Celtic Diary Tuesday January 27 : A Song For Sunday, and Deflection From Murray.

January 16, 2015 3:31 pm
Glasgow Rangers: a club in danger of losing its identity
John McDermott
From Scotland’s favourite team to financial freefall. How an illustrious football club became an emblem of a faltering belief in Britain
©Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/ Getty Images
Rangers fans cheer their team at East Stirlingshire in November 2012, following the club’s relegation to Scotland’s Third Division
I
brox stadium, August 25 2011: Rangers FC, the Scottish club that is one of the most famous names in world football, are 15 minutes away from being knocked out of Europe by the champions of Slovenia. The team needs one more goal to take the game into extra time. This is the moment that, traditionally, a home team would be rallied by its fans bellowing, baying, singing a rousing song. Instead, the Glasgow crowd strikes up a weary chorus of the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen”. Rangers fail to score.
Soon, the whole club is in need of divine intervention. Without the funds from lucrative European cup competition, years of hubris and inept leadership catch up with Rangers. In February 2012, it enters administration. Four months later, it is liquidated. Following votes by other clubs, a new incarnation of the club that has been champions a record 54 times starts the 2012/13 season in Scottish football’s fourth tier.
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Three years on, the sense of crisis persists. Administration left a void in the boardroom, through which has passed a procession of businessmen, many claiming to be “Rangers men”. No one is in full control of the club, which remains in desperate, monthly need of cash to pay its high wage bill. According to Harry Reid, an author of books on Scottish football and religion, “Rangers has become a magnet for every chancer in town.”
Many football fans like to think that their team is “more than a club”. In Rangers’ case, the claim is true. For much of its 143-year history, its successes were a source of pride for fans throughout Scotland, if not for supporters of Celtic, Glasgow’s other big club. “Rangers were the unofficial sporting champions of a different Scotland,” says Alasdair McKillop, the co-editor of Born Under a Union Flag, an anthology about the club’s place in the UK.
The club, like the nation, had a comfortable dual identity as both Scottish and British. At its most famous game, the 1972 European Cup Winners’ Cup victory over FC Dynamo Moscow, fans sporting kilts and Robert Burns T-shirts waved the Union Jack alongside the Lion Rampant, Scotland’s royal flag. “There was then an unquestioning acceptance of a strong Scotland within an overarching Britishness,” says Graham Walker, a renowned historian of politics in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as a life-long Rangers fan.
Off the pitch, Rangers was run in unspectacular fashion. It exemplified traditional Scottish Protestant virtues such as “strength, solidity, pride, decency and probity”, says Harry Reid. “This has now been turned on its head.”
For many fans, it was that European game against NK Maribor which foreshadowed the subsequent decline. Only three years previously, Rangers had reached the final of the same competition, but it wasn’t just the bad result that stayed in people’s minds.
Rangers draws much of its support from working-class fans in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, many of whom identify themselves as Protestant unionists. Graham Walker, who saw the game that night, says: “It seemed to me that too many fans are more concerned about defending Britishness than supporting Rangers.”
Today Rangers is a faded emblem of a faltering belief in the UK: a Scottish institution in Britain and a British institution in Scotland. Its rise and fall reflects not only how a football club lost sense of financial reality but much of its identity, too. Its story represents an imperfect microcosm of contemporary Scottish and British history.
The modern transformation of Rangers was dominated by two men. The first was Graeme Souness, the cocksure, mustachioed Scottish football legend who was appointed player-manager in 1986 after the club had gone eight years without a league title. The second was Sir David Murray, an industrialist who in 1988, encouraged by Souness, bought a controlling stake in the club for £6m.
Rangers — and Scottish football — would never be the same again. Murray’s money bought star players on high wages, including the England midfielder Paul Gascoigne and Mo Johnston, the first openly Roman Catholic player signed by Rangers since the end of the first world war. Between 1989 and 1997, Rangers won nine league titles in a row.
Sustained success on the pitch set the club apart, and the arrogance that accompanies serial winning undoubtedly alienated other football fans in Scotland. But changes in society also threatened the sense of a dual Scottish and British identity that Rangers represented. Memories of the British empire and the second world war — both of which encouraged a pro-union sentiment — were growing distant. And falling church attendances, especially Protestant, spoke of Scotland’s rising secularism. According to the historian Sir Tom Devine, the “centralising drive of Margaret Thatcher eroded Scotland’s distinctiveness”, too, and provoked today’s leftwing Scottish nationalism.
