One Club Constantly Plunges Scottish Football Into Chaos. It Should Not Be Permitted.

When did it get like this? Fans of a certain generation are entitled to look at the state of our game and the anarchy which has been wrought on it by a single club and ask that question. When did it get like this?

Because it surely couldn’t always have been this way?

They need to know this; in many ways, it has been this way for decades, at least two of them, but it got really bad in the last fifteen years. So we’re not in uncharted territory, but we’re certainly seeing a whole new level of mayhem.

It’s worth noting that I was in my 20’s when the first Ibrox club, Rangers, changed the way the game worked in Scotland. They drove up prices. They bent the media to their will. And in doing so they created the conditions for all else that was to follow. They brought the phrase “succulent lamb journalism” into the conversation, via a Jim Traynor column which still leaves you breathless when you read the dripping sycophancy in it.

The first truly atrocious piece of the current era of reeking bad journalism was in 2008, when David Murray told the media that their club was on the cusp of unveiling a £250 million stadium with a floating pitch, paid for by a casino development. I read it with astonishment, and for the first time I devoted myself to picking apart a story and writing a rebuttal.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment was to change the course of my life. It was also the very last throw of the dice for Murray’s club, although I didn’t know that either when I sat down to do my deep dive into the gush of nonsense in the press reports. I asked E-Tims if they would publish a piece on it, they said yes and I got down to business.

Two years earlier, Murray had predicted a “massive moonbeam of success waiting for us”, so naturally I called the whole thing “Moonbeams Park”. I might as well have called it Moonhowler Park because it eventually amounted to the same thing.

Everything about that proposal was ridiculous. At the time I had friends both working in and for the council, and so naturally I asked for their take on it and they assured me that the feasibility meetings had been a joke and that those involved spent most of them throwing about fantasy numbers. One good friend of mine told me “They sounded like people trying to convince themselves rather than us.” Which only confirmed what I already suspected.

Yet the media was lapping up Ibrox’s moonbeam story.

They did no due diligence. To pay for it, the club were relying on a casino being approved for Glasgow and being built on that site. They also needed to launch a bond scheme similar to the one at Arsenal’s, which had astonishing attached costs which no club in Scotland could ever have met even under the most benign circumstances.

And Rangers was not proposing this in anything like benign circumstances. The international banking system was already looking shaky. The following year, in light of the crash of 2008, after Moonbeams Park was nothing but a memory and an embarrassment to the hacks who had swallowed it all without doing a single bit of research, I wrote The End Of Rangers?, also for E-Tims, which took a lot of the work which was already being done by the likes of Phil Mac Giolla Bhain and a handful of others, but especially Paul Brennan at CQN, and expanded on it.

There were maybe a half dozen of us who were predicting the collapse of that club at that point, and from then onward we were simply waiting for it to happen. I tell people who ask me now what was it that convinced us that it was definitely going to happen that the numbers don’t lie and not even positive spin could make them lie. From the moment Lloyds took on the Murray account and cut off the flow of money that club was heading for ruin.

Ibrox fans to this day blame other forces. They blame Murray himself, but only for the EBT’s. But they ignore the basic truth that when that club went into administration it was damn all to do with the tax case. What happened was simple; Rangers ran out of money.

And the reason this is important is that their problems somehow became a problem for everyone else in the game.

Get that; they had run up massive debts, they had broken football regulations and used the SFA to conceal a tax scam, and it was the rest of Scottish football that was told that it had to come together and eat the shit on their behalf.

The first consequence hadn’t even waited for the administration crisis.

It had started months before when Craig Whyte had his notorious meeting with Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan and told them both that the club was in peril and he was considering drastic action. At that time, Scottish football had been working on a bold new initiative called FansTV, the brainchild of Hibs chairman Rod Petrie and backed by Celtic amongst others.

And Regan and Doncaster went back to those clubs and told them something; what they told them has never been revealed officially, but the result of it was that Doncaster recommended that we grab the Sky extension which was on the table at that time for a lousy sum … and we’ve been chained to them ever since. FansTV was the first major casualty of Ibrox mayhem.

After Whyte put them into administration and started the inexorable slide towards the grave the governors and the media got together to tell us that we had to be understanding, that we all had to sacrifice for the greater good – which was basically a way of saying that every club should bend towards giving them a free pass, and make sure the NewCo was in the top flight. Remember those days? Remember “social unrest”?

And none of these people seemed to care that this would create major problems for all those clubs in their own houses, with their own fans. But thankfully the clubs themselves sussed that and refused to play ball, as exemplified by Turnbull Hutton standing on the steps of Hampden and calling the conduct of the governing bodies “corrupt.”

