The death of a football club does not happen in one moment. It happens in stages. First comes the crisis with unpaid bills, court petitions, emergency meetings and public denials. Then comes administ…

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On 14 February 2012, Rangers stopped being a football story. For years, the club’s financial difficulties had existed in fragments: debt to the bank, cost-cutting, uncertainty over the EBT tax case, …

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Rangers have spent around £80 million on players in the space of 12 months, yet the Ibrox club is still repaying a £3.2 million Covid loan issued in 2021 from the Scottish Government in instalments which doesn’t end until 2042. At a time when Rangers are gambling heavily on recruitment to end Celtic’s domestic dominance, the optics of a publicly-backed pandemic loan being paid back at the same instalments as smaller clubs are difficult to ignore.

The figures, released under Freedom of Information legislation, show that Rangers borrowed £3.2 million during the Covid-19 crisis. By 30 September 2026, they had repaid £653,333 only, leaving £2,546,667 outstanding - even more galling is the fact that since March 2025, the Ibrox side had only paid back £240,000 - while spending tens of millions on players.

Across the 11 SPFL clubs which took government support, £25,262,000 was loaned out. Just £4,317,983 had been repaid by the end of September 2026, leaving £20,944,017 still due.

A Loan Designed for Survival

There is no argument that the loans were necessary at the time to help. Football was shut down, matchday income disappeared and clubs across Scotland faced a genuine threat to their existence. The Scottish Government stepped in when private lenders would not, with Celtic the only top-flight club not to take a loan.

But the scheme was emergency support, not a permanent subsidy. It was designed to keep clubs alive through an unprecedented crisis. Five years on, the question is whether the repayment structure should still treat Rangers - a club now spending tens of millions on transfers - in the same way as clubs operating on a fraction of their budget.

Rangers’ Spending Changes the Argument

Rangers’ recruitment drive has been on an entirely different scale. Around £80 million spent on players within a 12-month period place the club’s outlay at roughly 25 times its remaining Covid loan balance.

Aberdeen still owe £2,482,204, Hibernian £2,293,592 and Motherwell £2,354,871. Rangers owe £2,546,667, barely more than clubs whose entire financial model is built on far smaller revenues. Yet Rangers received the most amount from the COVID loan scheme unlike the other clubs.

The issue is not that Rangers took the loan. It is that a club capable of committing £80 million to player trading within a year is still servicing pandemic-era public debt over a schedule that runs to 2042.

Should Rangers Pay It Back Early?

The moral and political case for early repayment is strong. Rangers are not a struggling community club fighting for survival, like Hamilton Accies - who have just paid £20,000 back towards the £1.151 million they owe. They are one of Scottish football’s two dominant institutions, with enormous commercial reach, a global supporter base and the financial capacity to fund an aggressive transfer strategy. If Rangers can spend £80 million on players, they can clear a £2.5 million government loan taken from the public purse.

Paying the debt off would remove an unnecessary burden on the public purse, allow the Scottish Government to redirect attention and resources elsewhere. It would draw a clear line between emergency Covid support and ordinary commercial borrowing. It would also remove any obvious reputational question mark over Rangers’ spending spree. It would also send a message that the Ibrox club understands the difference between needing public assistance and simply preferring to spread out a debt it could easily settle.

The Government’s Terms Deserve Scrutiny

The Scottish Government must also answer questions. The FOI response confirms that the clubs and government retained the right to renegotiate the agreements, including the timing and amount of repayments, to allow flexibility based on performance and final league positions.

That flexibility may have been sensible during the pandemic. But it creates a glaring weakness now. Why should a club the size of Rangers be permitted to repay public money on the same gradual timetable as Aberdeen, Hibernian, Motherwell or Hamilton Accies when its transfer spending demonstrates that it has no comparable liquidity problem?

The government should not be in the business of offering soft repayment terms to football clubs simply because they are football clubs. If a club can afford £80 million of player investment, the state should be asking why it is not accelerating repayment of a Covid loan at a time where families across Scotland are struggling with the cost of living crisis, while public services are cutting services to save money where they can.

A Question of Priorities

Rangers will argue that football finance does not work in neat moral equations. Transfer fees are often structured over time, player sales can offset spending, and cash flow is not the same as profit. That is fair. But none of that changes the central point - Rangers have chosen to make an enormous financial commitment in an attempt to win the Scottish Premiership. If that commitment is genuine, then settling a relatively small public debt should be part of it.

The Covid loan was a lifeline. It should not become a low-interest convenience for a club now operating in a different financial universe to the other clubs who received help. Rangers should pay it off - in full, and now.

For one glorious afternoon at Paradise, Celtic remembered exactly who they are. Seven goals. Seven different moments of menace. Hearts arrived with confidence and belief that they could challenge for the title once again this season and left having been given the most emphatic reminder that the throne in Scottish football still belongs to the champions as Celtic’s 7-1 demolition moved Martin O’Neill’s side four points clear at the top of the Premiership, with Kieran Tierney, Benjamin Nygren, Callum Osmand and Camilo Durán all on the scoresheet.

This was not merely a win. It was a declaration.

Lets not pretend the past few weeks have been anything but abysmal. Celtic were beaten twice by Rangers in the league and in the cup, then went to Lisbon and were outclassed 4-1 by Benfica, leaving them pointless after two Europa League league-phase games and 34th in a 36-team table.

Those results hurt. They should hurt. Celtic are not a club that accepts being second-best to Rangers, and they are certainly not a club that should be rolled over so easily in Europe - even though it seems to be the norm in recent years. The Benfica defeat was particularly galling - 3-0 down by half-time, passive for long spells, and far too easily detached from the aggressive, front-foot football that defines this club at its best.

But football has a habit of offering answers as well as questions. And on Sunday, Celtic answered loudly.

From the seventh minute, when Tierney headed in from a Mika Baur corner, Celtic played with pace, purpose and belief. Nygren added a second within three minutes. Osmand struck twice in two minutes. By the break it was 5-1, and by full-time Hearts had been well and truly put in their place as Celtic ran out 7-1 winners.

This was fast, free-flowing, fearless Celtic football - quick combinations, relentless pressure, wide areas stretched, bodies arriving in the box, and a refusal to let Hearts breathe. O’Neill said afterwards that the attacking play was “terrific” and that his players carried confidence through the full 90 minutes.

That is the template. Not caution. Not containment. Not keeping possession just for the sake of it. Not hoping to survive big nights. Celtic are at their most dangerous when they impose themselves, take the game to opponents and make them deal with our quality rather than us reacting to theirs.

Martin O’Neill and Shaun Maloney must treat this performance as more than a welcome bounce after a bruising few weeks. It must become the standard.

Domestically, Celtic have the squad depth and attacking talent to overwhelm all opponents when they play on the front foot. Nygren, Osmand and Durán all scored against Hearts, while Baur’s creativity and Tierney’s authority gave the side an energy that was impossible to resist.

In Europe, the lesson is even more important. Benfica exposed what happens when Celtic surrender initiative - a 4-1 defeat, three first-half goals conceded, and an evening that felt like a lesson rather than a contest. If Celtic try to sit in and survive against quality European sides, they will be punished again. If they play with the bravery and tempo shown against Hearts, they can at least make themselves a threat.

We cannot revert to the timid, reactive approach that saw us beaten by Rangers and humbled in Lisbon. The 7-1 win proved that when Celtic trust their football, play to our strengths, rather than trying to stop opponents playing to theirs, we remain capable of devastating opponents.

Despite the result, I am no fool, there will still be many more ups and downs this season. O’Neill himself was right to resist calling this a definitive statement, noting that Hearts remain strong challengers and that four points at this stage is absolutely nothing. Celtic remain four points ahead of Rangers and eight clear of Hearts, but the season is long and the margins for error are unforgiving.

Yet Sunday mattered because of what it revealed beneath the result. The class is still there. The hunger is still there. The ability to punish a rival, silence a narrative and remind everyone at Parkhead why Celtic set the standard is still there.

Form is temporary. Class is permanent. And for 90 minutes against Hearts, Celtic’s class did not simply return, it stamped its authority all over the pitch, leaving every pretender to the throne with plenty to think about.

Craig Whyte arrived at Rangers as a solution. Within nine months, he had become the fall guy. When he completed his takeover in May 2011, Whyte was presented to supporters as the man who would releas…

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Ahead of last night’s 4-1 defeat to Benfica, Celtic once again rolled out the memory of the Lisbon Lions in the forlorn hope that some nostalgia might rub off on a group of players who are not fit to lace the boots of the men of 1967. It is actually becoming a parody now, in my opinion.

For modern Celtic players, the Lisbon Lions and 1967 have become nothing more than a burden - a PR gimmick used by a board looking to monetise everything it can and milk the supporters for every last penny.

I wrote about this back in June, after the third kit - inspired by tiles at the Estádio Nacional - was released as they once again milked the Lisbon Lions. I called out the board for monetising the 1967 European Cup triumph and using it as a marketing device once again. It has now gone beyond that. It has become a curse for every Celtic team that follows, a noose around their necks, because this board is more interested in making money from the Lions than in building teams capable of emulating or surpassing them.

Then there is the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon. A place of pilgrimage for Celtic supporters. For many Celtic supporters, it is a holy site - the way the Vatican is for Catholics around the world.

It is a nice photo opportunity for fans to visit once in a lifetime. But every time Celtic arrive in Lisbon, every time 25 May comes around, the club puts out content, unveils another piece of merchandise inspired by the stadium, or walks players around the ground as if they might somehow channel the spirit of the Lisbon Lions in an upcoming European tie.

It is tiresome. It is PR bullshit. And while this may anger many fellow Celtic fans, we need to get over it.

1967 will be 60 years ago on 25 May 2027. In those 60 years, what have Celtic achieved in Europe? Two more finals - in 1970 and 2003 - both defeats, followed by decades of underperformance, ineptitude, amateurism, and humiliation.

Celtic are not honouring the Lisbon Lions. They are pissing all over them - in the way the club is run, in the way it approaches European football every season, and in its apparent refusal to use the Lions’ memory as anything other than a means of bleeding supporters dry. And too many of my fellow Celtic fans are gullible enough to fall for it every single time.

I have met some of the Lisbon Lions over the years. I even had the pleasure of Jim Craig writing a regular column for Scotzine. I will always revere them as legends of the game, never mind Celtic Football Club. But what they achieved should be a blueprint for Celtic going forward - a standard to follow and inspire the club to make its mark in Europe once again.

Instead, the Lisbon Lions have been reduced to a piggy bank for this Celtic board and a noose around the neck of every Celtic team that has followed them. Celtic fans have every right to remember and memorialise what the Lions achieved. But it is time Celtic - as a club and as a support - stopped living in the past and started demanding excellence in the present.

Last night’s defeat to Benfica was humiliating and embarrassing. The game was over with at half time. To mention the Lisbon Lions and 1967 in the same breath as this current squad is a stain on their achievements.

If Celtic want to move forward, we need more than a change of board and an end to the Desmond cabal. We need proper structures, proper ambition and a proper plan. And we need to relegate the Lisbon Lions to the history books - where their achievements belong - rather than dragging them out every time Celtic play in Europe, travel to Portugal, or when the 25th May comes around every year.