Partly in response, a growing minority of Rangers fans displayed a more “defiant type of Britishness”, believes Walker. Religious sectarianism runs through the club’s fierce rivalry with its city neighbours Celtic, formed by an Irish Catholic priest in 1887. But, influenced by the deepening “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, fans sung “Rule Britannia” alongside rejoicing in the deaths of popes. “The strident unionism that Rangers fans display is anomalous,” Walker says. “It’s not that Britishness is dead . . . but the kind of flag-waving unionism that some Rangers fans stand for is a minority taste in contemporary Scotland, and it robbed [the club] of a lot of sympathy in the country.”
. . .
©Stewart Fraser/ Colorsport
Graeme Souness with the Scottish League championship trophy in 1987
Yet the ordinary Rangers fan has been deserving of sympathy over the past decade. “Rangers has suffered from every financial calamity imaginable,” says Henry McLeish, Scotland’s former first minister, who in 2009 conducted a review into the state of the country’s football. “It is the longest running business saga in football history.”
Despite its footballing success, spending on star players in the absence of stellar revenues meant that, by 2002, Rangers were £80m in debt. Murray appeared to have adopted the right strategy in the wrong country. Satellite television had turned the English Premier League into a big business but Rangers had become overleveraged within the smaller market of Scottish football.
By 2006, Murray was ready to sell. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, his company, Murray International Holdings (MIH), suffered severe losses to its property portfolio. For Alan Bissett, a novelist and playwright whose work features the club he supports, it is “striking how closely the rise and fall of Rangers mirrors that of the UK economy”.
Rangers had indeed spent beyond its means in a time of easy credit — and fans paid the price. “As far as I’m concerned, the bank is running Rangers,” Walter Smith, then the club’s manager, said in 2009. Two years later it was revealed that Rangers had used Employee Benefit Trusts, a tax avoidance vehicle, to reward staff. HMRC launched an investigation (a tribunal found no unlawful conduct but HMRC plans to appeal). In May 2011, Murray sold Rangers to Craig Whyte, another Scottish businessman, for the sum of £1.
At first, Whyte appeared to be like Murray but with even more money. Yet promises of investment proved hollow and worse was to follow. Whyte failed to comply with tax obligations, ran the club without proper reference to the board, and caused the club to effectively fund the purchase of its own shares, according to a UK court verdict in 2014.
Under Whyte’s ownership, the club ran up a tax bill of £9m. This was the direct cause of Rangers entering administration in February 2012. Four months later, the club’s creditors, owed £124m, voted to liquidate the old company.
That same day in June 2012, a consortium bought Rangers’ remaining assets for £5.5m. But this new incarnation of the club has, says Henry McLeish, “been unable to attract stable finance backed by stable personalities”. In April 2013, the consortium leader Charles Green resigned as chief executive; the two men that followed him lasted only a combined total of 18 months.
The most recent power struggle has featured Mike Ashley, a retail billionaire who owns English Premier League club Newcastle United, as well as a 9 per cent shareholding in Rangers. In 2012, the enigmatic sportswear mogul entered a joint venture to sell the team’s merchandise. It is a deal that has since led to a boycott of official gear by some fans, who claim that the club only receives 75p from every £10 spent on kit. Ashley wields power disproportionate to his holding by acting as Rangers’s short-term creditor. This week he reportedly offered the club a further £10m loan, in exchange for taking Ibrox and Rangers’ training ground as security. The Scottish FA has so far prevented him from increasing his stake in the club, citing rules on dual ownership, but a hearing is set for later this month.
Ashley is not the only power broker at Rangers. Sandy Easdale, a businessman who was convicted of non-payment of VAT in 1997, controls 26 per cent of the shares in Rangers, mostly via the proxies of mysterious institutional investors. In December he loaned the club £500,000 to avoid a winding-up order by HMRC, an amount repaid earlier this month after Rangers sold its best player to an English Championship club. Dougie Wright of the website Rangers Media forum, puts it this way: “Twenty years ago we were buying players from Barcelona, now we’re selling them to Brentford!”
. . .
