2012 should have profoundly changed our game. Why didn’t it?

Even with everything going on involving the Munich performance, I still want to plough through these last three pieces on 2012.

And this is an important piece of the jigsaw: the question of why Scottish football didn’t profoundly change in the aftermath of Rangers’ collapse.

To understand why we’re still stuck in the mud, you have to look at the choices made at the time. And you have to recognise that the movement which should have sprung up after what happened didn’t emerge at all. There may be various reasons for that, but a lot of it came down to selfishness and self-interest at various clubs.

And a lot of it was just pure and simple bad leadership.

Bear in mind, when it became abundantly clear that HMRC weren’t going to play ball and were going to deliver a death notice to Whyte’s Rangers, the governing bodies were terrified of what that would mean for the game.

So they started floating the idea of giving the new club a place in the top flight. When the Premiership clubs rejected this outright, the SFA and SPFL started putting pressure on Championship clubs to hand them a berth in that league instead. This led to an outcry at some clubs, and Turnbull Hutton of Raith Rovers stood on the steps of Hampden on his way into early discussions and called their behaviour corrupt.

The clubs ultimately resisted, and the newco started in the bottom tier—where new clubs are supposed to start. Without getting into all the legalese and politics, the fact that the Ibrox club accepted that outcome is all the proof you’ll ever need that they were, in fact, a newco and understood that full well.

If they had genuinely believed they were the same club, they would have challenged that in every court in the land because there was no legal mechanism for throwing a club out of the top league and into the bottom of the game.

But when you listen to the language from that time—the apocalyptic nonsense from the likes of Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster—they clearly believed Scottish football was facing an existential threat. And they made it abundantly clear that threat would crystallise if the Ibrox club had to start at the bottom.

When the clubs voted for that outcome, the governing bodies told us the game was in crisis. And because those same governing bodies lacked the guts to see that situation for what it was, we’ve basically ended up right back where we started.

The whole game is now watching Ibrox carefully as it tries to cut budgets while floundering in serious crisis all over again. Meanwhile, Hibs have just posted annual losses of £7 million. Hearts’ financial situation has been even worse in recent years. And other clubs are struggling, too.

None of this needed to happen.

2012 should have seen dramatic, fundamental shifts in the way Scottish football operated. One of the first mistakes was commercial. Doncaster enlisted no less a figure than Peter Lawwell himself to help renegotiate TV and commercial contracts. Even then, it wasn’t enough—our two main cup competitions went at least a year without a sponsor. And I don’t believe that was due to the Ibrox club’s absence from the top flight. I believe it was because the governing bodies acted as if that was a “Year Zero” moment for the entire game rather than just for that club.

Doncaster and Regan projected weakness.

Their job was to sell Scottish football in the best possible light, but they essentially declared it dead and buried.

Neither of them should have remained in post a single day after that mess was resolved. There should have been votes of no confidence in both, and they should have been removed. One of the reasons they weren’t is that Celtic backed them—especially Doncaster. And to this day, I still don’t know why.

Over on the Ibrox forums, they believe Doncaster is some sort of Peter Lawwell puppet—that we used him for our own ends, that he’s our placeman at the SPFL and SFA, and that he’s been doing Celtic’s bidding all these years. Well, I’d love for someone to point me in the direction of all these decisions that supposedly favoured us. Where are all these little carve-outs of power we supposedly secured by having him in our pocket? Because I’ve yet to see any of them.

If we really did manoeuvre ourselves into a position where Doncaster dangles on strings held in the Celtic boardroom, it’s just not clear to me what benefit we got from it. All I know is that we propped the guy up—when, if we hadn’t, he’d have drowned a long time ago. As he should have.

There’s ample evidence that Doncaster and Regan both knew what Craig Whyte’s plan for Rangers was: to dump the club’s debts and have Rangers emerge from the other side still a top-flight team via a “phoenix” manoeuvre.

In this scenario, a company enters voluntary liquidation and emerges anew—free of all the baggage that previously held it down.

It seems pretty clear from evidence in the public domain that Whyte imparted this plan to Doncaster and Regan, hoping to secure their backing. I’ve long believed this led to the sudden signing of the Sky deal and the abandonment of Rod Petrie’s alternative plan for a “Fans TV” model.

We’ll never know whether Fans TV would have worked, but we do know Doncaster and Regan called an emergency meeting of clubs, warning that a major problem at one club threatened to destroy Scottish football’s commercial structure. They pushed through a quick new deal with the broadcaster, and whatever they told the clubs, it was enough to panic them into signing it.

One particularly compelling piece of evidence suggests Doncaster and Regan shared more with Sky than with their own members. That evidence? The inclusion of a clause in the contract mandating a certain number of Glasgow derbies as part of the deal.