Celtic have now played in Lisbon seven times since 1967 and have not won once. Last night simply confirmed what should already be obvious - nostalgia does not win football matches. It does not defend set pieces. It does not build a squad. And it certainly does not excuse another European humiliation.

My stance may be harsh. It may knock a few noses out of joint. But it is not an attack on the Lisbon Lions. It is an attack on a club that keeps borrowing their glory while offering none of its own.

The Lions earned their place in history. They won it on the pitch, with courage, quality and a belief that Celtic could beat anyone in Europe. What they should not be is a permanent shield behind which a board hides, a marketing hook to be wheeled out whenever the club needs to distract from another European failure, or a sentimental story used to excuse the present.

Remembering 1967 is not the problem. Weaponising and monetising it is.

If Celtic genuinely revered the Lisbon Lions, they would build teams in their image - ambitious, fearless, properly resourced and capable of making their own history rather than endlessly repackaging somebody else’s. Instead, we get another Lisbon trip, another defeat, another round of nostalgia and another reminder that the club is more comfortable selling the past than confronting the present.

The Lions deserve better than that. So do the supporters. And so does Celtic Football Club.

The coin was flipped across the table. That detail has survived because it captured the absurdity of the moment. In May 2011, the controlling stake held by Sir David Murray- 85.3% of Rangers - was so…

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The financial collapse of Rangers is often told as though it began with Craig Whyte. That is understandable. Whyte bought the club for £1. He promised new investment. He used future season-ticket inc…

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The aim is not to pretend that removing the present power structure would be simple or cost-free, but to ask whether a self-sustaining club of Celtic’s scale could be owned, governed and protected by the people who fund it year after year - the supporters.

Introduction

Celtic could move from its AIM-listed PLC structure to a 100% member-owned socio club without relying on a new millionaire owner, but only through a negotiated, phased and professionally financed transition. The club’s existing ability to generate income from tickets, commercial activity, retail, broadcasting, European competition and player trading means the objective would not be to find someone to bankroll the football operation; it would be to transfer control from shareholders to the people who already sustain the club - the supporters themselves.

The central principle would be simple in theory - Celtic should be owned by its members, run by qualified professionals, and governed in the interests of the club’s long-term future rather than the preferences of any individual shareholder or private investor.

The ownership change

Celtic are currently a public limited company with multiple classes of shares traded on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s growth market. That means control ultimately rests with voting share capital, not with season-ticket holders or the wider support. The club itself acknowledges that it has three listed share classes.

Leaving AIM is possible, but it is only one part of the task. Under AIM Rule 41, cancelling a company’s market admission requires at least 75% of votes cast at a shareholder general meeting, plus notification to shareholders and the London Stock Exchange at least 20 clear business days before cancellation. Delisting Celtic would therefore not automatically make the club fan-owned. It would simply remove the public-market listing. The meaningful transformation would be the transfer of voting control and the rewriting of the club’s constitution.

A phased route

Phase 1: Create Celtic Members Trust

A new independent body would be formed before any takeover bid or delisting process. It would need:

• An elected interim council.

• Proper FCA/company/charity and football-governance advice.

• Published constitution, audited accounts and membership register.

• Strict one-member-one-vote rules.

• A legal commitment that no director, trustee or outside financier can convert support into personal control.

• A formal commitment to keep Celtic Park, club identity and core assets under member protection.

• The trust would become the democratic vehicle through which supporters organise, build capital and negotiate.

There is already a foundation for collective shareholder action. The Celtic Trust’s “Drive for Five” initiative says roughly 27,700 individual shareholders collectively own about 17.5% of Celtic shares, while a 5% voting bloc can secure the right to call an extraordinary general meeting. That is not fan ownership, but it demonstrates that a significant base of ordinary supporters already exists within the PLC’s shareholder structure.

Phase 2: Secure a controlling stake

The trust’s initial ambition should be a protected 25% plus one share block, then 51% control, before a full 100% conversion. This is much more realistic than pretending that tens of millions can be raised overnight.

The acquisition vehicle could be funded through:

• Membership income.

• Voluntary community shares or supporter bonds.

• Long-term pledges from the diaspora.

• Legacy giving.

• Ethical finance secured against predictable membership income - not Celtic’s operating assets.

• Donations or underwriting from wealthy supporters, but without extra voting rights or personal ownership.

• Negotiated sale, conversion or donation of major shareholdings.

A crucial line must not be crossed, the club should not borrow heavily to buy itself. Celtic Park, annual season-ticket income and future European earnings should not be placed at risk in order to remove private owners. The buyout vehicle must carry its own risk, and payments must remain affordable even in seasons without Champions League income.

Phase 3: Delist and restructure

Once a member vehicle has secured sufficient shareholder backing, the club could pursue AIM cancellation through the 75% vote required under the AIM rules.

The restructuring would then involve:

• Purchasing or converting remaining shares through an agreed scheme.

• Re-registering the operating club under an appropriate private-company/co-operative/community-benefit structure, subject to detailed legal advice.

• Cancelling the economic and voting privileges attached to historical share ownership in return for fair consideration.

• Vesting control in the Celtic Members Trust or an equivalent member-owned parent body.

• Introducing a constitutional “golden share” held by the members to protect the club’s identity and essential assets.

• The goal is not merely an unlisted Celtic. It is a Celtic in which no one can buy 30%, 50% or 75% of the club and dictate its future.

How the club would be governed

Celtic should borrow the essential democratic principle of Barcelona’s socio system without copying every part of Barcelona’s structure. The model should be designed for Celtic’s finances, law, geography and global supporter base.

The constitutional rule

• Every qualifying socio receives one vote.

• Membership cannot be bought, sold, gifted, inherited, transferred or accumulated.

• A wealthy supporter who contributes £1 million receives the same voting power as a supporter paying the standard socio fee.

• No dividends are paid to socios.

• No socio can sell their membership for personal gain.

• Operating surpluses are retained and reinvested in football, facilities, supporter services, academy development, women’s football, community activity and prudent reserves.

• Major constitutional decisions require a supermajority of socio members.

• The club’s name, colours, crest, Celtic Park and home location are protected assets requiring an exceptional majority for any change.

This does not mean Celtic must legally become a charitable non-profit in the narrow technical sense. A football club needs to trade, employ people, buy and sell players, pay tax and make operating surpluses. The more accurate description is not-for-private-distribution. Celtic can generate profit, but no individual owner extracts it as dividends or capital gains. The surplus remains inside the club.

President and board

The President would be elected by socios every six years, on a fixed term. That mirrors the broad political rhythm of FC Barcelona, whose presidential cycle is based on six-year terms. The President would lead the elected club board and present a manifesto before election.

To avoid turning Celtic into a personality contest, the system should require tickets rather than lone candidates:

• A presidential candidate stands with a proposed board slate.

• Each ticket publishes a six-year strategic plan.

• Each plan includes football governance, stadium development, commercial strategy, supporter representation, financial policy and community commitments.

• Candidates must meet eligibility, disclosure and integrity requirements.

• Election funding is capped and published.

• Debates and member ballots are independently administered.

• A recall process exists for gross misconduct, not merely poor results.

The six-year term offers a reasonable balance. It is long enough to deliver an academy strategy, capital project or football-operations rebuild; it is short enough that no board becomes untouchable.

However, the President should not be the chief executive, sporting director or day-to-day decision-maker. The elected board should appoint a professional executive leadership team, which in turn runs the club’s football and commercial operations.

Democratic ownership should create accountability, not an online referendum on every centre-half or every tactical substitution.

Accountability between elections

A six-year election alone would be too blunt. Celtic would need:

• An annual members’ assembly and published annual report.

• Quarterly financial and strategic updates.

• Member questions submitted and answered publicly.

• Annual votes on accounts, board remuneration policy and major capital plans.

• Independent election, audit and ethics committees.

• A clear register of conflicts of interest.

• Member-triggered special meetings where a defined threshold is reached.

• A high-threshold removal process for serious misconduct or constitutional breach.

• A formal supporters’ council representing season-ticket holders, disabled supporters, diaspora members, youth members and supporter clubs.

The contrast with the PLC model is straightforward. Under a PLC, a supporter’s influence is usually limited to whatever shares they own and major voting power can sit with a small group of private investors. Under a socio structure, the person who funds the club through a season ticket, membership and everyday loyalty has a formal constitutional role.

Membership structure

The membership model should separate ownership and democracy from ordinary commercial loyalty benefits. Not everyone who wants a season ticket will necessarily wish to pay for a voting membership, while the club still needs a clear, fair relationship with its ticket base.

The model below gives season-ticket holders a compulsory low-cost ordinary membership, while keeping full socio status voluntary, affordable and meaningful.

The numbers are for illustrative purposes only rather than a final proposal. The key is that full ownership cannot become a luxury item.

An adult socio fee of £75 is well below Barcelona’s current €225 adult rate. Barcelona’s 2026 adult socio fee is €225, with junior rates of €112 for ages six to 14 and €53 for under-sixes. A lower Celtic price is sensible because Celtic operates in a smaller media market, has a support spread across different incomes and would need mass participation rather than a prestige membership scheme.

Season-ticket holders

Every Celtic season-ticket holder should automatically be an ordinary club member. That membership should be included in the ticket price or charged transparently as a modest annual levy, such as £20, every season.

This would provide:

• A verified, permanent relationship between the club and its ticket base.

• Priority access to club communications, cup schemes, ticket exchange services and member events.

• A direct route to upgrade into full socio membership.

• A reliable annual membership income without tying voting rights to the ability to buy the most expensive seats.

• A clear distinction between buying access to matches and exercising democratic ownership.

The critical principle is owning a season ticket should not be the only route to becoming a socio. Celtic belongs to supporters across Scotland, Ireland and the world, including those unable to attend regularly. Equally, buying a season ticket should not automatically purchase voting control. A season-ticket holder would need to opt into full socio status, accept the constitution and pay the additional socio fee.

What could it raise?

No one can state Celtic’s true global fanbase with precision. The often-cited public estimates are old and vary materially. Research cited for 2003 placed Celtic’s worldwide support between about nine million and 12 million, and noted more than 800 supporters’ clubs across 60-plus countries. Those figures should be treated as broad indicators of reach and affinity, not a verified count of fans available to pay a membership fee.

A credible business plan must therefore be conservative. It should model paying members, not claim millions of subscribers simply because millions identify as Celtic supporters.

Celtic’s immediate addressable base is more tangible:

• A stadium capacity of around 60,000.

• A season-ticket base effectively close to capacity

• Tens of thousands of individual small shareholders; the Celtic Trust puts the figure at around 27,700.

• Large supporter-club and diaspora networks across Ireland, Britain, North America, Australia and elsewhere.

Conservative annual-income scenarios

Assume a mature member model with 55,000 season-ticket holders, and assume all are ordinary club members at £20. Then model full socios separately.

These figures deliberately exclude: Donations, Supporter bonds and community shares, Legacy income, Corporate sponsorship linked to the new model, Event income, Merchandising uplifts, Any ticket-price increase, Any transfer profit, Any UEFA prize money, They are membership-only figures.