He spoke for us all.

It was disgusting the way Ibrox’s behaviour was made into our problem. It was shameful that the governing bodies rolled over for that and were prepared to tolerate it. Thankfully the clubs themselves didn’t.

Rangers vanished and the tribute act was born.

Not only were they allowed to dodge all the regulations which usually pertain to a club waiting to get into the league but their new chairman stood on the touchline for their first match, at a time when everyone was calling them the NewCo and birthed the Victim Lie. And he was allowed to.

The Victim Lie haunts Scottish football.

Every single one of our current problems stems from it. Every single one. Every bit of mayhem Ibrox has wrought since has been inspired by, and justified on, the grounds that Scottish football didn’t just kick Rangers when they were down but that it was the other clubs who caused them to fall in the first place.

Why do we put up with this?

The media helped push this and never challenges it although they have to know that it’s destructive and even dangerous. They blithely refer to “the Old Firm” although every one of us loathes the term and decry it and that our club follows suit, refusing to use it. The media couldn’t give a toss about our wishes.

Since the Ibrox NewCo was born they have caused chaos, and at every stage this blog and others have said that unless the governing bodies bring them to heel that further chaos will follow. Nothing is ever done to check their retrograde behaviour. And because nothing is done about it, it continues to eat away at the national sport like a cancer.

When COVID hit they didn’t even think twice about trying to exploit the crisis which had caused thousands of deaths and would cost thousands more. Their initial response to it was to demand that all the games took place before the end of the season, in front of full stadiums, when that was basically nuts and technically impossible.

They manufactured a crisis out of a mis-sent email. At a time when clubs were worried they might go out of business and all in Scottish football were concerned for their loved ones and their futures, that club was more interested in smashing the existing structure and removing people from office because they believed that Celtic had too much power.

They demanded hearings. Investigations. They called meetings. They produced dossiers.

They spent weeks casting doubt on the motivations of fellow clubs and their directors and then accused the heads of the game of all manner of malfeasance and then couldn’t even produce a shred of evidence for any of it. I remember being appalled at the time and writing a series of articles pointing out that the governing bodies would look weak and stupid if they allowed that to go unpunished … and worse. They would invite further rabid behaviour.

They dragged the reputation of the whole game into the gutter over that. They behaved in a manner that was quite simply disgusting, and they were allowed to do it. Who knows what reputational damage that did? Who knows how many sponsors looked at the game here and saw anarchy and decided not to get involved with it?

Every time they act out, the rest of us are expected to pay the bill.

Every time they do it people like me point out that it cannot go unanswered, that some form of sanction should follow it, that some form of punishment must be meted out if for no other reason than to act as a deterrent.

To stop them from going further, or doing something worse.

When the governing bodies allowed them to get away with trying to decapitate the board in a manufactured controversy it was inevitable that worse would come. What they did next rocked the game to its foundations.

They actually destroyed the sponsorship deal the league was able to get. Destroyed it utterly. They undermined it to the extent the whole deal had to be renegotiated and cinch pulled out of the final year.

How could there not be sanctions for that?

How could such a degenerate act not be punished? Every other club in the country was placed in jeopardy by their conduct, and nothing was done about it. It was obvious that they had to be punished for that, that it had become a matter of protecting the integrity of the game and the other clubs in it … and they got away with it.

It was inevitable that we would end up here, with them openly pressuring the SFA to get rid of an official they didn’t like, and it’s equally certain that other clubs will suffer for that as all the rest of the officials will recognise that if Ibrox turns the guns on them that the governing bodies will not protect them in any meaningful way, and so they will not want to give decisions which cause that to happen. Does it matter if it’s a result of bias or just something inspired by fear?

This challenges the integrity of the sport. If the line isn’t drawn here, where will it be?

And here’s the thought that should be keeping people at Hampden and elsewhere awake at night; if they can’t act even now, even when its crystal clear that Ibrox is a renegade organisation which has no respect for any other part of our national sport, what fresh hell awaits our game? What new crisis will they manufacture? What new demands will they make? What new stratagem will they unveil to keep on punishing the rest of the clubs for the events of 2012?

They’ve told themselves the lie so long they actually believe it now. What choice do they have? Their whole identity is bound up in it now, and to unravel it would unravel them. But it is scandalous that the rest of us have to keep on paying that bill … and as long as the governing bodies continue to function in this cowardly way, that bill will just get higher and higher and higher.

We don’t know what they might do in the future. They look at the complete absence of leadership in the game and they must conclude they can get away with anything. Eventually, they’ll attempt to.