I’ve always urged people to think about that for a moment—and what it means. The clause definitely existed. The governing body went to great pains to point out that it was there. It was one of the earliest things the media was briefed on when it became apparent that Rangers were in real trouble.

We also know that it was explicitly inserted into the Sky deal that was signed shortly before clubs found out that Rangers were going into administration. And we know this because some journalists who were briefed at the time wondered where the clause had come from and what it meant.

See, what I think happened is pretty simple. I think that when Craig Whyte shared his plans with Doncaster and Regan, they realised there would be a backlash against the idea that a new club could just breeze into the top flight and take the place of a team that had already been there. So I think Doncaster and Regan went to Sky for the renegotiation talks and had that clause inserted into the contract so they could leverage the clubs into backing their play.

Did they tell Sky what they wanted that clause for? Was it Sky who suggested it after they shared the Craig Whyte plan with the broadcaster?

That’s impossible to answer because, when it came to the crunch, Sky never exercised the clause. In fact, they went out of their way at the time to tell Scottish football’s clubs that this was an internal matter for them to decide and that they would put no pressure on any of the people involved in the voting.

But it’s clear that as long as that clause existed, our game was in serious peril of losing one of its biggest commercial deals, which is why Doncaster and Lawwell went to Sky after the vote and renegotiated the whole thing.

Unfortunately, that stuck us with a bad, bad deal. And that deal has since been renewed twice. One of the reasons we’re here is because Sky still sees our negotiating position as fundamentally weak. And the reason they do is because the people running the game here are fundamentally weak.

This Sky deal locks us into a very poor income stream. And that is one of the reasons why some of these clubs are running up debts. That problem should have been largely eliminated from our game in the aftermath of 2012. Let’s not forget that Rangers were not the first club to go bust. Others had gone bust in the decade before.

We lost Airdrie. More importantly, we lost Gretna. And we lost those clubs because their management was bad at what it did. They ran up debts they couldn’t service.

In Gretna’s case, they did exactly what Rangers had spent decades doing: they overspent to beat their competition. And on the back of that overspending, they even got to a Scottish Cup final.

When Brooks Myleson—the millionaire owner who had serviced their debts and carried the losses for years—was no longer able to do so, Gretna had already accumulated such a cost base that they swiftly went out of business.

Gretna was the real warning shot that the governing body should not have ignored. It was the evidence staring us in the face that major changes needed to be made, and that clubs should not be allowed to endanger themselves or the game as a whole by accumulating massive debts. In short, that should have been the moment we introduced some form of financial fair play.

But of course, that would have had an adverse impact on the club from Ibrox—the club which, at that time, was still spending more than it was bringing in, even as the bank was putting pressure on them to start making cuts.

I have no doubt whatsoever that had the Ibrox club—which was then Rangers—been a better-run organisation, one that lived within its means, we would have had financial fair play in Scotland at the same time England got it.

No other club benefited more from the failure to impose FFP in Scotland than theirs did. And when Rangers went out of business on the back of unserviceable debt, any excuse the game had for not immediately implementing FFP regulations was gone.

By Regan and Doncaster’s own admission, the behaviour of Rangers had put all of the game’s commercial contracts in serious peril.

By Regan and Doncaster’s own admission, their behaviour had jeopardised dozens of other clubs. And yet, in the aftermath—and with the new club in the bottom tier—they completely failed to put in place the framework that would have protected those clubs and the whole of the game from anyone coming in and repeating what David Murray and Craig Whyte had done.

And then they watched as Sevco behaved in exactly the same way that had got Rangers into trouble. They stood back and watched as the Ibrox club started accumulating major debts again. In the absence of any concerted action to fix that, I consider it a matter of time until another Scottish club circles the drain and vanishes down it. Inverness came very close very recently, and they’re still not all the way out of the woods.

It is easy to blame the governing bodies for that, and I do blame the governing bodies for that. They should have been determined to impose financial sanity on clubs, whether those clubs wanted it or not.

They should have put a framework document together and then aggressively pursued that policy—via the media, via the fans, and via those clubs that were in favour of FFP regulations in Scottish football. And there are clubs out there that would have supported it, and you would hope Celtic is one of them.

And that’s a failure on our part too because we voluntarily impose tough financial limits on ourselves. We do that to too great a degree, in my opinion.

But as a club that plays by the rules—not only the written rules but those we bind ourselves into—you would think we would see both the imperative for financial fair play and the benefits to all of Scottish football of having it in our sport. Celtic should have taken the lead in imposing financial fair play on the rest of Scottish football. Celtic should have been front and centre on this concept.