The credible target for a well-run launch would be £5m–£9m per season once the model is established. A high-engagement model reaching 150,000 socios worldwide could exceed £10m annually, but that should be treated as an ambition rather than an assumption.

For context, Celtic reported £111m revenue for the year to June 2026, down from £143.6m in the previous year because of Europa League participation after failing to qualify for the Champions League. The club still reported £66.4m in cash at year-end. Membership income would not replace European football revenue, player sales or season-ticket income; it would provide a more predictable recurring stream [annually] and a direct funding source for democratic ownership, club development and supporter-led projects.

Could Celtic operate sustainably?

Yes, but the distinction between operating the club and paying for the ownership transition is crucial. Celtic already operate as a largely self-financing football business. Revenue comes from matchday income, domestic and UEFA media distributions, sponsorship, retail, merchandising, hospitality and player trading. The club’s 2025–26 results show the scale of European football volatility as revenue fell £32.6m, from £143.6m to £111m, when Champions League income was excluded, and the club moved from a £33.9m post-tax profit to a £4.8m loss. Yet it retained £66.4m cash.

That is a strong argument for fan ownership built on financial discipline rather than fantasy spending.

A sustainable financial constitution

The socio club should adopt rules such as:

• No dividends, distributions or private extraction of operating profits.

• A minimum protected cash reserve, perhaps equivalent to six months of fixed operating costs.

• A three-year rolling football budget, not one based on assumed Champions League qualification.

• Transfer spending funded from ordinary revenues, amortisation capacity and actual player-sale proceeds.

• No borrowing secured against Celtic Park without a supermajority of socios.

• No debt to finance routine wages or transfers.

• Any acquisition debt held outside the club and capped against predictable membership income.

• Annual publication of a football-budget range and cash-reserve policy.

• Mandatory member approval for exceptional borrowing, stadium relocation or sale of major club assets.

This does not mean Celtic would never borrow. Borrowing can be sensible for stadium modernisation, training facilities or renewable infrastructure when there is a clear asset, a repayment plan and member approval. It means Celtic would not become another club gambling its future to satisfy the short-term demands of an owner or the short-term impatience of a membership.

The real advantage

Celtic would not need an owner to inject money every year like some clubs, because it already creates substantial revenue. The socio model would ensure that money has only one destination - back into Celtic.

That could include:

• First-team recruitment and wage investment.

• Academy and women’s-team development.

• Barrowfield, Lennoxtown and Celtic Park upgrades.

• Ticketing technology, accessibility and supporter services.

• Community projects in Glasgow and the wider Celtic diaspora.

• Financial reserves against a bad European cycle.

• The managed purchase of any remaining historic share capital.

• No dividends. No private capital gains. No exit strategy for a billionaire. No need to wait for an individual benefactor to decide whether the club is “deserving” of investment.

The democratic case

The strongest case for a Celtic socio model is not that it would make every football decision correct. It would not. Member-owned Barcelona have made costly errors, accumulated significant debt and shown that democratic structures are no automatic protection against poor executive judgement. The case is that it replaces dependence with rights.

At present, a PLC structure leaves the decisive power with those holding the biggest share blocks, in Celtic’s case Dermot Desmond. The supporter may fill Celtic Park, buy the shirt, travel to Europe, renew the season ticket and keep the club commercially alive, but still hold no guaranteed meaningful say in its direction. A socio system would make the relationship honest.

The supporter would no longer be merely a customer, an atmosphere provider or a balance-sheet line. They would be a contributing member of the club - entitled to vote, entitled to scrutinise, entitled to remove leadership at the next electoral cycle, and entitled to know that no private owner can sell Celtic’s future without the consent of the people it belongs to.

A six-year mandate would give an elected President and board enough time to build properly. Annual reporting, member assemblies, transparent accounts, independent audits and clear recall provisions would ensure they do not become as insulated as the PLC structure they replaced.

The future question for Celtic should not be whether the next millionaire is more generous than the last. We shouldn’t be wanting to replace Desmond with a Haughey. It should be whether a club with this support, this revenue base and this history is finally prepared to trust its own people - its supporters.

Dermot Desmond can ignore boos at Celtic Park because he is hardly ever there. He can dismiss banners, chants and social-media campaigns as the background noise of a support he has never truly answered to. But take the protest onto a golf course, place it in front of the professionals and wealthy circles he chooses to inhabit, and suddenly the response becomes immediate, personal and vindictive. That is what happened at St Andrews during the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.

A small group of Celtic supporters disrupted Desmond’s round of golf by throwing tennis balls onto the course and displaying banners as part of the ongoing ‘Not a Penny more’ boycott. It was a targeted protest rather than an act of disorder - despite claims to the contrary. The point was made clear, the man widely regarded as Celtic’s most influential shareholder may remain beyond the reach of ordinary accountability at the club, but he is not beyond protest wherever he does.

And, judging by the speed and tone of Celtic’s subsequent statement on Sunday night, the protest landed exactly where it was intended to land - humiliating Desmond.

The place that matters most to Desmond

Celtic supporters have protested against Desmond for years. They have booed. They have sung about him. They have displayed banners at Celtic Park, criticised the board outside the stadium and challenged the direction of the club at AGMs. None of it has visibly shifted him.

That is partly because football is easy to keep at arm’s length when you are Dermot Desmond. He does not sit in the dugout. He does not front up to the media. He hardly attends a game. He does not put himself through an AGM grilling - preferring to send his nepo baby son nowadays. He does not have to answer the questions that Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay, Brian Wilson or whoever else is sent out to represent the hierarchy must attempt to navigate.

At Celtic Park, opposition can be framed as the usual noise of football. The disgruntled supporter becomes a nuisance. The banner becomes a minority view. The criticism becomes something to be managed through statements, stadium bans, closed-door meetings and carefully selected club messaging. St. Andrews was different.

This was not a chant from the back of a stand. It was not a protest outside the ground. It was not something that could be ignored by refusing to look in the direction of a banner. It was public embarrassment in an environment that matters personally to Desmond - golf, wealth, influence, celebrity, and status.

It forced course security to escort him away after the disruption. Whatever the exact private conversations were afterwards, the optics alone were humiliating for Desmond. A billionaire accustomed to controlling the environment around him was suddenly the focus of unwanted attention at one of the world’s most famous golf venues. That is why the reaction came so quickly.

Celtic’s badge, Desmond’s grievance

The statement issued in Celtic’s name was remarkable not because it condemned disruption, a football club is entitled to condemn a protest it believes crossed a line, but because of what it revealed.

It was long. It was deeply personal in tone. It repeatedly invoked Celtic’s reputation, the club’s history, the conduct of supporter groups and the need to protect employees, directors, shareholders and “others associated with Celtic.”

Most tellingly, it concluded: “The reputation of Celtic Football Club is non negotiable.”

That line is supposed to make the statement sound principled. Instead, it gives the game away. Celtic’s reputation was not damaged because a handful of supporters threw tennis balls onto a golf course. The overwhelming majority of people watching from outside the club will have understood precisely what it was - a protest aimed at a hugely influential figure who controls the football club.

What does damage the reputation of Celtic Football Club however, is Dermot Desmond’s control of the club, the board’s incompetence when it comes to player recruitment, long term strategy on and off the pitch, and the club’s continued failure in Europe.

There was no question of Celtic supporters storming an event, attacking participants or causing mass disorder. The protest was disruptive, yes. It was deliberately designed to make a point, yes. But the idea that it somehow dismantled a reputation built over more than a century is absurd. What it did damage was Desmond’s ego and reputation in front of pro golfers he pays to be around.

It put a spotlight on the contradiction at the heart of Celtic’s governance. Desmond is not the owner of Celtic Football Club. Celtic is a PLC. It has shareholders. It has a board. It has formal governance structures. It has an AGM. It has a support whose emotional, financial and cultural investment funds the club - if Desmond wasn’t there the club would continue to function, it would thrive, it would flourish - Yet the club’s public posture repeatedly suggests that criticism of Desmond is treated as an attack on Celtic itself. That is the problem.

Dermot Desmond is an enormously influential shareholder. He is not Celtic Football Club. He does not own its history, its identity, its community or the right to define who is and is not a legitimate supporter, he also cannot dictate to the fans what they can and cannot do. Celtic existed long before Desmond accumulated influence through his shareholding and it will exist long after he is gone - sooner rather than later hopefully.

Using the club’s official platform to respond to what was, in reality, a personal humiliation is exactly why so many supporters believe the lines between the club, the board and Desmond’s interests have become blurred.

A familiar pattern

This is not the first time Desmond’s displeasure has been communicated through the machinery of Celtic.

Last season’s statement against Brendan Rodgers had the same flavour - an extraordinary personal broadside delivered using the club’s letterhead. It was the language of Dermot Desmond making clear that he had been crossed. The statement after the St.Andrews protest has Desmond’s fingerprints all over it.

The target may officially be the Celtic Fans Collective, but the emotional centre of the statement is not the club’s governance, fan engagement or operational strategy. It is the fact that Desmond was targeted while playing golf in a private capacity and was humiliated.

That is why the repeated references to Celtic’s reputation ring hollow. If the priority were genuinely the club’s reputation, the board would be much more concerned about the issues supporters have raised for years.

Instead, the club has chosen to declare war on a supporter collective after a protest that embarrassed a shareholder at a golf tournament. That is not a defence of Celtic’s reputation. It is a reaction to protect Dermot Desmond’s status.

The AGM will expose the reality

This year’s AGM is likely to be fractious, and rightly so. Desmond will avoid the scrutiny himself, as he has done time and time again. The task of fronting the room will fall to the board fronted by interim chairman Brian Wilson, and Dermot’s nepo baby Ross, who has increasingly been positioned around the club’s upper structures by his father. A clear sign that Dermot is shoehorning his son into the club to take over from him sooner or later.

That alone will infuriate many supporters. The idea that a club of Celtic’s scale could be represented by another member of the Desmond family while the most influential figure continues to dodge direct challenge and accountability will reinforce the belief that the club is being treated as a private family’s play thing rather than a public institution with obligations to shareholders and supporters.

Peter Lawwell, whatever supporters thought of him, had authority. He had presence. He had experience. He understood the political and commercial landscape of the game. He carried influence in Scottish football and beyond it. The current boardroom does not project the same strength, it projects no strength whatsoever. Puppet rulers doing their overlord’s bidding.

Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay, Brian Wilson and the rest may hold official titles, but the perception among a large section of the support is that they are managing Desmond’s position and vision for the club rather than shaping Celtic’s future for the club’s own benefit. That perception becomes harder to dismiss every time the club produces a statement that reads more like a billionaire spitting the dummy than a football club’s considered response.

The AGM should be the place where the board answers for recruitment, investment, sporting ambition, supporter engagement and strategy. Instead, there it will almost certainly be another stage for Desmond [through his son] talking down to supporters while the central questions go unanswered.

Whether the AGM is done in person or online is another talking point. Either way, Desmond & co will escape accountability once again.

