The gangster podcast comes to football: Souness, Murray and the City case

One of the things I enjoy most in my downtime is listening to podcasts which have absolutely nothing to do with football. I like audiobooks too, but podcasts are great because they are so often about real events, and I love the true-crime ones in particular.

Some of my favourite stuff in recent years has been on YouTube, where there is now a whole industry built around former gangsters who have supposedly gone straight by talking about what bad men they used to be.

Every now and again they bring on another former gangster, who then spends an hour talking about what a bad man he was too.

This is not really new. It is the natural evolution of those Danny Dyer programmes where he travelled around interviewing all the hard men from the football firms.

In spite of myself, I find some of this stuff incredibly interesting, especially when the guest is somebody genuinely notorious and he is talking about how that world operated without necessarily giving you every incriminating detail.

It was exactly those programmes I thought about when I discovered that Graeme Souness, on a podcast I did not even know he had, was interviewing Simon Jordan and David Murray about the Manchester City scandal.

Other people found that funny. I found it fascinating.

Of course I was going to listen to it.

Because there were at least two people in that conversation who had very direct experience of a previous football-finance scandal.

Simon Jordan’s Crystal Palace went into administration in 2010 with debts of around £30 million, while David Murray’s Rangers story requires no introduction to anybody who has been paying attention to Scottish football for the last 20 years. And then there is Souness.

Souness received £30,000 through a Rangers EBT in 2001, around a decade after he had left Ibrox and while he was managing Blackburn Rovers. He subsequently said the payment related to scouting work he had done for Rangers.

So, listening to these men discuss Manchester City felt less like listening to a conventional football podcast and more like listening to former mafiosi analyse somebody else’s bank robbery. After all, if you want insight into how these things work, who better?

For about half an hour, it felt like a true-crime episode narrated by people who understood the world being discussed from rather closer quarters than most of us ever will.

Manchester City have responded furiously to the independent commission which found serious financial breaches over a period of years.

Chief executive Ferran Soriano has described the verdict as a “Premier League conspiracy theory”, arguing that it rests on a false allegation about disguised owner funding. City deny wrongdoing and are appealing.

The conspiracy language immediately rang bells with me.

We heard plenty of that around the Ibrox scandal too. To this day there are people online who will tell you that what happened there was not the result of Rangers’ own conduct but some enormous conspiracy involving Celtic, HMRC, the football authorities, Police Scotland and others; the Unseen Fenian Hand working behind the curtain.

Everybody has their conspiracy theory. And David Murray got quickly into one of the most interesting areas of the whole discussion: the auditors.

He talked about the responsibilities auditors now carry for the accounts they sign off, while making the aside that things were different ten or twenty years ago. Again, it had the feel of one of those former-criminal podcasts where somebody explains how the rules used to work and why a particular racket would be harder to operate today.

Murray may well be right that auditors will face questions in the City case.

The commission found that City had misrepresented financial information and concealed its true position from regulators and auditors, while City’s defence is that the evidence supports its version of events.

But I found Murray’s interest in auditor responsibility irresistible.

Was he simply making a technical point about Manchester City? Almost certainly. But if you know the history, you cannot help hearing echoes.

And why did he mention the auditors? Well, that’s interesting; City’s auditors are BDO, who became the liquidators of Rangers after HMRC rejected the proposed CVA. That only reinforces the point about the extraordinary number of accountants, administrators, lawyers and investigators who eventually became involved in cleaning up what was left behind in that mess. And I wonder if Murray wasn’t taking a shot at them for their part in it.

Then you get to Souness himself, and this is where the true-crime metaphor becomes almost too perfect.

The £30,000 EBT is established fact. So too is the fact that the Jean-Alain Boumsong transfer from Rangers to Newcastle was one of the deals which attracted scrutiny during the Stevens/Quest investigation into football transfers.

Quest did not itself find evidence of irregular payments involving agent Willie McKay, but Boumsong’s £8 million Newcastle move was among the transactions it did not initially sign off as satisfactory.

That wider investigation subsequently led to police raids involving Newcastle, Portsmouth and Rangers, with computers seized as part of the inquiry. It was those computers which ended up in the hands of HMRC when their colleagues in financial crimes found what was on them and passed all that stuff to the Treasury.

Souness was never convicted, or even established to have taken a bung in relation to those transfers, and that distinction matters. But the historical connections are extraordinary enough without inventing anything.

Here he is hosting a discussion about financial irregularity in football, with David Murray sitting opposite him, while half the unresolved mythology of that entire period hangs invisibly in the room.

They both played their roles in the EBT era, and not merely because both of them received one. We may never know exactly what Souness’s £30,000 payment was really for, but it was the existence of that EBT which gave HMRC the thread they pulled on and which eventually unravelled everything.

There’s a scene in the brilliant Hatton Garden drama where Timothy Spall’s Terry Perkins accuses Brian Reader, played by Kenneth Cranham, of being responsible for the longest stretch of his life. Perkins and his crew had carried out a major robbery at roughly the same time as the Brink’s-Mat job, and while the police were hunting those responsible for that notorious crime, they accidentally stumbled across the hideout of the gang behind the Security Express depot robbery.

That is what it was like hearing Souness and Murray discuss the City situation without ever once acknowledging their own role in British football’s other great financial scandal.

One investigation accidentally opened the door to another, and in both stories the people who thought they were safely outside the spotlight suddenly found themselves standing directly underneath it.

Then came one of my favourite moments of the podcast.

Murray said he had racked his brains trying to think of a precedent for what Manchester City had done. And I was sitting listening to this thinking: surely there is one relatively close to home which might spring to mind?

