Apparently, Rangers...or Oldco Rangers, or The Club Formally Known As Rangers, or The Biggest Scandal in Scottish Football History, or whatever else you'd like to call them...are finally going to be liquidated later this month.
That's right; the football season is now more than two months old, and still this sorry saga hasn't died a death. And it won't for a while yet; the tribunal on the club's use of Employment Benefit Trusts, chaired by Lord Nimmo Smith, will sit in November. This tribunal will firstly decide on whether these EBTs were illegal in football terms; if Oldco Rangers are found guilty of this, the tribunal will then have to decide on a punishment.
Of course, as a result of the impending liquidation, Rangers have been thrown out of the SPL and forced to start in the bottom tier. They are currently under an embargo which prevents from signing any players in the next two transfer windows. Several first team players with a market value of six or seven figures have walked away for nothing. Whilst Celtic fans look forward to an away trip to Barcelona in the Champions League in a few weeks, Bluenoses instead have travels to Stirling and Cumbernauld ahead of them.
It is worth noting that this outcome is not really a 'punishment'; Rangers went bust, and ultimately have been treated the way any other club could (or, at least, should) have been treated in the circumstances - by being chucked to the bottom of the league pyramid. But, aside from expelling them from the league all together - or handicapping them with a points deduction, there aren't very many options available to the tribunal for punishing Rangers.
It seems that the most likely outcome is that the Ibrox club will be stripped of the trophies it won during the EBT period. It's unclear whether they will be handed to the teams which finished as runners-up - which could mean cup wins for the likes of Queen of the South and Ayr United, and that Celtic would, belatedly, crush the Nine-In-A-Row record set by Jock Stein's Hoops side and the Rangers of the 1990s - or whether they would just be expunged in the record books.
Unsurprisingly, Rangers fans are pretty hacked off about this possibility. The Gers' head honcho, Charles Green, has used the situation brilliantly; he's spouting conspiracy theories faster than David Icke, he's suggested a sectarian agenda against his club, all the while keeping the more, shall we say, rank-and-file Rangers support onside and interested in what's going on. Whatever you say about the average Rangers fan - and there's plenty I could say but for the fact that this is a family blog - they have turned out in heroic numbers for matches against the likes of Montrose and East Stirlingshire, and rallied to the club's cause. And part of that has been because Green has easily won the PR war against Scottish football's authorities. As in the time of Craig Whyte, the Scottish sports media are happy to print any old rubbish being spouted from the press office in Govan, no questions asked, while the people in charge procrastinate and fail to take charge of the situation.
Only today, Campbell Ogilvie, SFA President and, of course, Rangers club secretary during the EBT years (and who, it turns out, actually had an EBT), casually told the BBC that he hadn't been able to do his job properly for the last six months. This begs an obvious question - why is he still being paid, instead of being suspended or placed on gardening leave pending this inquiry? The answer, of course, is because there is an utter lack of leadership.
I personally can't see anything to gain from this whole palava, other than that the tribunal will surely make the rules regarding player contracts black and white - and I don't see why you need a tribunal to do that. Even if Rangers are stripped of these honours, do you think for a second that the club, or their fans, will accept it, or that the players will hold their hands up, admit it was a fair cop, and hand back their medals? No chance. The official record books may put an asterisk next to their name, or declare that there was no title winner at all, or might hand the championships to Celtic, but every Gers fan will remember seeing their players and manager lifting the trophy. The best comparison is in Italy, where Juventus still believe themselves to be the winners of the league titles that they lost over the Calciopoli scandal. The authorities think otherwise, but Juve still put an extra star on their shirt this season because they insist they won 30 titles, instead of the 28 that the record books say they won.
Stripping Rangers of their titles is, for me, a pointless exercise in posturing, that will succeed only in further stirring up the animosity between the club and, well, everyone else in Scottish football. What matters in the real world is not who did or didn't win football leagues - its the disgusting £94 million tax bill that hasn't been paid by the people who ran the club during these times. I couldn't give a s*** about Rangers losing titles - but I care hugely about the idea of a huge business denying the public purse such astronomical amounts of money. That cash could have been spent on hospitals, or schools, or plenty of other worthwhile things; instead it got used to make sure the likes of Jerome Bonnissel and Gavin Rae got paid a few extra bob than they should have been. That's what the focus should be on - and it's shameful that it isn't.
Sticking Ally McCoist and his squad in the third division should have drawn a line under the whole sorry affair, and it was supposed to - the big item on the agenda now should be reconstruction. Stewart Regan, the SFA Chief Executive, declared in the summer that a plan would be in place for this by November; that deadline is looming but we've heard nothing to suggest any agreement is in the pipeline. I'd love to think that this is because people are quietly working on it, but the men in charge of Scottish football have done nothing in the last few years to suggest that they can be trusted on this. Now, more than ever, we need to be looking at the future - our national game is broken and needs fixed. In order to this, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, we are better off with Rangers on the inside pissing out, than on the outside pissing in. But whilst this mess rumbles on, Scottish football remains stuck in it's rather ignominous recent past.
L.
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