O’Neill has the Ibrox fans terrified. Why else are they rewriting history?

It always amuses me when someone on the other side of the city chooses quite deliberately to shine a light on the downfall of Rangers, albeit in the context of something else entirely. Today it is the turn of Mark Dingwall at Follow Follow, and his piece “exposing” the so-called myth of Martin O’Neill is about as daft as you will get.

The purpose of his article is to cast O’Neill as something other than the success.

It is framed around the idea that McLeish got the best of him; over their managerial tenures at the respective clubs, O’Neill has seven trophies and McLeish has seven. But Dingwall wants the focus narrowed to the time when the two were in direct competition.

The way he frames the piece, O’Neill’s unsuccessful years are characterised as spells we either don’t know about or have forgotten about.

Apparently we “live in denial” about them.

The Seville season where we reached a European final and won nothing is not something many of us is “in denial” about. On the contrary. We are fully aware of how that transpired, fully aware of how it ended. Likewise that day at Fir Park.

The reason we don’t talk about them is not that we’ve forgotten them or want to re-write the history books.

It’s that there’s no point. Of course, O’Neill had barren years. And there is a good reason why.

After his first campaign, O’Neill was progressively forced to do more with less; that’s the way Celtic rewards good managers.

In O’Neill’s second season, he spent £7.1 million; this is true. That’s less than his first campaign.

But in the next season, he spent a mere £2 million. In his fourth season his transfer spending was zero. Yes, zero. That was the year of the expensive loans. But he didn’t get a penny to spend in fees.

Incredibly, Follow Follow claims that this is the time when Ibrox was downsizing and we were ramping up spending. When you base you article on that premise, it collapses at once because that, of course, is absolute bollocks.

This is what they do over there, though; they rewrite history into which ever form suits them.

In the narrowest possible sense, depending on how you frame the timeline, there is a factual argument here. McLeish had a very successful spell at Ibrox. Nobody serious denies that. He won trophies. He won a treble. He gave O’Neill’s Celtic a proper fight.
But that is where the honest part of the argument ends.

Because the wider claim being made around it is much more slippery. The idea is not merely that McLeish won trophies. The idea is that he did so while Rangers were somehow downsizing, while Celtic were upscaling under O’Neill, is where the whole thing starts to fall apart. In fact, it does more than fall apart. It collapses into dust.

Because you cannot talk honestly about McLeish’s time at Ibrox without talking about the financial machinery that sat underneath it. You cannot talk honestly about the players he had, the wages Rangers paid, the squad they built or the trophies they won without talking about the Employee Benefit Trusts.

That is not Celtic paranoia. That is not bitterness. That is not revisionism. This is not us looking for excuses for O’Neill; we don’t need excuses. A lot of the ghosts of that period were laid to rest at the end of last season.

No, the use of EBTs is documented history.

O’Neill won three league titles, three Scottish Cups and one League Cup at Celtic. McLeish won two league titles, two Scottish Cups and three League Cups at Rangers.

But if you’re going to present the case that McLeish simply “bested” O’Neill across the whole piece you are inviting scrutiny in an area where you don’t stand on solid ground.

The attempt to present McLeish as operating under some noble austerity regime, as though he was squeezing blood from a stone while O’Neill was being handed gold bricks by the Celtic board is laughable. It is laughable that anyone on the other side of the city would even try to squeeze this kind of revisionism past us.

Rangers during that era were not some poor wee club tightening the belt and making do. They were operating through the EBT years.

The Supreme Court ultimately found that payments made through the Rangers EBT scheme were taxable earnings, and HMRC made clear that Income Tax and National Insurance should have been deducted from those payments.

Reports and legal summaries have put the scale of those EBT/sub-trust payments at around £47 million to players, coaches and staff between 2001 and 2010.

That period covers the heart of McLeish’s time at Ibrox.

So, spare us the fairy tale.

This was not McLeish doing more with less. This was McLeish managing a squad assembled during a period where Rangers were using a financial mechanism which allowed them to sustain wages and player recruitment in a way that later became central to one of the biggest scandals in British football.

You cannot put the trophies on the table and hide the method under the carpet.

What’s incredible is that McLeish himself has already given away the game.

In a BBC documentary clip widely discussed at the time, he said of that era: “If we didn’t pay the same kind of money Celtic were paying their players we would have been behind them.”

That is the whole argument in one sentence, and it came out of his own mouth. McLeish wasn’t some plucky underdog punching above his weight. He was a cheat. He admits it. He is not even attempting to deny the reality of it; on the contrary he freely admits it.

Rangers had to pay Celtic-level wages to compete with Celtic. How did they help sustain that? Through the EBT era.

So, when people say McLeish was downsizing Rangers while O’Neill was upscaling Celtic, they are deliberately trying to rewrite history.

Yes, Rangers moved players on. Yes, some of the Advocaat-era madness was being unwound. Yes, McLeish inherited a club that had already spent heavily and was dealing with the consequences of that spending.

But that is not the same as saying Rangers were suddenly operating with one hand tied behind their back. It is not the same as saying McLeish was managing on crumbs. It is not the same as saying he was battling against Celtic’s financial might with a squad of cast-offs, teenagers and hope. The wage bill was still serious. The squad still had major players. The EBT structure was still there.

This is the thing that always gets me about how Ibrox supporters talk about that period. They want all the glory of the trophies, but none of the context.

They want to talk about Helicopter Sunday, about the treble, about McLeish’s record, about how clever and resilient they were.

But they do not want to talk about how those squads were funded. They do not want to talk about the side letters. They do not want to talk about the tax case. They do not want to talk about the fact that a large part of Scottish football looks at those years and sees the trophies through a very different lens.

They want history without consequence.

Sorry, but no. The trophies may be counted, but only because the Nimmo Smith inquiry was a corrupt joke. Still, the method cannot be ignored.

Martin O’Neill built Celtic up from a club that had been traumatised by the 1990s. He inherited the raw materials of something good and turned it into a machine. He took Celtic to Seville. He restored belief. He gave us a team that could stand toe-to-toe with anybody in Scotland and plenty beyond it.

McLeish had good moments. Nobody should pretend otherwise. He was not a fool. He was not a bad manager. He achieved things. But the idea that he did it in some pure, stripped-down, financially restrained environment is nonsense.

The EBT years are a reality that cannot be wished away because it is inconvenient to the mythology.

McLeish had the same obsession with matching Celtic at all costs. That phrase matters. At all costs. Because the cost did come. It came later, but it came.

So yes, if someone wants to have a dry statistical argument about trophy counts within a particular window, let them have it. McLeish won important trophies. He had big results. He gave Celtic trouble. That much is true.

But history is not a pick-and-mix counter where Ibrox supporters get to take the trophies and leave the EBTs behind. Those things belong together. They always will.

Alex McLeish’s Rangers record can be respected as a football achievement in one narrow sense, but it cannot be laundered into a morality tale about doing more with less. That story does not survive contact with the facts.

Anyway, I’m moved to wonder why this matters. What is their point? That O’Neill is infallible? Nobody believes that and nobody ever suggested that he was. But here’s where the context really matters; he is still winning right now, and even when he had losing seasons he amassed points totals which would have won most of the leagues in the last ten years.

If they want to talk records, let’s start with that. That they are resorting to these bizarre rewrites of history reveals just one thing; fear. O’Neill scares the Hell out of them.

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