©Getty Images
Fans hold a banner at a Rangers v Celtic match in March 2012
At the start of this year, several groups emerged as potential opponents to the combined control of Ashley and Easdale. These include Dave King, a businessman who has pleaded guilty to contravening South African tax law; Robert Sarver, an Arizona billionaire who also owns the Phoenix Suns basketball team; and a trio of rich Rangers fans who go by the name of the “Three Bears” (one of Rangers’ nicknames is the “Teddy Bears”).
Yet, whoever emerges with the ball after this corporate goalmouth scramble, a question will remain for many Rangers fans: why are we still in crisis?
Reid believes the failure of Rangers fans to take control of their club reveals how its identity has changed since the late 1980s. Contrasting the situation with that at Heart of Midlothian, an Edinburgh-based club that entered administration in 2013 and whose fans have subsequently established a supporter-ownership model, he says: “The decent Rangers-supporting middle class of Glasgow could have mobilised but they vanished off the face of the earth.”
As Colin Docherty, who last year helped found the community interest company Rangers First, admits, “there was a vacuum.” It is one that Rangers First, which bought its first Rangers shares last July, is belatedly trying to fill. According to Docherty, there is a “silent majority” of Rangers fans who care for neither boardroom chicanery nor sectarianism.
His choice of words is notable. During last year’s independence referendum campaign in Scotland “silent majority” was used to describe the pragmatic types who cared little for romantic Britishness but ultimately saved the union, which was preserved by a 55 to 45 per cent vote. Dougie Wright believes there are parallels between the vote and the club’s state of angst. “We are a confused support and a lot of that stems from the independence referendum,” he says.
It seemed to me that too many fans are more concerned about defending Britishness than supporting Rangers
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During the referendum campaign, some Rangers fans would sing, “You can shove your independence up your arse.” But Glasgow was one of the few Scottish cities where a majority voted “Yes”; some Rangers fans must have done so. Given the class divide in votes (the poor were more likely to vote “Yes”), pollsters say it would be surprising if an institution in Govan, a large working-class area, did not reflect that in some way.
“Like Scotland itself, Rangers fans have had it difficult in recent times finding a happy balance between British and Scottish influences,” says McKillop. Perhaps it was no surprise that when crisis struck, it had less of a footing in Scotland than it once did, and a fractured fan base has made it easier for a succession of businessmen to present themselves as the true representatives of supporters’ interests.
After two dramatic years, in the independence referendum, Scots eventually affirmed the union. But it is a different sort of unionism to that of previous generations. A quieter, contingent belief in the UK has replaced the default Britishness of the past.
Belatedly, it seems that some Rangers fans are trying to embrace a new future, too. The supporters’ trusts believe they are reclaiming control of their club — and its identity. They are forming alliances: George Taylor, one of the Three Bears, has a lifetime membership in Rangers First. His consortium has offered to match Ashley’s £10m loan — without taking the stadium as collateral. For the first time in a long time, Rangers fans are daring to be optimistic. The question is whether their silent majority can, like Scotland’s, make itself heard.
John McDermott is an FT commentator
Photographs: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/ Getty Images; Stewart Fraser/ Colorsport; Getty Images
This article has been amended since publication to clarify how the new incarnation of Rangers ended up playing in the fourth tier of Scottish football in 2012/13
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COMMENTS (48)
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John McDermott FT7 days ago
As per the note above, and in response to your comments, I’ve amended the second paragraph. I did mention liquidation later on in the piece but it should have been mentioned in the second paragraph too. I hope this clarifies the issue for readers.

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Heron 8 days ago
This article is correct in that under successive owners it put itself into unsustainable debt, which coupled with it being a big fish in a relatively small pond (the Scottish Premier League) meant that it could never recover without some sort of debt forgiveness or a very benevolent or not so benevolent white knight.
Creating a linkage between Rangers’ financial difficulties and some sort of supporters’ confusion about their historical Protestant British ‘Identity’ is merely adding a spiritual context, where there isn’t one.
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John McDermott FT9 days ago
Thank you for all your comments.
@Hardie – I gave a passing mention to the Northern Irish aspect but you’re right that it deserves serious attention, not only in writing about Rangers, but about Scotland more broadly.

@psy kay – In 2011 they went out of both the CL and the Europa league in quick succession.
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Tribunus Plebis 9 days ago
What I find depressing is that even the fate of a football club is now being examined in the devisive context of the Scottish independence issue. Is there no problem facing Scotland that can now be debated on its merits? What a lot the Separatists have to answer for.
