The media’s latest piece of Ibrox feel-good only serves to remind us who killed the OldCo.

This morning, someone sent me a piece from yesterday that I read with wry amusement. It was, of course, from the Daily Record, and it was about how Rangers were supposedly one of the architects of the Champions League. I don’t know if the writer thought this should entitle them to a permanent place in the competition, but he missed some important facts, even as the article attempted a kind of canonisation of the Ibrox club as visionaries.

I’m not sure where the Record finds some of its obscure claims, like the assertion that the eight stars on the Champions League logo represent the eight clubs that participated in the first-ever group stages, thus including the first Ibrox club as one of them. But this kind of stuff doesn’t impress me.

Let’s talk about Campbell Ogilvie for a moment. For the record, he wasn’t the man who “invented” the Champions League. He was one of many pushing for a group-stage format at the time. European Super Leagues had been talked about since the inception of continental competition. To suggest that one man came up with this as some kind of dazzling revelation ignores the fact that there was already a broad movement clamouring for it.

What’s particularly amusing is how the current Ibrox club clings to the glorious past of the oldco. We’ve all talked about this many times, of course, but it’s almost as if they enjoy torturing themselves. As they gaze back at the grand old days of yore, does this stuff stir the blood? Does it make them proud? Does the claim that their former club “founded” the Champions League compensate for the fact that it’s Celtic who have played there consistently in recent years, reaping all the financial benefits of doing so?

It’s a measure of their desperation for validation that they are now claiming credit for something their oldco did and subsuming it into their new club, just as they’ve done with everything else.

I find it fascinating how selectively they cherry-pick the best bits of Rangers’ history. But this is one piece of supposed heritage I wouldn’t want to be associated with if I were in their shoes. Because, of course, whether or not Ogilvie had a hand in shaping the Champions League, we know for certain that he was the architect of the first-ever EBT scheme used at Ibrox. His signature is right there on the document—the very reason he had to recuse himself from any role involving the club during its SFA investigation.

We don’t need to revisit the rights and wrongs of that saga; we’ve covered that ground countless times. But the fact remains that Ogilvie played a significant role in the collapse of Rangers, directly or indirectly. His involvement and that signature are key reasons why many of us in the Celtic fan media do what we do. The crisis he helped spark at the governing body inspired many of us to start writing and campaigning in the first place.

We know what we remember Campbell Ogilvie for. If I were involved with the Ibrox club, I’d want to keep his name as far away from us as humanly possible. Once you start looking into who he was and what he did, you might even begin to wonder why there isn’t already a statue of him outside Celtic Park!

As for Ogilvie himself, he has reportedly expressed regret over how the Champions League has turned out. He doesn’t seem so much like the proud father of the competition as the guy who turns up at a trial to say, “He was always such a good boy.” He’s lamented how the format has been “corrupted” by allowing non-champions in and how the money has concentrated at the top. But how could he—or anyone else—fail to foresee this from the outset?

This competition was always going to grow into something beyond simply bringing the champions together. It was inevitably going to include the top clubs from across the continent. A child could have seen that. But then, Ibrox and those involved in its operations have always had a tendency to leap without looking.

When you’re an institution that fears the future, it’s natural to retreat into the past. Few clubs are as adept at dredging up fragments of history to cheer themselves up and distract from the bleakness of the present. And they’re ably aided in this by a media that feeds them supremacist guff and fantasy on a daily basis. This time, they picked the wrong name to glorify.