Nemesis

 

Nemesis

I had one of those conversations this week which demonstrates how people construct reality based on their own innate desires and prejudices, rather than the facts. I was in Tibo, a nice café on Glasgow’s Duke Street, with a couple of friends when a ‘friend of a friend’ joined us. The topic got round to football and the chap commented that, Celtic’s current dominance is built on the fact that they conspired with others to ‘kick Rangers when they were down and get them relegated down the leagues.’ All of this was caused, in his mind, by jealousy and hatred for the Ibrox club. This line of argument was a bit of a red rag to a bull to me.

I tactfully reminded him that Rangers had imploded financially by spending more than they earned for years and operated an under the counter payment scheme to entice quality players to Scotland with the lure of tax-free money. (EBTs) This, and the staggering level of debt built up by a club in the low-income Scottish league led to administration and eventually a liquidation which left creditors ripped off for millions. As a bankrupted business, employees, including players, walked away and had Charles Green decided to build flats at Ibrox rather than create a new company there would be no one playing there today.

My now red-faced companion retorted, ‘the company went bust, a club can’t die.’ I replied that, ‘Third Lanark died and in Scots law there is no separation of club and company once an organisation incorporates.’ This fantasy about being ‘relegated’ was also spouted and I reminded him that Rangers were not relegated. The new entity applied for membership of the league and fans and clubs across the land baulked at the idea of them being given preferential access to the top league immediately. Like all new entities they’d have to work their way up from the bottom.

Of course, this caused an Everest of cognitive dissonance with my verbal sparring partner and he was not a happy man. His attempt to somehow portrait the old Rangers as victims, when they in fact cheated on an industrial scale, was as implausible as those Atletico Madrid fans who claim that the thugs who kicked Celtic off the Park in 1974 were victims of a bad referee and diving Celtic players. Most of us know the facts of what occurred in 2012 and aren’t buying this victimhood narrative. If anything, Rangers FC (1872) were fortunate the SFA lacked the guts to follow their own rules and strip them of trophies won during the EBT years. I wrote at the time…

‘All of these arguments about whether Rangers as it currently exists is a new or old club are in some respects a smoke screen hiding the real issue here- the EBT scheme which saw Rangers pay tens of millions of tax-free pounds to players they might not otherwise have tempted to Ibrox was and remains the real bone of contention. To be clear, these payments were not illegal but as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled, they were payments for playing for Rangers and as such should have been subject to tax. For Rangers to pay players in such a manner and to record it in side letters they subsequently hid from the SFA, broke player registration rules. As such players who represented Rangers whilst receiving EBT cash were in breach of SFA rules which state all contracts and payments to players be recorded with the governing body. It stretches credulity to ask us to believe that Rangers expected scores of footballers to pay back the EBT money they received. The money paid was not loans but wages, and those  in control at Ibrox at the time knew that.’

It all seems like an old debate and hardly worth rehashing after a decade but the fallout from 2012 is still with us. The Rangers of today still spends more than it earns but is learning that that it must have its limits or the same could happen again. Celtic’s dominance in the past decade is down to generating more income, running the club prudently and having 10,000 more seats which generate over £5m in revenue above and beyond what Rangers could in season ticket income. They have also bought well and made handsome profits on player sales.

Learning to live within your means is a hard lesson for those who watched the hubris and arrogance of the Murray years at Ibrox. The ‘if they put down a fiver, I’ll put down a tenner’ attitude of Mr Murray did for Rangers in the end and he sold HMS Rangers to Craig Whyte for £1, knowing full-well it was heading for an iceberg.

In Greek mythology, Hubris is seen as exhibiting excessive pride and arrogance, and it is usually followed by Nemesis. Those of you who saw the bloody, British gangster film ‘Snatch’ will recall the psycho gang boss ‘Bricktop’ describe Nemesis as…

‘A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.’

For the Ibrox club of 2023, watching Celtic having the sort of dominance domestically which is as complete as any club has had in any era in Scottish football history, is an appropriate Nemesis. Of course, some will go through the list of organisations which state that Rangers are the same club. I don’t actually care. What matters is that sporting integrity demands that all clubs play by the same rule book. Paying players secret, tax-free money was clearly wrong and honest Rangers fans will concede this.

As we left the café, I asked the chap what he would say if Celtic had done the things Rangers did in those years. He smiled and replied, ‘exactly the same things you’re saying now about Rangers.’ I could see he was implying that I was exhibiting the same bias he had. I shrugged and replied, ‘but the facts don’t lie.’

I don’t think I’ll be on his Christmas card list.