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Scratch 10 days ago
Seems to me a Nixonian trial by audit by the Revenue tipped ’em over the edge.
I wonder if the subtext there was “these tax loopholes aren’t for the likes of footer players.”
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Hardie 10 days ago
The missing element in the article, given its focus on identity, is the Northern Irish element in the support. Both Celtic and Rangers have ‘enjoyed’ very substantial Irish support, including on match days, significantly compounding the sectarian issues.
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Chris_in_Oxford 10 days ago
@Hardie
To quote Simon Kuper’s book again, “Northern Ireland is like an Old Firm game that got completely out of hand.”
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WarrenBouffant 10 days ago
@Chris_in_Oxford @Hardie It’s easy for Simon Kuper to make such glib remarks from the comfort of a Paris apartment. I broadly agree with Hardie’s comment. I think Kuper’s is unhelpful.
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Chuck Tatum 9 days ago
@Hardie Belfast and Glasgow are historically twin cities, almost a mirror image of each other with a lot of migration to and fro, both protestant and catholic, some escaping the troubles with family links in both cities, and the ferries and budget airlines are full come match days. A Belfast Catholic once told me he supported Celtic and when I asked if he supported an Irish team as well, he simply said, ‘Celtic are Irish!’
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Chris_in_Oxford 10 days ago
An interesting comparison for this article is a chapter in Simon Kuper’s book Football Against The Enemy written during Rangers great days of the early 1990s, and when Celtic were in the Doldrums. One quote from that sticks in my mind. Simon points out that most people in Scotland (including Rangers and Celtic fans) are now not overtly religious, and that, for example, half of all Catholics who marry, marry Protestants. But he concluded that the fans of the Old Firm “have decided that they enjoy hating each other so much, that they will not give this up just because they no longer believe in God”
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Chris_in_Oxford 10 days ago
As an interested European observer of the Scottish football scene, I was astonished that Rangers really did get liquidated and had to start from scratch at the bottom of the third division. I believe that in many, possibly most, other European countries with just a few dominant teams, the sheer financial potential of such a large club would have led to a compromise of some kind, that allowed the club to stay in the Premier League. After all, the other clubs in the SPL lost out on gate receipts and it was harder to sell the TV rights with Rangers doomed to several years in the lower leagues.
It stuck me then the literal interpretation of Rangers’ liquidation was a sigh of how attached Scots are to sticking of the letter of law, I find it hard to imagine, say, the Portuguese league treating Benfica in the same way. Would so stiff a penalty be applied to Olympiakos in Greece, or Besiktas in Turkey? I saw it as a great tribute to the Scottish commitment to transparency.
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Mersault 10 days ago
@Chris_in_Oxford The decision only to let Rangers begin again in the lowest tier of the Scottish game was hardly one that a large part of the Scottish game could be said to have agonised about. The reason they didn’t benefit from the leniency that the Leeds United, Middlesborough, Portsmouth and Fiorentinas of this world have benefitted from says more about the level of hatred and jealousy felt by the rest of the Scottish game towards Rangers Football Club than any laudable desire for transparency.

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Psy Kay 10 days ago
Interesting piece, however, with a few minor errors. Rangers, as noted earlier are known as the teddy bears. Also, the cup they got to the final of was the Europa Cup; not the Champions League which they were knocked out of by the Slovakian champions. If they got to the final of the Champions League finances may not have been a problem four years later.
Living in Glasgow, I found it astounding the amount of Rangers fans who blindly toed the party line that the no vote was intrinsically linked with support with Rangers, and thus the Union. I do believe Rangers fans live in a parallel universe where the British Empire is that of the pre-WW1 error. Especially when many of their fans come from socially deprived areas such as the ex-mining towns in the central belt which were put to the sword by the Thatcher administration.
They are far from being the popular team in Scotland, and definitely not outwith. That easily goes to Celtic. Rangers are associated with being reactionary, racially exclusive, and fiercely loyal, even in the face of evidence that supports the contrary.

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Nathan 10 days ago
@Psy Kay Congratulations on generalising an entire support. As a Glaswegian Rangers fan, I know plenty like-minded supporters who do not let their football team decide their political affiliation.
