it all on the Unseen Fenian Hand.

God, that hand … it’s everywhere.

If it’s not turning off the water in Seville, it’s messing about with their internal marketing decisions.

That hand sure does keep busy.