I think there are broadly two reasons why Celtic didn’t take a lead on this. I believe there have been moves at the governing bodies to adopt FFP regulations, but there has been no genuine support from major clubs within the game. The Ibrox club certainly would not back anything like it. It’s also clear that, with the SFA having loosened regulations on multi-club ownership, they don’t want clubs bound by financial limits, and the clubs themselves, by and large, don’t want those limits either.

Greed and selfishness have taken over the process. 2012 was the opportunity to implement change. Now that the opportunity has been squandered, we are waiting for another crisis to present itself—probably the death of another club. Then the discussion will happen, and everyone will ask why reform didn’t happen when it should have. And the fact that some of us have spent every single one of the intervening years warning about this will be conveniently ignored.

In the first instance, I think Celtic didn’t want to be seen as taking the lead in any campaign to introduce FFP to Scottish football. They didn’t want to be accused of deliberately pursuing a policy that would hamstring our major rival, and I understand that—it would have looked nakedly partisan to many people. But this is where moral courage comes in. This is where you need to be strong and aggressive.

Would it have benefited Celtic for the league to impose a limit on what the club from Ibrox was allowed to spend? Yes, of course it would. But is that the only reason some of us want to see this done? No, of course not. This is for the benefit of the whole game. It stops clubs from getting themselves into dangerous waters.

I think our sport is in greater danger now than it was at the height of the 2012 crisis. The loosening of the guardrails on multi-club ownership and allowing people from England and elsewhere to bankroll Scottish clubs while they accumulate more and more debt is inherently dangerous and stupid. But the clubs, blinded by self-interest, are happy to pursue that policy, and the governing body is happy to let them.

That brings us to the second problem Celtic has had. As I’ve said repeatedly, the people at the top of our club lack strategic sense. Had we acted in 2012 and been at the forefront of a reform agenda, those reforms would almost certainly be in place today, and been in force for over a decade. Financial fair play would only have been the first of the sweeping changes ushered in.

Did we even try? Did we even realise what a historic moment it was? Did we fail to foresee that the new Ibrox club’s owners would pursue the exact same reckless policies as Rangers’ had? That they wouldn’t just want to reach the top flight as quickly as possible but would also immediately try to mount a serious challenge to Celtic?

If our club didn’t see that coming a mile away, then it isn’t run by smart people at all, but by incredibly stupid ones.

The risk was obvious and was telegraphed so clearly that a lot of us were writing about it from day one. I said ten years ago that if another financially doped Ibrox club won a title on our board’s watch, those responsible would have to go.

And two of them did, in very short order.

Peter Lawwell was gone as CEO, and then Ian Bankier stepped down as chairman. Neither of those men would have been missed. Both of them should have hung their heads in shame for presiding over an era where a financially doped Ibrox club was allowed to do exactly what its predecessor had done.

One of the reasons I was so vehemently opposed to Lawwell’s return as chairman is that he should never have been allowed back in the building after a strategic failure on that scale—never mind being given the top position.

There are other problems arising from Lawwell’s era.

Many of my colleagues in Celtic cyberspace believe that our failure to properly reform the game, our failure to hold Neil Doncaster accountable, our failure to aggressively pursue Resolution 12, is about our club’s complicity in the notorious Five-Way Agreement and that these things are all tied up in there.

There are many theories as to why our club did not lead a reform agenda and why it continues to fail to do so. But one reason, at least, is that I think we’re just bad at this stuff. I think we’re bad at strategy.

Even if we had tried to lead, I doubt we’d have found much success in getting others to follow us. Firstly, because of the selfishness and short-sightedness of other clubs. But also because we aren’t good at building coalitions. Our executives are trusted in terms of their commercial acumen and their ability to make money. Beyond that, I don’t think they’re rated at all. I don’t think they’re viewed as great strategists or tacticians. I don’t think they’re people others would follow into battle.

For a club that has, on occasion, had sharp political minds in the boardroom, we have no clear sense of how to put together any kind of movement or promote meaningful change. Not only are the people at our club not particularly interested in leading, but I don’t think they would know where to start even if they wanted to.

Now, of course, change has finally come to Scottish football—but not from within. Clubs must now adhere to strict financial policies if they want to play in European competition. UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations have finally caught up with the Ibrox club in a big way.

Ironically, reports suggest that Peter Lawwell himself was one of the architects of this very policy at UEFA—something Scottish football has been either unable or unwilling to implement. Of course, how much of that is actually down to Lawwell and how much is just part of the mythology surrounding him, we may never know.

Still, Scottish football remains as precarious as it was in 2012—if not in a worse position. A lot of people are responsible for that, but at the top of the list are the likes of Rod Petrie, Neil Doncaster, and Ian Maxwell—the so-called leaders who seem to stumble from one crisis to another in a daze.

I get the feeling that a very big crisis will hit at some point on their watch. And God only knows what damage it will do.

Photo by Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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