Also, ‘racially exclusive’? The club has been signing players of all religions for well over a generation.
It strikes me as though you may wish all of the above to be true in order to justify your attitude towards the club and its support- the boring reality is that your average Rangers fan is almost identical to your average Scotsman.
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AndrewV 10 days ago
Football is a great example of what Scotland would look like it it became independent. Rangers are stuck in a small market which doesn’t give them enough revenue to sustain a proper team.
Scots love watching world class football and have progressively spent more money on the sport over the years. But the profile of the spending has changed, twenty years ago all of the spending of the football fans in my family went to Scottish clubs, now nearly all of it goes to English clubs.
Rangers (and Celtic) both understand the problem which is why they sought to join the English league. Sadly they were refused. As a result anyone in Scotland who wants to watch world class football watches English football.
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Iain Grogan 10 days ago
@AndrewV Of course it’s not sad they were refused entry into the English League – they’re not English! They should stay and try harder to make Scottish football better instead of just chasing the money. Of course they have to be financially prudent (a big ask….) but they can get back to principles they used to have, nurturing and developing excellence in home grown talent, which was successful on the European stage, lest we forget. If they were allowed to change country, to play in another country’s league, they would not be so successful – Gers v Chelsea – laughable! If their 100% mercenary instincts were followed and clubs just migrated around countries following money, without regard to their local support, then clubs around the world would be joining the English and Spanish leagues and of course it would all eventually collapse. At best it would become simply a tv entertainment franchise, with a few financially supported clubs serving up theatre, and destroying all the foundations of football.
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AndrewV 10 days ago
@Iain Grogan The Spanish league is an interesting point. If Catalonia ever gets independence and FC Barcelona is thrown out of the Spanish league to go into a new Catalan league then that would be the end of the club. There just wouldn’t be the market to sustain it.
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StoppedClock 10 days ago
@AndrewV @Iain Grogan There are now several small European countries which have much healthier football than Scotland. Take Switzerland for example; the success of FC Basel and the FIFA ranking and success of the national side (higher than England of course, as well as Scotland). And Belgium.
Of course these countries don’t have clubs and leagues that match the traditions and history of Scottish football. But the article we are discussing points to the problem: there’s not much else to talk about in the case of Rangers.

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Psy Kay 7 days ago
@AndrewV @Iain Grogan who in their right mind would throw Barcelona out of their league?
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COLOPHON 10 days ago
@Iain Grogan
If Rangers and Celtic were allowed into The English Premier League they would, in time, be successful – equivalent to other large clubs such as Newcastle Utd, Everton or Villa. Whether they could compete with the top four would depend on ownership. However, their admittance into English football, thankfully, is unlikely. Base bigotry and sectarianism would be an unnecessary, unwelcome and altogether ‘foreign’ addition to English football. Unwanted.
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Mersault 10 days ago
@Iain Grogan @AndrewV I thought we just had a vote that decided we were part of the same country! (The same country as Swansea and Cardiff, I believe.)
As for the professional game becoming “simply a tv entertainment franchise, with a few financially supported clubs serving up theatre” – I think that particular ship may already have sailed.
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mojomogoz 11 days ago
There will be a Rangers that money will find and float…at least for another few years.
However, given the lack of money in Scottish football, the great error that Rangers have made, more than their organisational muppetry, is not to develop a “Rangers way” of developing players and playing. It was the one thing they needed to do to be able to come back and compete.
Arriving in the Premiership again carries great risk of being an anti-climax…and that could be the thing that terminally sickens many of the fans.

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gyula grosics 11 days ago
More pedantry. Celtic was founded by a Marist Brother, not a priest.

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Chris_in_Oxford 10 days ago
@gyula grosics When I went to School at a Marist College in England we thought of all the “brothers” as priests.
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Mersault 11 days ago
“Rangers are not the favourite of any decent minded person in Scotland.” nm
Wow.
And I thought only hate-filled bigots said things like that…
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nm 10 days ago
@Mersault It is not hate filled bigotry to look down on those who sing in celebration of mass murderers such as the UVF, it is common decency. You can add a contempt for their IRA supporting chums across the city too if you like. I have no time for either. As such, portraying Rangers as standard bearers for the normal decent 55% who voted No is really disgraceful.
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Mersault 10 days ago
@nm @Mersault Agreed. Especially when so many of them voted Yes.