Protest, power and unity

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the tactics of the Celtic Fan Collective. Some supporters will feel the St Andrews protest went too far. Others will argue it was an effective piece of direct action because it did what years of stadium protests failed to do - it provoked Desmond. Both views can exist.

But the bigger lesson is obvious. The protest has shown where Desmond’s pressure points are. He may not care about a hostile atmosphere at Celtic Park in the same way he cares about being embarrassed in a prestigious golfing environment, among people whose opinions matter to him more personally.

That does not mean every protest should now be exported to a golf course. It does mean supporters have been reminded that the existing power structure is not as untouchable as it likes to appear. The difficulty, as ever, is unity.

There are too many fan groups within the Celtic fanbase, too many agendas, too many competing campaigns and too many different ideas about how change should be pursued. The Green Brigade & the Celtic Fans Collective, shareholder groups, season-ticket holders, occasional matchgoers and supporters who follow from home all want Celtic to be better. But wanting the same outcome is not the same as operating as one force. That fragmentation of the fan base actually helps the board.

A divided support can be dismissed as a collection of minorities. One group can be banned. Another can be criticised. A third can be invited into selective dialogue. The board can always claim it is engaging with “responsible” fans while deciding for itself who qualifies as responsible. A united support is almost impossible to manage.

The most meaningful leverage remains financial and institutional - coordinated shareholder action, sustained pressure at AGMs, disciplined campaigns around governance, and in theory a significant downturn in season-ticket renewals or market confidence. The problem is that supporters are emotionally tied to their seats, their routines and their club. Most will not surrender that connection, even if they are furious with those running it.

The same applies to the PLC share price. A serious collapse in value would change the tone quickly, but it remains unlikely without a much wider commercial or footballing crisis. So the board’s current tactics is understandable, it believes the anger will pass, the tickets will continue to sell, the money will continue to flow and Celtic’s dominance at home will keep discontent manageable. St Andrews was a warning that not everyone accepts that calculation.

Celtic are not going away

The most revealing aspect of the club’s statement is its insistence that supporters cannot “intimidate or coerce” the club. That language is designed to turn a governance dispute into a morality play - respectable club versus irresponsible agitators; historic institution versus self-appointed groups; sensible dialogue versus escalating disruption. But that framing avoids the real issue.

Celtic supporters are not asking for permission to care about the club. They are not required to accept that questioning the board, challenging the use of money, demanding strategic ambition or criticising a powerful shareholder somehow makes them a threat to Celtic.

The club belongs to its support in every meaningful sense - emotionally, culturally, and historically. Directors come and go. Executives come and go. Shareholders come and go. Supporters remain.

Dermot Desmond may have been humiliated at St Andrews. He may have responded by using Celtic’s official platform to take aim at the Celtic Fans Collective. He may now seek to make an example of those involved through indefinite bans and the withdrawal of recognition. But the real outcome may be the opposite of what he intended.

He has shown supporters that their protests can reach him. He has shown that the carefully managed distance between Desmond and Celtic can collapse very quickly when his personal world is affected. And he has reminded everyone that the most powerful man around Celtic Park is still deeply sensitive to public challenge. The tennis balls did not damage Celtic’s reputation. They punctured Dermot Desmond’s aura of invulnerability and his ego.

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There is no defensible place for historic child abuse to become football ammunition. The abuse of boys connected to Celtic Boys Club was not a punchline, a social-media retort or a means of winning an argument about trophies, finances or the fate of Rangers in 2012. It was the exploitation of children by adults who were supposed to protect, coach and guide them.

Yet too many Rangers supporters have chosen to treat that suffering as precisely that - a weapon. Every disagreement, every Celtic celebration, every joke about liquidation, every reminder of a league table or a trophy count can be met with the same grotesque response - taunts, chants and accusations built around child abuse and the trauma that survivors endured for years even to this day. The target may be a Celtic fan who has said nothing about historic abuse, a current player, a manager or an entire support. The point remains the same. The abuse of children is being deployed as tribal currency.

That is sickening. It is morally bankrupt. And it says far more about the people using child abuse for point-scoring than it ever could about the people they aim to insult.

The survivors of abuse at Celtic Boys Club deserve compassion, space to speak and the full support of anyone who claims to care about children, justice or Scottish football. They do not deserve to be dragged into an argument by people who want a cheap way to silence Celtic fans on an entirely unrelated subject. No survivor’s story should be summoned because someone has laughed at Rangers’ financial collapse, their prolonged sporting decline or the club’s record in a particular season. That is not showing solidarity with victims or demanding justice for them. It is exploitation of victims and the suffering that they endured.

The starting point must be unambiguous, the crimes committed by figures including James Torbett and Frank Cairney were appalling. Torbett and Cairney have been convicted and imprisoned for sexual abuse offences - along with other Celtic Boys Club coaches and staff. Celtic later settled group legal claims with 24 former Celtic Boys Club players, with payments exceeding £1 million, while further cases are still awaiting being addressed.

Those facts must be faced honestly. They should never be minimised, buried beneath a wall of club loyalty or treated as an inconvenience to be managed. Survivors took enormous personal risks in coming forward. Some spoke in court. Others spoke to journalists. Many carried their experiences for decades before bravely coming out and telling anyone what happened to them.

The correct response to that courage is belief, respect and a determination to make sure institutions learn from failure. It is to listen when survivors say that the damage did not end when the abuse ended. It is to recognise the long tail of trauma, whether it was relationships damaged, confidence destroyed, resulting in addiction, mental health affected, trust in adults and institutions shattered. It is to accept that a criminal conviction, while vital, does not restore what was taken away. It is certainly not to turn their experiences into a football chant.

When Rangers supporters label Celtic fans “paedos” or “nonces”, or aim those words at Celtic players and managers with no connection whatsoever to historic offences, they are not expressing concern for victims. They are not demanding accountability. They are not contributing to a serious discussion about safeguarding in football. They are using the language of child sexual abuse as an insult because they believe it will hurt their rivals. That is a profound betrayal of the people whose experiences they pretend to invoke.

There is a simple test. If the same supporters who chant and tweet about Celtic Boys Club abuse do not show comparable interest in survivor testimony involving other clubs, other football institutions or their own club’s historic youth set-up, then their concern is not child protection. It is tribal hostility. They are not standing with survivors; they are selecting survivors whose pain can be turned into a weapon to be useful in a rivalry. That is not advocacy. It is voyeurism with a scarf on.

The Convenient Silence

The ugliness is made worse by the selective amnesia which so often accompanies these attacks. Scottish football’s historic abuse crisis did not belong to one club, one part of Glasgow or one community. It existed across clubs and youth organisations, and it reflected wider institutional failures seen throughout society in schools, care homes, churches, youth groups and sports bodies. Rangers are not outside that history.

The Scottish FA’s independent review into historic child sexual abuse in Scottish football recorded testimony relating to multiple clubs and alleged perpetrators. Among the figures associated with allegations involving Rangers’ youth set-up was Gordon Neely, a coach whose history had already been examined in reporting by BBC Scotland. Neely worked at several clubs, including Hibernian and Rangers, and allegations were made that he continued abusing boys after moving between football environments.

The details around Neely should trouble anyone interested in truth and justicec rather than tribal propaganda. Rangers have long said that Neely was dismissed after a complaint from parents and reported to police. But the SFA review was unable to establish whether a formal report to Strathclyde Police had in fact been made at the time. BBC reporting also uncovered a contemporary Rangers News item which said Neely had “resigned” and was wished well for the future, creating a serious discrepancy between the public messaging of the period and the later account of an immediate dismissal for alleged abuse.

That is not a minor semantic issue. It goes to a central question in every historic abuse case - what did an institution know, what did it do, what did it record and what did it report?

Nor did the harm necessarily end when a club relationship ended. It has been established that Neely went on to private coaching after leaving Rangers, and allegations were made that he continued abusing boys into the 1990s. That is exactly why safeguarding failures are not historical curiosities. When concerns are ignored, obscured, poorly documented or not passed to the relevant authorities, the risk is not confined to one club, one dressing room or one season. It follows the abuser.

Rangers themselves issued a public apology following publication of the SFA review. The club acknowledged the gravity of the findings and apologised to those affected by child abuse in Scottish football. An apology matters, but it must be followed by honesty, transparency and an unwillingness to allow supporter culture to erase or trivialise the experiences of those who came forward. That is where too many people have failed.

Survivors connected to Rangers’ youth setup have described feeling ignored, dismissed or left without meaningful redress. In 2018, one ex-Rangers youth player who said he was abused by Neely at Ibrox said he had been told by the club hierarchy to contact the liquidators of the former company rather than Rangers FC. Whatever the legal complexities surrounding corporate identity and liquidation, that response exposes the gulf between legal positioning and moral responsibility. A survivor who says he was abused as a child in a football environment should not be treated as a problem to be redirected through insolvency paperwork.

The wider record also includes allegations involving former Rangers and Liverpool scout Harry Dunn, who died in 2017 while awaiting trial on historic child-sex-abuse charges. There have also been public allegations and claims involving other individuals connected with Rangers-related youth football. These matters require careful, accurate language and should never be used to make sweeping accusations about people who have not been convicted. But they do establish the crucial point that Rangers supporters cannot pretend historic abuse is a uniquely Celtic stain while treating every account connected to Rangers as inconvenient background noise, claiming victims lied, or ignoring it completely.

Rivalry As Deflection

There is a reason this behaviour has intensified during the modern era of Celtic dominance. Since Rangers’ 2012 liquidation, Celtic have won the overwhelming majority of Scottish league titles, reached the Champions League or Europa League group stage football, secured extended periods of domestic supremacy and accumulated trophies at a rate Rangers supporters once used to herald themselves as the World’s Most Successful Football Team.

That sporting imbalance has created resentment. Of course it has. Football is built on rivalry, envy, bragging rights and the desire to see your rival lose. Celtic fans have mocked Rangers’ liquidation, financial collapse, European failures, managerial instability, derby defeats, and title drought. Rangers fans have mocked Celtic’s own defeats, transfer disappointments and setbacks. Much of that is ordinary football antagonism, however unpleasant it can become. But historic child abuse must sit outside that world entirely.

It cannot be an escalation in a row about titles. It cannot be the “ultimate comeback” to a meme. It cannot be a way to puncture the joy of a supporter celebrating a league win. It cannot be an answer to questions about Rangers’ use of Employee Benefit Trusts, side letters or the club’s financial practices in the years before liquidation. It cannot be a way of avoiding discussion of the sporting consequences of Rangers’ collapse.

Yet the pattern is familiar. A Celtic supporter makes a point about football. A Rangers supporter replies with abuse imagery, labels the individual a “nonce”, or posts material invoking Celtic Boys Club. The original topic disappears. The survivor’s experience is reduced to point scoring by one supporter against another. The offender feels they have “won” because the exchange didn’t continue. That is the overall tactic of the usual suspects within the Rangers support - don’t debate, don’t argue, contaminate.

