Two Financial Storms, Two Very Different Football Conversations

A tale of two scandals - why Manchester City face scrutiny while Scottish football tried to bend the rules to shoehorn Rangers to the top.

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.