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nm 11 days ago
John, am normally an admirer of your pieces, but you lost me at “Scotland’s favourite team”. They might have had the biggest support, though I think Celtic beat them there at least on attendance figures. They might have won the most trophies. However, for almost all of Scotland outside their fan base, the are a symbol of backward thinking bigotry and hatred. Their association with unionism has a peculiar Northern Irish slant and manifests itself in the celebration of sectarian mass murderers. Not the “favourite” of anyone I know or of any decent minded person in Scotland.
Also you state the following: “In February 2012, it enters administration. As punishment, the Scottish football authorities announce that from the start of the following season, the club that has been crowned champions of Scotland 54 times will be relegated to its fourth tier.”
Now this is factually incorrect. Rangers were not “relegated” to the 4th tier, but were liquidated, which is a serious step beyond administration as I am sure any FT reader will know. Rangers, at least in terms of the “company” no longer existed. A new company was allowed to pick up their name and start from scratch, in a legal sense. They were then admitted to the 4th tier. This is somewhat different from being relegated, as you ought to know.
You then make some rather daft comments about the relationship between Britishness and Rangers and wonder that there must be some who support Rangers but were pro-Independence. You could perhaps have asked one of the people you interviewed about this. Alan Bisset it seems is a Rangers fan. He is also a regular speaker at Radical Independence events and regularly expresses his hatred for the UK. He might have provided some insight into that mindset.
Rangers and all they stand for have nothing whatsoever to do with my support for the UK as an entity. Quite the contrary. I support the UK as I enjoy living in a state not defined by pathetic narrow identity politics but allows the freedom for many identities to coexist.

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Iain Grogan 10 days ago
@nm ‘not defined by narrow identity politics’ – what??, like UKIP and their Brit nationalism? like the Tory boys and their warm beer on English cricket greens and “no society” beliefs? like Labour and their cloth cap class war?? Cheez, I just don’t recognise this attempt at portraying the UK as not having identity politics, you must live somewhere else.
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PtangYangKipperBang 10 days ago
@Iain Grogan @nm It depends what you want from identity. I prefer nm’s more positive view of “freedom for many identities to coexist” rather than your picking up of “narrow identity politics”.
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nm 10 days ago
@Iain Grogan @nm The UK has many comfortably co-existing identities, including those who like warm beer and cricket (and why not?). That is the point, though you seem to have missed it.
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John McDermott FT9 days ago
@nm The point I was trying to make was that they were, at some point, much more respected in Scotland as a whole than they came to be from the 1980s onwards. I’m not making that claim for them now. I’ve noted below that I could’ve been clearer in the second par. I do say they were liquidated and reincarnated later on. But it’s sloppy, so I apologise for that.
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nm 8 days ago
@John McDermott @nm John, respectfully, until the 80s and the coming of Souness (who has to be given credit for breaking with the past), Rangers operated an openly sectarian hiring policy, refusing to sign a Catholic player. Now, they got away with this because of the backward nature of Scottish society, this is true. I would not class this as respectability though. The fact that this was laughed off as a joke was about as “respectable” as the racist jokes of comedians in the 70s. Many backward organisations who profit from hate and division (the Klu Klux Klan come to mind) have moved to unacceptable status as society moves on. Rangers are no different here. I think where you struggle is in your narrative that this is linked to Unionism in Scotland, in its more general sense. That, it seems to me, is based on a spirit that turns away from divisive identity politics and embraces openness. It does have a much closer link to Northern Ireland and the peace process, I will give you that.
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StoppedClock 11 days ago
“Like Scotland itself, Rangers fans have had it difficult in recent times finding a happy balance between British and Scottish influences.”
There’s a bigger issue not really discussed in the article: Scottish football has been marginalised over the past 30 years, not just by the success of the PL in England, but in comparison with the whole of Europe.
And nasty sectarianism (not just among Rangers fans) has played a part in that.
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BigJockKnew 11 days ago
Rangers are not known as the “little bears.” The nickname is the “Teddy Bears.” Also, “Rangers won a record nine league titles in a row.” They actually equalled Celtic’s record of nine.
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thefreeman 10 days ago
@BigJockKnew
yes we know all about the number of titles,BUT,how many were won by illegally fielding players paid under illegal methods which in reality means they cheated to win some of these titles you crow about,you really should have kept your mouth shut!