It is designed to make any Celtic fan who speaks about Rangers feel that they should be carrying collective guilt for crimes committed by men they never met, in an organisation they had no role in, before they were even born in some cases. It simultaneously allows the person posting the abuse taunt to avoid a more difficult reality that every major institution, including their own, has an obligation to confront allegations of historic abuse with seriousness and care. The cowardice is not merely in the cruelty of the insult. It is in the refusal to look inward.

If Rangers supporters genuinely want historic abuse to be discussed, then discuss it properly. Discuss why alleged abusers could move through youth football. Discuss failures of reporting and record-keeping. Discuss the culture of deference towards coaches and authority figures. Discuss the need for survivor-centred redress. Discuss the distinction between legal liability and moral accountability. Discuss how modern safeguarding standards can be strengthened. But do not pretend that shouting “paedo” at a Celtic supporter is part of that discussion. It is not. It is the opposite.

A Double Standard On Justice

There is a bitter hypocrisy at work in the comparison between how survivors are invoked in rivalry and how they are treated when they seek justice.

Celtic Boys Club survivors who came forward helped bring abusers into the criminal justice system. The likes of Torbett and Cairney faced their victims in courts of law and were convicted for it. Civil litigation followed, and Celtic eventually reached a settlement with 24 former players in 2025, with tailored compensation awards based on individual assessments. That does not make the suffering disappear. It does not make every question about institutional responsibility vanish. It does not mean the work is finished, particularly when further claims or survivors emerge.

But it does mean that survivors forced the issue into the open, that their accounts were heard, and that real consequences followed. That fact should inspire solidarity with survivors elsewhere in the game, not resentment or comparative scorekeeping. Every survivor deserves a credible path to truth, recognition, safeguarding reform and, where appropriate, redress - whether their abusers are still alive or died years before.

The disparity becomes especially cruel when some Rangers-linked survivors say they have not received the recognition or support they deserve. If a supporter can spend hours online posting abuse-related taunts about Celtic, they can spend five minutes reading the testimony of people who say they were harmed within Rangers-related football. If they can make banners, songs or memes out of Celtic Boys Club, they can campaign for their own club to listen to those who have alleged abuse in its youth environment. That would be what solidarity looks like.

It would involve supporting independent investigations rather than treating them as an attack on the club. It would mean accepting that acknowledging an institution’s failures is not the same as accusing every supporter, player or employee of wrongdoing. It would mean abandoning the childish idea that a rival club’s failures somehow cancel out your own.

The legal questions around Rangers’ 2012 liquidation are complex. But a moral question does not become complicated simply because a company structure changed. When an adult says they were abused as a child in a football setting, the instinctive response should be compassion and a commitment to finding answers - not a rush to identify which corporate entity might avoid responsibility. That includes Celtic’s own handling of the abuse scandal and their years long defence of using the separate entity defence when it came to Celtic Boys Club.

A club’s history is more than its honours list, strip colours and stadium. It is also the people who passed through its doors, including the children entrusted to adults under its banner. Institutions cannot demand the romance of continuity when celebrating title wins and old heroes, then rely on discontinuity when survivors ask to be heard.

Draw The Line

Scottish football has spent decades allowing the Glasgow rivalry to swallow almost every other moral consideration. It has turned religion, identity, history, politics and community into material for tribal antagonism. There are times when rivalry is entertaining, creative and part of the game’s cultural energy. There are other times when it is poisonous. This is one of those times.

No Celtic fan should deny or minimise the horror inflicted on Celtic Boys Club survivors. No Rangers fan should deny or minimise allegations and survivor accounts connected to Rangers’ historic youth environment. No supporter should use a survivor’s experience as a means of winning a row. No player, manager or ordinary fan should be branded a sex offender because of the club they support or work for. And no terrace chant that revels in abuse should be shrugged off as “banter”. Banter is mutual. Banter has limits. Banter ends where the abuse of children begins.

The people who abuse survivors’ stories to attack Celtic fans are not defending victims. They are using the victims. They are taking the most painful experiences imaginable and making them part of a football identity contest. They are turning suffering into content, trauma into a slogan and abuse into a form of entertainment. That should disgust every decent supporter - no matter the club they support.

The more difficult task is to replace that culture with something better, a football culture in which all survivors are believed, all football clubs confront their past, safeguarding is treated as a permanent responsibility and rivalry is kept firmly away from the pain of abused children.

That is not asking football supporters to stop being rivals. It is asking them to remain human and not use childrens suffering so that they can get a kick out of it whether on social media, on the streets, or on the terracing.

The latest Transfermarkt squad valuations have been treated by parts of the Scottish media as though they are audited financial statements. Rangers’ rising total has been rushed into headlines as proof of a dramatic power shift, while Celtic’s comparative figure has been used to frame a familiar argument between the two Glasgow sides.

It is neat, easy to understand and perfectly designed for a headline.

But there is an obvious problem, Transfermarkt valuations are not real transfer values. They are estimates created through subjective criteria, editorial judgement and community discussions - not evidence of what a club would actually pay or what players are actually worth.

Transfermarkt itself is clear on the matter, even if much of the coverage built around its figures is not. The website says its market values are calculated through various pricing models and substantial community involvement, with users contributing to detailed discussions around player values. It explicitly states that these figures should not be equated with actual transfer fees or player valuations. Its stated aim is not to predict a price, but to provide an expected value. That ought to be treated as an important disclaimer rather than a minor technicality buried beneath another Rangers-versus-Celtic debate in the struggling world of Scottish mainstream media.

A player does not carry a fixed price tag around his neck. He is worth whatever a club is willing to pay, another club is willing to accept, and the player himself is willing to facilitate. Everything else is guess work. Football transfers are not conducted by dragging a player from a database into a shopping basket. They are negotiations shaped by timing, leverage, finance, contracts, ambition, wages and circumstance.

The gap between a public valuation and a real-world transfer fee can be enormous. A player deemed to be worth £18 million by Transfermarkt may have enjoyed a strong start to the season, scored a few goals, impressed in a European tie or collected a first international cap. That may raise his profile, and it may well make him a more attractive proposition. But none of it means a club is prepared to put £18 million on the table for him.

Perhaps his contract is running down. Perhaps he is on wages that make the overall deal unappealing. Perhaps he has an injury record that concerns potential buyers. Perhaps the clubs with the money do not need his position. Perhaps his best performances have come in a league whose standard is viewed with caution by scouts elsewhere. Perhaps there is simply no market for him at that price.

The reverse can be true as well. A player with a modest Transfermarkt figure can command a premium because several clubs want him at once. A club in England may be desperate for a particular profile before the end of a transfer window. A selling club may be under no pressure to move him. A long contract, an urgent buyer, a bidding war or a desire to replace a departing player can all drive a fee far beyond the value attached to a database entry.

Transfermarkt acknowledges much of this itself. Its explanation of market values includes age, performance, future potential, reputation, the financial standing of leagues, marketing appeal, injury susceptibility, the number and reputation of interested clubs, broader market trends and the different economic conditions facing clubs. It also lists the individual details that can affect a deal - sell-on clauses, bonuses, release clauses, loan fees, buy-back options, contracts, player swaps and the acquisition of partial rights.

Then there are the less tidy factors that decide transfers in the real world. A club can refuse to sell to the highest bidder. A player can refuse a move. A side in financial difficulty may accept less than it would otherwise demand. A club under pressure to sign a replacement may overpay. A player can force a move, while another can sit tight on a lucrative contract. None of this sits neatly in a squad-total graphic shared online by those desperately wanting to believe the figures as fact.

And yet Scottish football coverage repeatedly treats Transfermarkt numbers as though they settle arguments. The reason is obvious. The figures are wonderfully useful for creating a story where one does not exist - desperate to fill column inches and produce clickbait articles to provide as much money as possible to keep their dwindling and struggling news publications alive.

A straightforward rivalry can be constructed from them in minutes. Rangers’ squad is valued at one amount, Celtic’s at another, and a conclusion is immediately offered about who is recruiting better, who is catching up, who is falling behind, or who has assembled the more valuable team. Just because the team is more valuable doesn’t mean they will win games nor win the title come May.

It is the kind of content that encourages reaction rather than thought - perfect clickbait material. Supporters will share it, opponents will dismiss it, and the debate will roll on because the numbers carry the appearance of authority. Pound signs are persuasive, particularly when attached to footballers, even when there is no actual transaction behind them.

That does not mean Transfermarkt has no use. It is an excellent resource for browsing player histories, checking contracts, tracing career paths and getting a rough indication of how a player is perceived within the site’s own framework. Used carefully, it can be a helpful starting point. The trouble comes when a starting point is passed off as a final judgement - as the Scottish mainstream media and a certain fanbase are doing.

There is a difference between saying that Transfermarkt estimates a player’s market value at £18 million and stating that the player is worth £18 million. The first is accurate. The second is speculation dressed up as fact.

Celtic and Rangers operate in a market where the numbers are often inflated by emotional investment. Every signing is either a coup or a disaster before he has played a full season. Every strong run of form can become proof that a player belongs in a bigger league. Every comparison becomes a question on which club is moving forward and which is being left behind.

The reality is more complicated. The strength of a squad is not measured by the total of a website’s subjective valuations. It is measured by performances, results, recruitment success, development, depth, wage control and the ability to generate real demand from credible buyers. It becomes visible when offers arrive, when sales are completed and when clubs reinvest successfully.

If Rangers sell a player for a major fee, that is evidence of value. If Celtic receive serious interest in a key player from clubs with the means to buy him, that is evidence of value. If either club consistently develops players, performs in Europe and turns recruitment into real profit, that tells us something useful about the quality of the operation.

Until then, Transfermarkt’s squad figures are little more than a talking point. They may be entertaining, they may flatter one support or annoy another, and they may provide the Scottish media with an easy angle to produce content when they can’t think of anything else to write about. But they should not be mistaken for proof.

A website’s valuation is not a transfer bid. It is not a completed sale. It is not a guarantee of demand. And it certainly is not a reliable measure of whether Rangers are suddenly “great” again or whether Celtic’s squad has somehow lost its value and are on a downward spiral.

The only number that truly counts is the one written into the deal when a buying club decides a player is worth paying for and what happens come the end of the season and who is sitting top of the table lifting the league trophy.

The phrase “the big tax case” sounded like something for lawyers, accountants and courtroom specialists - technical, slow-moving and somehow separate from football. Supporters could debate it in pubs…

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Sir David Murray discussing Manchester City’s financial misconduct is not merely ironic. It is an invitation to forget how recklessness, debt and disastrous ownership decisions consumed the Rangers he left behind.

In fact, there is something almost magnificently shameless about Sir David Murray appearing on Graeme Souness’s podcast to discuss financial governance in football, specifically Manchester City being found guilty of 114 of the 115 Premier League charges against them.

City’s financial scandal demands serious scrutiny from people with credibility, independence and a consistent attitude towards financial wrongdoing. Instead, football has been given us Murray, Souness and Simon Jordan in an ownership podcast special featuring two former club owners whose financial records ought to make them witnesses for the prosecution rather than expert commentators.

Murray talking solemnly about City is the equivalent of inviting arsonists to host a seminar on fire prevention.