Instead, he went for Juventus. He talked about their relegation. Which considering the way Scottish hacks are banging on about Rangers being “relegated” proves that even Murray isn’t going to make that suggestion. He doesn’t have to. That was someone else’s scam, after all. But it was interesting how widely he steered clear of it.

This came during a wider discussion about the aggressive manner in which Manchester City have defended themselves, and again the echoes were glorious. I seem to remember another football institution whose representatives were hardly shy when challenged about what had happened under their stewardship.

Murray also offered the familiar argument that every football club has its little secrets and skeletons in the cupboard. That is another classic true-crime line.

Everybody does something. Everybody has secrets. Why are you looking at us?

It sounds like the guy in the gangster documentary explaining that his crew was no worse than anybody else’s crew, and what makes it amusing is that on those podcasts the audience is in on the joke because the audience knows the history.

That is what made the whole discussion so compelling. The most interesting things were sometimes the things which were not being said.

Then Murray started lecturing the Premier League about its business model and the amount of debt throughout English football, and at that point I nearly fell off the chair.

This was David Murray. The same David Murray who eventually sold his 85.3% Rangers shareholding to Craig Whyte for £1, in a deal which involved Whyte taking responsibility for an £18 million bank debt and other obligations.

I’ve only ever heard of one other case where a major institution was offered up for £1, and that was when Peter Barings was trying to save his bank and offered it to the Sultan of Brunei for £1 if he assumed the debts. Even the then richest man in the world wanted nothing to do with a deal like that.

Murray International Holdings itself had been built on enormous borrowing. After the banking crash its property portfolio collapsed in value, the group recorded enormous losses and its debts ran into hundreds of millions. To hear David Murray warning the English Premier League about debt-financed football is hilarious.

His own business empire was built on debt finance, and when 2008 arrived and the easy money disappeared, assets were being shifted faster than the last shop in town selling Wonka Bars during golden-ticket mania.

Then we got to the warning phase.

Souness, Jordan and Murray all suggested, in different ways and with different emphasis, that the Premier League should be very careful about what it does next. There was talk about scorched-earth tactics, negotiations behind closed doors and the danger of the whole thing becoming damaging to the competition.

Again, where have we heard this before?

We heard precisely the same basic argument in Scotland.

Rangers were too important. Scottish football could not survive without them. The television deals would collapse. The game would be ruined. The entire structure would supposedly come down if that institution disappeared.

Well, the second Ibrox club subsequently entered the bottom tier and top-flight Scottish football survived perfectly well without a club called Rangers for four seasons.

The world did not end. The television cameras did not disappear. Scottish football continued. Indeed, the newco’s passage through the lower divisions brought those leagues additional attention and income which they would otherwise never have enjoyed.

So, the suggestion that the Premier League itself could somehow collapse because Manchester City received a severe punishment is even more absurd.

The Premier League is vastly bigger than one club. If City were deducted 100 points, relegated or otherwise removed from the title picture for years, Liverpool would not mourn. Arsenal would not mourn. Chelsea would not mourn. The clubs suddenly fighting for an extra Champions League place would certainly not mourn.

The competition brand is bigger than any club in it. That is the lesson Scottish football already learned but which some would prefer you forgot.

And then came the discussion about ownership. This might have been the funniest section of all. Here were former owners discussing the dangers of foreign ownership, when British football has produced more than enough examples of home-grown owners running clubs into financial disaster without any help whatsoever from abroad.

Jordan’s Palace went into administration carrying debts of roughly £30 million. Jordan himself was reportedly its largest creditor. Murray presided over the era which ultimately left Rangers in a position where he sold control for a pound before the whole structure collapsed under his successor. And of course, the club was destroyed not by those debts but the one they owed to HMRC for the tax scam which he had authored himself.

Foreign ownership can obviously be reckless. So can domestic ownership. Bad ownership does not need a passport.

The most revealing thing about the entire programme, though, was what never really became the central comparison. They were happy to talk about Juventus. They were happy to talk about Manchester City. They were happy to discuss auditors, debt, title stripping, governing bodies, aggressive legal tactics, institutional collapse and the danger of digging too deeply because football clubs have skeletons everywhere.

But the obvious Scottish parallel was always sitting there in the room and never really became the subject.

That is the true-crime-podcast mentality again. The former gangster will tell you everything about what the other crime family did. He will tell you how the rackets worked. He will tell you where they went wrong. He will tell you how law enforcement caught them, and how long everybody served.

But ask about the unresolved chapter in his own story and suddenly things become much less specific. That is why this was such a fascinating listen. Not because Murray, Souness or Jordan necessarily intended to reveal anything about themselves.

Quite the opposite. It was fascinating because it revealed the mindset.

It was in what they were willing to discuss and what they were not. It was in the arguments they reached instinctively for: everybody has skeletons; be careful how deeply you dig; do not punish too severely; think about what happens if the institution falls.

We heard all of those arguments before. And here they were again.

The brass neck of the whole thing was magnificent.

A former owner whose club ended up in administration, another whose club eventually went into liquidation after he sold his controlling interest for £1, and a host who received an EBT from Rangers years after leaving the club were sitting around offering a masterclass on the financial sins of everybody else.

I could not stop listening. Who better to explain the mentality behind the scam than people who have lived close enough to one to recognise all the furniture?

That is why people listen to true-crime podcasts. Not because they want the gangster’s political opinions or his prediction for the Super Bowl.

They want to know how the world worked. They want the little secrets. They want the dodgy mechanisms. They want the things people normally do not say aloud.

And in a strange way, that is exactly what we got here.

A football podcast which, whether anybody involved intended it to or not, sounded an awful lot like a group of made guys at a sit-down, talking shop and offering advice to another crew, who had been caught in the act and were facing the consequences.

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