Sir David Murray bought Rangers in 1988, two years after the arrival of Graeme Souness had kick-started the football club which had spent most of the previous two decades in the shadow of Celtic, then Aberdeen and Dundee United.
Murray maintained the highly speculative transfer policy of previous owner, Lawrence Malborough, achieving considerable domestic success during his first decade at the club.
Last year Celtic Quick News reported his greatest contribution to Scottish football:
“Within a year of taking control of Rangers Murray ended the most blatant sectarian employment policy still in place in Scotland when his club openly signed a Catholic football player for the first time since before World War I. For this, he deserves enormous credit.
“Many of you grew into adulthood in a country where a large part of the population supported a ‘No Catholics at Rangers’ policy. The sense of shock in 1989 when Rangers signed Maurice Johnston will be difficult to relay to a young reader. This was a taboo no one thought would end.”
After Martin O’Neill’s Celtic redrew the balance of power in Scottish football, Murray found it difficult to compete. He also perhaps found it difficult to lose. A highly controversial Employee Benefit Trust scheme was used to compensate dozens of footballers as well as non-football staff. The consequences of this scheme, the legality of which has still to be decided, brought the club to its knees.
Murray’s business interests had grown from its initial base in steel to encompass a huge property investment empire. When the recession brought a tightening of lending criteria and the property crash arrived in 2008, Celtic Quick News predicted Rangers would go out of business. The clock has been ticking ever since.
Murray sold Rangers to Craig Whyte a year ago, later claiming he was “duped” by Whyte, although former chairman, Alasdair Johnston, today disputes this claim.
All roads of this entire debacle lead back to Murray.
Prediction: Sir David Murray will pay a heavier price than anyone else involved in this mess. I’ll hold fire for now on what I think will be the more serious consequences but I expect Sir David, along with Ogilvie, Clark, Whitehouse and others will face an SFA Judicial Panel for what has happened at Rangers and that none will work in football again.
Many thanks for the info on clubs playing out-with their associations’ geographical area. No more needed.
You can buy a hard copy of the new issue of CQN Magazine via Magcloud here.
The graphic below is just for a flick through, to read the magazine go here to it’s dedicated site.
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Paul, you’re playing a blinder today but I think you are giving credit to Doncaster for the SPL statement when none is properly due. The ramifications of today’s statement are far-reaching and potentially tremendously damaging to the SPL.
Duff & Phelps may well have prejudiced the interests of Rangers (or more relevantly, the creditors and shareholders to whom they must answer) by a tardy or incomplete response to the SPL investigation, but it is the SPL and SFA who have the wider responsibility towards SPL member clubs and Scottish football respectively, and it is they who must answer for the consequences of the so-far botched investigation into Rangers’ player registrations.
The SFA delegated the investigation to the SPL in the first instance. As the CEO of the SPL Neil Doncaster has since then had ultimate executive responsibility to ensure that the investigation was completed timeously.
To that end, he should have: quickly agreed a clear timeline and deadlines with Harper McLeod; communicated those to all the relevant parties – above all, the administrators of Rangers; and made it clear that anything less than full co-operation would in itself become the subject of examination and potential disciplinary proceedings.
Above all, given that on 5 March Doncaster himself stated that expulsion from the league was one possible sanction that could result, he had to ensure the investigation was completed in good time for a tribunal to sit and any appeal to be heard before the 12/13 fixtures have to be collated in early June.
Harper McLeod should therefore have been instructed to prepare a report by end-April based on whatever information was made available to them by that date, and including a statement on any delays or lack of co-operation on Rangers’ part. If the report found grounds for a disciplinary tribunal one should have been convened by mid-May, with any appeal to be heard promptly after that.
In this way, and ONLY in this way, could Doncaster ensure the integrity of the 12/13 SPL. Any deviation from this timeline would run the risk of Rangers being expelled from the league after SPL (and crucially SFL) membership and fixtures had been set for the season; or even after the season had started.
Given this, today’s SPL statement is quite extraordinary. 11 weeks and 2 days since Neil Doncaster announced the SPL’s enquiry into potential non-disclosure of payments to players by Rangers, and less than 4 weeks before the 12/13 fixtures are due to be published (indeed, the process of calculating them begins in a little over a week from now), we learn that the SPL “look[s] forward to receiving full cooperation from the club and its administrators in providing everything that it and they have access to and which is required for the investigation to be completed”.
This goes beyond incompetence and ineptitude. Only a wilful decision to allow the investigation to be derailed in this fashion is sufficient to explain this astounding failure of management. As a direct result the stability and (such as it is) prosperity of the league is threatened, and the clarity which could have been gained by a proper and timely examination of Rangers’ behaviour is denied to those who must deal with its consequences.
It is not clear if Doncaster has acted alone to delay the investigation process, or whether he is acting under instructions from the clubs. If it is the former, he should resign or be sacked forthwith. If it is the latter, it is time for the clubs to answer to their fans. Doncaster’s actions are either a shocking failure to protect its members’ interests, or a strategy supported by the members. Which is it? A great deal hangs on that answer.
Stewart Regan is also in the dock. The SFL and Scottish football as a whole would clearly be prejudiced yet further by an unnecessary delay in the Harper McLeod report. The SFA should in turn have tasked the SPL with specific timescales and reporting requirements. Instead, the SFA has apparently been happy to sit back and let the extraordinary current situation to develop. This sort of indecision and the complete absence of leadership will not play well when, as looks increasingly likely, the whole messy affair ends up on a desk in Nyon. And when it does, Duff & Phelps, who will by then have long since picked up their extravagant fees and exited stage left, are not likely to be particularly high on the list of worried parties.