Murray’s financial legacy

Murray’s Rangers cultivated an image of limitless wealth. The reality was a football club built around borrowing, escalating expenditure and the belief that tomorrow’s income would somehow justify today’s extravagance. By 2004, Rangers’ debt had reached £73.9 million. A £52 million share issue intended to reduce it was almost entirely underwritten by Murray himself, effectively moving much of the burden elsewhere within Murray International Holdings rather than demonstrating broad investor confidence in the club. The famous “for every fiver Celtic spend, we’ll spend a tenner” boast was not simply bravado. It became the governing philosophy of his era.

That era may have delivered trophies, famous signings and nights Rangers supporters will never forget. But it also left a financial structure incapable of surviving when easy credit disappeared when the financial collapse happened.

Murray now admits that some of his decisions were based on “vanity and not sanity”. Yet he continues to present the collapse as something that primarily happened to him - the financial crisis struck, Bank of Scotland failed, HMRC targeted Rangers and events escaped his control. It was a convenient version of history because it transforms his long-term mismanagement of Rangers into an unforeseeable act of God.

The banking relationship

The more uncomfortable question concerns Murray’s longstanding relationship with Bank of Scotland and the extraordinarily accommodating lending practice from which his business empire benefited.

Gavin Masterton, the bank’s former managing director, retired in 2001 shortly after the merger with Halifax. Murray was regarded within Bank of Scotland as one of its “favoured sons”, while the borrowing attached to his wider business empire increased enormously during the following years.

It is fair to distinguish documented lending from allegations of personal favours. Friendship alone does not prove that loans were improper. But it is equally fair to ask whether Murray’s football model could ever have existed without a bank prepared to tolerate levels of borrowing that a more sceptical lender might have challenged much earlier.

When HBOS was swallowed by Lloyds Banking Group in 2009, the atmosphere changed dramatically. Lloyds forced Murray to reduce the bank’s exposure to Rangers and the Murray Group, Rangers’ debt fell by about £10 million between 2009 and 2011, as the bank was heavily involved in efforts to have its money repaid. Donald Muir joined the Rangers board during the restructuring period, while Walter Smith publicly complained that the bank was effectively running the club.

Murray describes the banking crash as one of the great misfortunes that overwhelmed him. Another interpretation is less flattering, as the crisis exposed a business and football model under Murray that had become dependent on continued banking indulgence. Once a new owner of the debt began applying conventional scrutiny, the supposed financial powerhouse had nowhere to go. Losing the old Bank of Scotland and Gavin Masterton relationship did not create Rangers’ underlying problems. It revealed them.

The EBT reckoning

Then there were the Employee Benefit Trusts. More than £47 million was paid to Rangers players, managers and directors through EBT arrangements between 2001 and 2010. In 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in HMRC’s favour, concluding that the payments represented earnings and should have been taxed accordingly.

Murray told Jordan that he approved the scheme because auditors and professional advisers had signed it off. That may explain why he believed it could be used, but it does not absolve him of responsibility for authorising and profiting from it - as he was the biggest recipient of the scheme with over £6m paid to him. Chairmen cannot claim every trophy earned under their stewardship and then outsource every disastrous decision to accountants, bankers, tax advisers or successors - despite how much Murray tried to do it and yet neither Jordan or Souness took the former Rangers supremo to task over his comments. Certainly not his best pal Souness who labelled Murray his best pal and the greatest chairman in British football history. I think I actually laughed and vomited a little at the same time hearing Souness give Murray the podcast soundbite equivalent of a reach around.

Despite an independent Scottish football commission finding that Rangers had failed to disclose side-letter payment arrangements, imposing a £250,000 fine. Murray still depicts Rangers as a selected target and a victim of HMRC. HMRC has explicitly rejected claims that it miscalculated the tax liability, stating that it won the avoidance case in the Supreme Court. The eventual settlement was lower than HMRC’s original claim, but that does not turn the underlying scheme into prudent financial management or make the tax liability imaginary.

The Whyte escape hatch

Murray eventually sold his controlling Rangers stake to Craig Whyte for £1 in May 2011, who drove the final nail in the coffin. Murray may have jumped ship before it sank but he certainly handed Whyte the hammer.

Murray presided over the debt accumulation, the unsustainable spending culture and the EBT arrangements. He then approved a sale to a buyer about whom Rangers’ independent board committee had expressed serious concerns. Whyte inherited the crisis and accelerated it catastrophically; he did not conjure it from thin air.

Murray has apologised for selling Rangers to Whyte, but an apology is not the same as accountability. “I was duped” remains one of the most useful phrases in British business, it allowed Murray who chose Whyte as the club’s buyer to recast himself as a victim, when he was as much of a perpetrator as Whyte was.

Jordan’s glass house

Simon Jordan at least asked Murray about the EBTs and revealed that he had considered but rejected a similar arrangement at Crystal Palace because he feared HMRC would eventually challenge it. That was a pertinent question and a better decision.

But Jordan is hardly an immaculate authority on sustainable ownership. Crystal Palace entered administration in January 2010 at the end of his decade in control, following cash-flow problems, delayed wages and an unsuccessful search for new investment or buyers. Jordan was reportedly the club’s largest creditor, so he lost substantially too, but Palace’s collapse remains part of his ownership record.

That is what makes the whole spectacle so ridiculous. Souness is hosting a discussion about City’s financial offences with Murray, whose Rangers model collapsed amid debt and tax liabilities, and Jordan, whose Palace tenure ended in administration. All the while Souness sat fidgeting and looking lost during the conversation between Jordan and Murray.

These men are entitled to discuss Manchester City. Experience includes failure, and people can learn as much from ruin as success. But the failures must be acknowledged honestly rather than polished into wisdom after the event or trying to play the victim card to escape your own part in the downfall of the clubs you used to own and manage.

The missing interrogation

Murray’s problem is not that he lacks experience. It is that his retelling of that experience always seems to contain a remarkably generous allocation of blame for everyone except David Murray.

The bank collapsed. HMRC targeted Rangers. Advisers approved the EBTs. Whyte duped him. Supporters demanded success. The financial crisis made survival impossible. All of those factors can form part of the history. None of them erases the central fact that Murray controlled Rangers for more than two decades and made the decisions that created the club’s vulnerability.

So yes, Murray wants to be remembered for Gascoigne, nine-in-a-row and 35 trophies. Fair enough. Football history should remember the success. But he must also be remembered for how he financed Rangers, what he left behind and the fact he opened the door for Craig Whyte.

If he wants to discuss Manchester City, let him. But before Murray comments on another club’s financial scandal, someone should have asked him why Rangers required such enormous borrowing, why the model depended upon continued bank support, why he authorised the EBT arrangements and why he sold to Craig Whyte despite the warnings surrounding the takeover.

The podcast should have been an interrogation of Murray’s stewardship, but that was never going to happen with his pal Graeme officiating proceedings. Instead, it became another opportunity for him to blame a banking crash for exposing financial decisions made long before the banks finally started paying attention to the dealings orchestrated with Gavin Masterton.

Manchester City’s reported guilt does not cleanse David Murray’s record. It merely gives him another scandal to hide behind.

The side letters did not write themselves. They were not administrative debris left behind by an otherwise orderly football operation. They were not a spreadsheet error, a forgotten attachment or a p…

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Aleksander Ceferin is right to be alarmed by FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s lust for power, private capital and football’s further commercialisation. But when the UEFA president insists that “football is not for sale”, he is speaking as the head of an organisation that has spent decades auctioning off European football’s competitive soul to the highest bidder.

Ceferin’s broadside at Infantino - wrapped in warnings about “emperors”, custodianship and the danger of letting money dictate the game’s future - is politically useful, rhetorically sharp and morally incomplete. FIFA deserves scrutiny. Yet UEFA cannot plausibly present itself as football’s last line of defence against monetisation while its flagship competitions increasingly exist to protect the revenues, places and status of clubs from Europe’s biggest television markets.

The emperor has company

Ceferin’s remarks came amid UEFA’s dispute with FIFA over plans for a commercial subsidiary that could have managed major FIFA competitions and potentially opened the door to private investment of the World Cup. He argued that football’s leaders are “custodians, not owners”, that nobody has the right to sell its future, and that the sport has “no need for emperors”. It was an unmistakable attack on Infantino and his centralising, expansionist vision for the global game.

On the narrow question, Ceferin has a point. Football should not be treated as the personal asset of whichever president happens to be in office. Nor should the World Cup, the Club World Cup or national teams be used as chips in a private-equity transaction, designed to create another layer of corporate value for investors who will never stand on a terrace, travel to a qualifying match or care what happens to a club once the commercial cycle has moved on.

But it takes a remarkable degree of institutional self-belief for UEFA to make that case without acknowledging its own record. European football has not been preserved from the market by UEFA. It has been reorganised for the market by UEFA.

The organisation may not have sold a stake in its competitions to an outside investor, but it has long sold access, prestige, calendar space, broadcast inventory and sporting fairness in exchange for ever-larger television and commercial deals. The beneficiaries have not been European football in its fullest sense - the 55 member associations, their champions, their communities and the leagues whose clubs provide its cultural depth. The chief beneficiaries have been UEFA itself and the already wealthy clubs - particularly those in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France - whose presence maximises the value of the product.

There is an important distinction between funding football and turning football into a financial product. UEFA likes to blur it. The problem is not that European competition generates money. Professional football needs money. The problem is who gets it, what sporting principles are bent to generate more of it, and whether the system still offers a meaningful route from domestic success to continental opportunity. On those tests, UEFA’s defence becomes much less convincing.

From champions to customers

The European Cup was once beautifully simple. Win your domestic league and you earned the right to call yourself a European champion. It was imperfect, often harsh, and its straight knockout format could eliminate a giant club in September. But it was honest - actual champions playing for the club championship of Europe.

It was also genuinely continental. The champions of Scotland, Sweden, Romania, Yugoslavia, Portugal and elsewhere were not decorative guests imported for atmosphere. They belonged in the competition because they had won their nation’s premier league title.

When the Champions League began in 1992-93, there was still one club per country. Rangers, as Scottish champions, went unbeaten and came within a point of reaching the final; IFK Gothenburg, with semi-professional players, finished second in their group. That is not nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. It is evidence of a competition where sporting success in smaller countries could still translate into a serious continental platform.

Then came the commercial infestation. UEFA recognised that the richest broadcasters wanted more guaranteed involvement from the clubs in the largest markets. The old format did not guarantee this - a Milan, Barcelona, Manchester United or Real Madrid could lose early in the competition, depriving television partners of the glamour fixtures they had bought. For football romantics, that uncertainty was the point. For the people packaging the competition and investing in it, it was a business risk. So the rules changed.

In 1994-95, the champions of the major markets were placed directly into an expanded group stage, while the champions of 22 other national associations were denied entry to it and pushed into UEFA qualifying rounds. In 1997, runners-up from the highest-ranked leagues were admitted. In 1999-2000, the biggest three leagues could send four teams. By 2018-19, four clubs from each of England, Spain, Germany and Italy went straight into the group stage.

