Thoughts From a Sofa

El cormaco has been thinking again, and this time he’s been doing some research as well…  

“What Rangers did was wrong” , “The frustration of fans is understandable”

These are comments you may have seen in the MSM recently. Usually followed by something like:

“But its time to move on”, “The club has suffered enough” or

“Scottish football needs to heal”.

They will also spin the line

“There is no mechanism to revisit the LNS commission”, “The issue of non disclosure has been dealt with”.

Well, I don’t like being told what to think, so I did something I shouldn’t. I did some research. I’m very sorry.

What set me off was the rather incredible piece in the Daily Record about the whole outcry over EBTs being essentially a Timmy led sectarian conspiracy, harmful to the greater good of Scottish football.

This is not a Celtic thing, it’s a football thing, and even Rangers fans should want a clean and transparent competition.

So, I wanted to see how many people this issue affected, and what ratio you might reasonably say have a vested interest in getting to the full truth and what might be assumed to want to maintain the status quo.

So I got the average attendances for SPL league games only from 1998 -2009, from the start of the DOS scheme to the end of the EBT scheme to see where the weight of the “greater good” might lie.

I then averaged this attendance over the 11 year period.

The average Celtic attendance was 57,536, the average Rangers attendance was 48,816, and the average attendance among the other 8 SPL clubs was 10,160.

If we use the average figure, give each team 19 home games per season over 11 seasons we have 209 home games. Multiply 209 by the average attendance over the period and we arrive at some eye watering figures which indicate why this matters to the greater good of Scottish football

12,066,919 paying entrants to Celtic Park, 10,202,620 to Ibrox  and 2,123,402 to other SPL grounds gave their money to a competition about which there is material uncertainty over how fairly it operated, and how much those who where responsible for seeing it was run fairly knew about how unfairly it was being operated.

So for greater good of Scottish football we are being asked to protect the feelings of the minority (a significant one granted) – an average of 48,816 per Rangers game against the rest of Scottish football – average 67,896 per game. Better that 14,190321 paying customers paid for a sham than go upsetting the bears.  If you paid into any of these games regardless of what colours you were wearing this should affect you.

Sporting advantage is subjective to some degree, difficult to prove, but deliberately incorrect registration of players is not a grey area. The SFA have dealt very harshly with clubs like Spartans for minor oversights, yet there can be no doubt that Rangers very deliberately withheld what are now considered (subject to appeal) players’ contractual information for c.ten years from the football authorities as well as from HMRC.

To borrow a bit of Sevconian, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not calling for #strip the titles. I don’t know enough with certainty to be able to say this.

However the remit of the LNS commission is now seriously compromised –it proceeded with an understanding that there was nothing inherently wrong with how Rangers operated their EBT scheme and so as any other club could have operated the same system there could be no sporting advantage. It also incredibly came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with Rangers registration of its players, despite side letters outlining off the books payments being availabble.

Here is a bit of news, I want to move on too. I m sure we all do. Even the staunchest among Scottish football would like to bring this period to a close.

But before that can happen there is some cleaning up to do and some key questions to answer. And this is the part that no one given a platform in the press seems to want to acknowledge.

If no appeal is forthcoming, then in my opinion the only course of action available is to set LNS aside, and set up an entirely independent enquiry to review Rangers, SPL and SFA actions over the period and clean the game.

If this enquiry decides to strip titles, so be it, if they find another punishment or none at all I’ll live with that too, if it is transparent and beyond doubt that the enquiry was not impeded by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, in both Ibrox and Hampden.

Finally, I’d strongly recommend reading @laytonbbhoy (on fields of green site) on the whole demise of First Rangers, he lays out very clearly how complicit officials in the SPL / SFA were in the Craig Whyte era, how much they knew about “Project Charlotte” – his plan to dump the debt, start a newco and be considered the “same club”:  Sounds familiar doesn’t it.

There is sufficient doubt about the impartiality of the football authorities, how they applied their own rules “without fear or favour” , what they knew about EBTs/ DOS, Project Charlotte etc to warrant a review of all relevant parties in the period in question.

When this has happened I’ll happily move on.