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Mersault 9 days ago
@thefreeman @BigJockKnew You mean the titles that an independent commission was required to look into and into which found that no sporting advantage had been gained? Interesting that the Celtic fans who rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect of this investigation (Rangers fans having been fiercely opposed to it) and insisted that the report would be definitive – soon changed their minds upon its publication.
A real victory for sporting integrity though – in the sense that it upheld the principle that you have to win on the field of play in order to become champions.
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John McDermott FT9 days ago
@BigJockKnew Thank you.
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John McDermott FT11 days ago
@Homer/Dedge
In trying to condense a long story into a short paragraph I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. I’m sorry for that.
I also understand that what happened in 2012 (and beyond) is contentious – as is what is and what is not “Rangers”. I used the word “relegated” because in the 2011/12 season a club called Rangers was playing in the top division and in 2012/13 a club called Rangers was playing in the fourth tier. There were other, better ways I could have put that sense of before and after across for the reader. As Dedge says, there was a new incarnation (as I say later) of the club after its liquidation (ditto).

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@chrismcc62 11 days ago
@John McDermott @Homer/Dedge
I understand what you are saying, John, but relegation has a very specific meaning and that meaning does not fit with what happened.
As has been said elsewhere Rangers was not relegated, it was liquidated, ceased to exist and the new entity that bought the old club’s assets was allowed in at the bottom tier of Scottish football.

You may consider altering that bit of your article.
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COLOPHON 10 days ago
@@chrismcc62 @John McDermott @Homer/Dedge
The team that plays in blue at Ibrox is Rangers. The legal entity is something else.
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PtangYangKipperBang 10 days ago
@@chrismcc62 @John McDermott @Homer/Dedge And were allowed as a new company to rejoin the SFL at the cost to other semi pro teams. Dubious dealings that the Scottish Football Monitor has investigated.
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PtangYangKipperBang 10 days ago
@@chrismcc62 @John McDermott @Homer/Dedge They were allowed to rejoin the SFL at the cost to other successful (and solvent) semi pro teams. This was a dubious deal as The Scottish Football Monitor has investigated. The sad truth is that Rangers/Sevco/WhatEverItIsCalledNowCo cannot function financially and has to be propped up by loans and odd financial deals by dodgy businessmen. Mike Ashley is just the latest one.
Hubris is a terrible thing…;-)

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Homer 11 days ago
“As punishment, the Scottish football authorities announce that from the start of the following season, the club that has been crowned champions of Scotland 54 times will be relegated to its fourth tier.”
What nonsense is this?
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Dedge 11 days ago
“As punishment, the Scottish football authorities announce that from the start of the following season, the club that has been crowned champions of Scotland 54 times will be relegated to its fourth tier.”
Relegated? Punishment?
I seem to remember a vote for a new club to enter the league.
Please elaborate how Glasgow Rangers (Now in liquidation) was relegated?
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John McDermott FT11 days ago
@Dedge Thanks for your comment. Yes – more than one vote (hence *authorities*). I write further down about the liquidation and the new incarnation of the club. Perhaps “subsequently banished” would have been a better phrasing than “as punishment … relegated”. I could and should have been clearer on that point.
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Dedge 11 days ago
@John McDermott but there was no relegation or banishment. Craig Whyte set up Sevco5088 to purchase the assets, and had an agreement with Duff & Phelps. D&P then sold assets (not including staff contracts) to Sevco Scotland which was set up by Charles Green. This alone would indicate there should be a deed of novation.
The team that played Brechin, with a “conditional” membership, had to get special dispensation from SPL in order to use players registered with Glasgow Rangers who still existed at that point.
I think it would be clearer, and more factual, not to mention relegation or banishment at all.
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Mersault 8 days ago
@Dedge The vote was not simply about a new club entering the senior game in Scotland – it was a vote as to which division (if any) Rangers F.C. should be allowed into post liquidation. A more lenient choice (including readmission to the SPL) was open to the member clubs. However, the clubs chose to ignore precedent from other leagues (e.g. Leeds United, Middlesborough, Portsmouth, Fiorentina, Parma and Derry City) which would have favoured a more lenient option.
In this context, the writer’s use of the word “banishment” is reasonable; although “relegation” clearly is not. Rangers F.C. has never been relegated.
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