This was not an accident of footballing evolution. It was a strategic answer to commercial pressure. UEFA’s own former general secretary, Gerhard Aigner, acknowledged that UEFA made a mistake by giving the biggest clubs extra places, because it reduced the chance for champions from other countries to enter the competition. He put it bluntly, when two clubs from the major nations had to qualify, other countries had “a real chance”; once four places were handed to the richest leagues, “the door is too small for them to enter”.

That should be the heart of the argument. The Champions League is no longer primarily a competition for champions. It is an elite league-phase tournament in which finishing fourth and sometimes fifth in a domestic league can be rewarded with access to Europe’s greatest prize. Nobody should be expected to accept that this is fundamentally about sporting merit.

A side that has not won its league, perhaps has not even finished on the podium, can enter the Champions League because it represents a more lucrative market, carries a globally recognised badge, or helps ensure that a broadcaster gets enough premium fixtures to showcase. Meanwhile, the champions of a smaller nation may face multiple qualifying rounds in July and August merely to reach the same table. That is not a level playing field. It is a hierarchy with a footballing veneer.

The gravy train has tracks

The modern Champions League format makes UEFA’s priorities even clearer. The 36-team league phase brought more fixtures, more broadcast slots and more opportunities to sell matches between the continent’s biggest brands. UEFA says the system creates more high-profile games and greater diversity. The commercial translation is simpler - more inventory, more certainty and more money.

The effect is visible in the allocation of places. Europe’s five leading leagues occupy 22 of the 36 Champions League league-phase slots, and only one of their clubs needed to navigate qualifying to reach that stage in the first season of the new format. Just 16 of UEFA’s 55 member associations were represented.

That is the reality behind the polished language of “European football”. Europe is not simply England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France, with the rest invited to make up the numbers. It includes Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Georgia, Armenia and dozens of other football nations.

Their champions do not lack passion, history or competitive legitimacy. They lack the television-market value that UEFA and its major clubs prize most.

The disparity is not only about entry. It is about the self-reinforcing financial cycle that follows. Champions League participation brings significant prize money, broadcast income, matchday revenue, sponsorship attraction, player recruitment power, and international visibility. Those benefits allow qualifying clubs to strengthen their squads, dominate their domestic leagues and qualify again. At the top end, the biggest clubs collect more of everything - coefficient money, market-pool value, sponsorship leverage and access to the most valuable fixtures.

The more the big clubs qualify, the richer they become. The richer they become, the more likely they are to qualify. UEFA then points to their dominance as proof that they deserve the places and money in the first place. It is circular economics dressed up as sporting merit.

The current distribution system has historically channelled significant money through market-pool and coefficient mechanisms. That means rewards are linked not just to what a club achieves in that season but to the size of its domestic television market and its accumulated European pedigree. An established giant from a major league can therefore enjoy advantages that have little to do with whether it was actually the best team in its country that year. And, as ever, the smaller club pays the price.

Football Benchmark’s analysis offers a more nuanced picture than the simple claim that every UEFA reform shuts out smaller nations. The number of clubs from 45 small and medium markets appearing across UEFA competitions has risen, from an average of 24 per season before the 2009-10 reforms to 53 in 2024-25. But the increase has been concentrated overwhelmingly in the Conference League. Representation in the Champions League and Europa League has largely stagnated, while breakthroughs in the Champions League knockout rounds have become rare. That is the trick UEFA has perfected, expand the pyramid at the base while fortifying the penthouse.

The Conference League has provided worthwhile European nights and genuine opportunities. Olympiacos winning it in 2024 mattered. So did deep runs by Basel, Djurgården, Rangers and others. But it is not the same as access to the Champions League’s wealth, prestige and global exposure. Offering smaller nations a third-tier continental competition while reserving the flagship competition for the wealthiest leagues is not equality of opportunity. It is managed exclusion.

The Super League defence

UEFA’s standard defence is familiar. It had to make concessions to the major clubs or risk losing them to a breakaway Super League. It had to compromise in order to preserve an open pyramid. It had to feed the beast to stop it devouring the game altogether.

There is truth in that. The threat from the self-appointed superclubs is real, and UEFA deserves credit for opposing the 2021 European Super League proposal. That project was a brazen attempt by a closed group of owners to secure permanent access to wealth regardless of performance. It was contemptuous of domestic leagues, supporters and the basic idea that football should be earned on the pitch.

But UEFA’s opposition to the Super League cannot erase the uncomfortable fact that the Champions League has moved steadily in the same direction - just more slowly, with better branding and a famous anthem.

The Super League’s original sin was not merely greed. Football has always had rich clubs and commercial interests. Its sin was to reduce the risk of failure for the elite and to protect their income from the consequences of poor performance. UEFA has repeatedly done a softer version of precisely that.

The more places given to the major leagues, the more safety nets created for high-coefficient clubs, and the more revenue weighted toward established names and large TV markets, the less meaningful sporting jeopardy becomes. The club that finishes fourth in England does not need protection from the consequences of failing to win its league. It needs to live with those consequences, just as a champion from elsewhere is expected to survive rounds of summer qualifying.

The issue is not whether Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester United, Juventus, Milan, Borussia Dortmund or Barcelona are big clubs. Of course they are. The issue is why their size should entitle them to an easier route into a competition supposedly reserved for champions than the domestic champions of Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Croatia or Serbia.

If UEFA truly believes in open competition, it should start by restoring a serious distinction between champions and non-champions.

Ceferin should look inward

This is why Ceferin’s speech rings hollow. He may be right about Infantino’s hubris. He may be right that football should not be owned by presidents, investors or corporate vehicles. He may even be right to say that money must never decide what football gives up. But money has already decided a great deal under UEFA’s watch.

It decided that broadcasters needed more English, Spanish, Italian and German clubs. It decided that finishing fourth could be almost as valuable if not more valuable than winning a league. It decided that the champions of smaller nations should face obstacle courses while the non-champions of richer leagues receive direct entry. It decided that more fixtures are always better, even as players are stretched, domestic calendars are squeezed and supporters are asked to buy more subscriptions. It decided that European football should increasingly mean the most marketable clubs rather than the full sporting map of Europe.

Ceferin should not merely ask whether FIFA is putting football up for sale. He should ask what UEFA has already sold, who bought it, and who has been left outside the shop.

The answer is not that UEFA is identical to FIFA. It is not. Nor is the answer that commercial success is inherently corrupt. UEFA competitions generate money that can and should support national associations, youth development, grassroots football and the wider game. The point is that UEFA cannot claim the moral high ground while refusing to confront the inequality built into its own flagship product.

There is a better route. Make domestic champions central again. Give more champions from smaller associations a viable, protected path into the Champions League proper. Reduce the automatic privileges enjoyed by non-champions from the biggest leagues. Distribute revenue more meaningfully across the continent. Stop treating coefficients and television markets as a substitute for what happens on the pitch.

That would not end European football’s financial inequality overnight. The Premier League’s wealth, in particular, is a structural force UEFA cannot simply legislate away. English top-flight clubs have a broadcast income and commercial scale that dwarf much of the continent, and even clubs outside its established elite can now exert financial power over traditional European names.

But UEFA does control the design of its own competitions. It controls access. It controls revenue distribution. It controls whether the European Cup remains, in spirit as well as branding, a competition where champions matter most.

Ceferin is entitled to point at Infantino’s empire-building. He is not entitled to pretend that UEFA has not built its own version of a gated estate around the Champions League.

Football is not for sale? It already has a price tag. UEFA just prefers to call it a broadcast package.

A football contract is supposed to tell the truth. It is supposed to record the terms on which a player agrees to work for a club, his salary, bonuses, benefits, duration of employment and obligation…

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The most revealing difference between the Manchester City case and the Rangers crisis is not simply one of law, scale or circumstance. Manchester City’s case concerns 115 breaches of Premier League financial rules, which the club have denied despite being found guilty of 114 of them and which must be determined through the proper disciplinary process. Rangers entered administration in February 2012, failed to secure a company voluntary arrangement and then went into liquidation, after which its business and assets were purchased by Sevco Scotland and used by a new Phoenix Club calling itself The Rangers FC as they began life in the then-Scottish Third Division.

The cases are not identical, and pretending otherwise does not strengthen the argument. But they reveal two sharply different instincts in football - one about whether the powerful should be examined, and another about whether rules still matter when applying them becomes costly.

In England, the coverage around Manchester City have been treated as an enduring question of sporting integrity. The process has been glacial, opaque and damaging to confidence in the Premier League’s ability to enforce its own regulations. Yet the principle has survived - a club’s ownership model, revenue, sponsorship arrangements and financial disclosures are legitimate subjects for rigorous scrutiny, even where the club is rich enough, successful enough and legally equipped enough to resist it.

In Scotland, Rangers’ collapse produced something more troubling. Much of the game’s governing apparatus appeared to begin from the assumption that Rangers’ competitive position had to be protected because Scottish football could not afford to lose them. It fell to supporters, not the authorities nor the press, to insist that the game could not afford to establish the opposite principle - that its rules were negotiable when the club concerned was commercially important enough.

When Rangers entered administration on 14 February 2012, the immediate football consequence was a 10-point deduction. But the central battle was not about those 10 points. It was about what would happen if the club could not emerge from insolvency and a new club sought to inherit its place at the summit of the Scottish game.

The commercial alarm was easy to understand. Rangers were one half of the Old Firm economy. Their presence shaped television agreements, sponsorship interest, travelling supports and the budgets built by clubs who relied on one or two profitable home fixtures against the Ibrox side. Losing Rangers from the top flight was not an abstraction for chairmen trying to balance books in a difficult market. Yet it was precisely because the commercial pressure was so obvious that the integrity question required a clear answer.

After a company voluntary arrangement failed and Rangers were effectively liquidated, Charles Green’s consortium acquired the assets of Rangers and sought admission to the Scottish Premier League. The essential question was not whether the new Rangers could or should exist. It was whether a new applicant, emerging from the liquidation of the club that had held the membership, should simply be placed in the top division as if the intervening events had no sporting meaning.

That proposition became increasingly difficult to defend. A club which had lived beyond its means, accrued debts it could not meet and reached liquidation could not reasonably be allowed to preserve the principal sporting benefit of its former club without creating a precedent for every future crisis. The more privileged the treatment offered to Rangers, the more plainly Scottish football would be saying that insolvency carried one consequence for ordinary clubs and another for its most commercially important institution.

On 4 July 2012, the SPL clubs rejected the Rangers newco’s application for top-flight admission by 10 votes to one, with Kilmarnock abstaining, Rangers were the one club to vote yes for the admission. It was an overwhelming result. It was also the consequence of a campaign conducted well beyond the boardroom.

The supporters who made clubs listen

The remarkable feature of 2012 was not that rival supporters objected to Rangers receiving special treatment. Rival supporters objecting to Rangers is not, in itself, a news story. The remarkable feature was that supporters across Scottish football held their own clubs accountable for decisions that could have been commercially attractive, politically expedient and profoundly damaging to the credibility of the competition.

Fans understood what was at stake with a clarity some administrators conspicuously lacked. They saw that the issue was not whether Rangers supporters should lose their club, nor whether a new Rangers should be barred from Scottish football. It was whether the game would permit a successor club to retain the sporting position of a liquidated club while creditors absorbed losses and every other club was expected to accept the consequences.

Supporters contacted directors, organised through trusts and fan groups, used public meetings, local media, forums and the increasingly powerful tools of online mobilisation via social media. More importantly, they made a financial argument in language chairmen could not ignore. If their club backed a specially constructed route for Rangers, then season-ticket income, matchday spending and the goodwill on which football clubs depend could no longer be assumed.

That was not the behaviour of people driven merely by animosity. It was the behaviour of people refusing to be treated as customers on Friday and ignored as stakeholders on Monday.

The most persistent response from parts of the football establishment and sections of the media was to describe this resistance as revenge. Supporters, it was suggested, were motivated by tribal hostility, sectarianism or the pleasure of watching a historic rival fall. The suggestion had a political utility, it allowed those advocating exceptional treatment to avoid addressing the actual argument.

The argument was simple. If a club’s name, support and commercial value were sufficient to make the rules elastic, then the Scottish professional pyramid was no longer a sporting structure so much as a hierarchy of protected brands.

The resistance did not end with the SPL vote. It moved to the question of where the new Rangers should enter the Scottish Football League. The prospect of admission to the First Division was openly discussed as a way of softening the financial effect on clubs and broadcasters. Stewart Regan, then the Scottish FA chief executive, warned of a “slow, lingering death” for Scottish football if Rangers were placed in the Third Division.

It was a revealing phrase. The threat was not merely that clubs would lose money, though many would. The threat was that football might be forced to live by the logic it professed to believe in.

The SFL clubs did not accept that logic. Twenty-five of the 30 member clubs voted for the new Rangers to begin in the Third Division, while 29 backed associate membership. The decision did not erase Rangers from the game. It gave the new club a place in the professional structure and a route to rebuild, with promotion available through performance rather than accommodation.

That is why the charge of vengeance fails. Rangers were not excluded from Scottish football. They were not forbidden from rebuilding. They were not denied supporters, history, identity or a future. They were denied a shortcut. They were denied preferential treatment.

The anger upstairs

The mythology of the Rangers crisis sometimes casts every chairman as an eager participant in a stitch-up. It is not that neat. The late Rod Petrie, then Hibernian chairman, publicly took the position that integrity should be maintained even at financial cost, saying that it was “beyond purchase”. Yet behind the scenes, it was rumoured that Petrie blew his top over fans pressuring clubs to vote against accepting Rangers into the SPL.

The more important point is that the vote exposed an unmistakable mood of institutional frustration. Supporters had derailed the solution that many senior figures saw as financially rational. They had made it harder to repackage a crisis as a technical issue of membership and league placement. The people in the boardroom had discovered that their power was contingent on the consent of the people who paid to keep their own clubs alive.

For chairmen, Rangers’ absence created immediate holes in budgets. For supporters, the question had a longer horizon. What was the value of preserving a short-term income stream if it required Scottish football to declare that liquidation was merely an inconvenience for the most valuable participant?

A league does not retain credibility because it possesses famous fixtures. It retains credibility because clubs and supporters believe that the consequences of failure are not allocated according to wealth, influence or the quality of a club’s television product.

The journalism that looked away

There is another question that Scottish football has never properly settled - where was the sustained scrutiny while Rangers’ financial model was still operating and while David Murray’s authority was at its height?

Murray’s ownership was associated with trophies, expensive recruitment and an image of confident corporate management. Those achievements made criticism awkward and pretty much non-existent. The owner was not simply a football chairman; he was a powerful business figure whose standing, access and relationships could shape the terms of football coverage.

That does not mean journalists were required to foresee every element of Rangers’ eventual collapse. It does mean they were required to ask serious questions about a high-spending operation supported by structures that few outside the club could properly interrogate.

The Employee Benefit Trust arrangements were at the centre of that wider financial story. Rangers’ use of EBTs involved payments to players, staff and others through trust structures. Former Rangers owner David Murray later said that he regretted what had happened to the club’s supporters and staff.

The question is not whether a later apology settles the matter. It does not. The question is why the operation of a club with a financial model of such consequence did not receive more persistent and adversarial scrutiny when it could have mattered most. Even to this day Murray is not hauled over the coals for playing a major part in Rangers’ demise.

A part of the explanation lies in the culture of access. Scottish football journalism operates in close quarters - the same press conferences, the same sources, the same private calls, the same calculation that today’s hostile question could mean tomorrow’s closed door. Access can produce knowledge; it can also create deference. A reporter who fears losing an exclusive may become more likely to accept the framing offered by the executive who provides it.

The danger is not always an explicit bargain. It is subtler than that. Powerful figures come to be treated as reliable narrators of their own conduct. Critics are made to appear troublesome, obsessive or motivated by rivalry. The story becomes a dispute between voices rather than an examination of evidence.

Craig Whyte’s takeover should have tested that culture more severely. Whyte bought control of Rangers from Murray for £1 in May 2011. BBC Scotland’s The Inside Story, broadcast that October, examined allegations of criminality relating to Whyte’s previous business dealings. The BBC described the programme as uncovering evidence connected to alleged criminality, while Whyte threatened legal action over its content.

The BBC showed that the questions were there to be pursued, yet this was months after yours truly and other football bloggers had uncovered Whyte’s dodgy past. The warning signs were not beyond the reach of journalism. But a single investigation, however important, is not the same as a press corps maintaining sustained pressure on the suitability, financing and commitments of the man taking control of one of Scotland’s two dominant clubs.

By the time administration arrived, coverage was voluminous. Every day brought developments and reporting of unpaid tax, player contracts, sanctions, the failed CVA, the liquidation process, the newco debate, the league votes and the looming financial consequences for other clubs. But intensive reporting after the event is not the same as investigation before it. The purpose of scrutiny is not simply to explain a collapse once it has happened. It is to make it harder for those in power to conceal the decisions that make collapse possible.

Souness, McCoist and selective outrage

That history makes the recent interventions of Graeme Souness and Ally McCoist on Manchester City especially jarring.

Both have spoken in forceful terms about the potential consequences of financial wrongdoing in football. McCoist, discussing City’s situation, accepted that relegation through the divisions could be one of the punishments available and expressed sympathy for the non-playing staff who would suffer if a club was forced to start again. Sympathy for staff is entirely proper. It was proper in 2012, when people connected to Rangers faced genuine fear for their livelihoods, and it would be proper if employees of any club were caught in the consequences of boardroom conduct.

What jars is the gap between McCoist’s willingness to acknowledge the sporting implications for City and the language deployed when Rangers’ own use of EBT arrangements was under examination. When title stripping was discussed in the Rangers context, McCoist rejected it emphatically, saying it was something Rangers would “never accept”.

There is no contradiction in believing that City, Rangers and every other club are entitled to a fair process. There is a contradiction in treating financial irregularity as “fraud” or “cheating” and potentially ruinous when the club under discussion is Manchester City, while treating comparable questions of sporting advantage, disclosure and financial compliance as intolerable slurs when the club is his beloved Rangers.

The case of Souness is more specific, and more awkward still. In 2012, BBC reporting based on documents it had seen identified Souness as having received £30,000 through the Employee Benefit Trust in 2001 - roughly a decade after he had left Rangers as manager. At the time, he was the manager of Blackburn Rovers. Weeks after the payment was made, Souness completed the signing of Tugay Kerimoğlu from Rangers for Blackburn, HMRC had considered whether the payment might have been improper in relation to the transfer but found no additional documentation to verify that suspicion.

The timing naturally invites questions. It does not, on its own, prove an illicit payment, a transfer inducement or corrupt conduct. But the chronology absolutely required scrutiny, and it received none.

Souness later sought to explain the £30,000 payment as remuneration for scouting work for Rangers. In 2016, he said he had been “in between jobs” and had been going to scout players on the continent for the Ibrox club. The basic timeline makes that explanation difficult to reconcile with public fact. Souness was appointed Blackburn manager in March 2000 and remained in post until September 2004. He was therefore not between managerial jobs when the EBT payment was made in 2001; he was the serving manager of an English club.

Tugay joined Blackburn from Rangers in the summer of 2001 for a reported £1.3m, during Souness’s tenure at Ewood Park. The question that ought to have followed was not whether Souness could ever have watched a player or offered informal advice to Rangers. Football is full of overlapping relationships. It was whether a serving manager of Blackburn could credibly receive a £30,000 payment, through an EBT arrangement, from the club with which Blackburn was conducting transfer business with, and then explain it as scouting work for that club.

That is not a question of hostility towards Souness. It is a question of conflicts, transparency and basic professional accountability.

The “in between jobs” claim should have been subjected to the elementary discipline of a five-minute fact-check. A journalist needed only to check the dates of Souness’s Blackburn employment against the date of the Rangers EBT payment. The contradiction was plain. Yet much of the subsequent coverage reported his scouting explanation as though the act of offering one was the same as adequately accounting for the payment.

This is where the failure of the Scottish football media becomes more than an abstract complaint about softness towards powerful people. Souness was not a peripheral figure. He was a former Rangers manager, an influential broadcaster and pundit, and a prominent voice on football’s moral questions. His explanation deserved to be reported; it also deserved to be tested.

Instead, the substance was too often displaced by the personality. A figure with authority offered a justification, and the cycle moved on. No sustained questioning of the timeline. No clear interrogation of why the payment used an EBT structure. No pressing examination of the concurrent transfer relationship between Rangers and Blackburn. No insistence that a public figure demanding accountability from others should provide a coherent account of his own record.

This is not an argument that Souness should be pronounced guilty of wrongdoing on the basis of chronology. It is an argument that journalism should ask what the chronology means.

The same standard should apply to Souness, McCoist, David Murray, Craig Whyte, Manchester City’s directors and everyone else with power in football. Due process is not deference. Reporting a denial is not an investigation. Publishing an explanation is not the same as examining whether it survives contact with the facts.

What the supporters understood

Scottish football supporters understood something in 2012 that many in the boardroom and press box preferred to forget. The integrity of a game is not a slogan to be brought out when it costs nothing. It is a discipline, tested precisely when adherence to it becomes commercially inconvenient.

The SFL clubs’ decision to place the new Rangers in the Third Division did not end Rangers’ story. It began another chapter. The club climbed through the divisions, returned to the Premiership and restored its place in the sporting landscape through results on the pitch. That was not a punishment of Rangers supporters. It was the only resolution that allowed the new club a future without requiring Scottish football to declare that the old club’s collapse carried no structural consequence.

Manchester City’s case will ultimately be decided by an independent process, and it should be. The Premier League have established its rules were brokenand, now the decision is what sanctions those rule breaches require. City’s wealth, achievements and importance to English football should not exempt them from that process. Nor should resentment towards City substitute for evidence.

But those now most vocally demanding punishment for City should recognise the standard they invoke. If sporting integrity means anything, it means that rules do not become optional when the subject is close to home, emotionally important or commercially powerful.

Scottish fans did not destroy their game by refusing to grant Rangers special treatment. They protected it from the more corrosive possibility that, in the moment of greatest pressure, its custodians would admit that the rules applied only to those too small to resist them.