“Rangers has become a magnet for every chancer in town….”

Great piece from John McDermott in the FT (worth the registration)… The club, like the nation, had a comfortable dual identity as both Scottish and British. At its most famous game, the 1972 European Cup Winners’ Cup victory over FC Dynamo Moscow, fans sporting kilts and Robert Burns T-shirts waved the Union Jack alongside the Lion Rampant, Scotland’s royal flag. “There was then an unquestioning acceptance of a strong Scotland within an overarching Britishness,” says Graham Walker, a renowned historian …

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Rangers’ Armed Services Day descends into an undisciplined act of self undoing…

So Scotland [Deep breath!]? Well, I did try to get ‘the other side’ of this story, but since there’s no one in the press office at Ibrox today, and there’s no mobile number for the press officer they do have available (which is unusual in my experience), I’m going on what’s already out there. Adds: This story broken here by Phil at An Phoblacht. On Saturday, Rangers (or Sevco as they are known to their rivals throughout Scottish football) thumped …

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Strange happenings in Scotland after the ‘busting’ of Rangers?

Interesting interview with one of the members of the panel which sat on the busting of Rangers Football Club, Gary Allan QC… It’s ahead of a Channel Four news piece tonight that could be very interesting. The thing that strikes as most odd is the near professionalism with which he was harassed. Something quite beyond his own experience of dealing with criminals in his own court, he says. Adds: A QC, 32 journalists, the owner of Raith Rovers Football Club …

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Could Rangers make a virtue of their moral and financial crisis?

Yep, £170 million. That’s a shocking figure to rack up. It hardly helps the club’s case for decent handling that the last owner of the club takes such a cavalier attitude to the club’s predicament. His remarks came in response to the latest directive from the SFA that they cannot sign any new players for another 12 months. The comments of the club’s administrator Paul Clark is worth quoting at length: “All of us working on behalf of the Vlub …

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Is the Rangers crisis undermining the false economy of Scottish football?

There’s always been something slightly delusional about football. Listen to a football fan talking, and it’s ‘we’ did this and ‘we’ did that. The truth is that the commercial relationship between fans and their clubs has long since been notional. These are big joint stock companies whose relationship with their fans is purely sociological. The Rangers FC crisis is living proof of that departure in the interests of club and fans. The Glasgow Herald has discovered there is barely any …

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Rangers: Where has all the money gone?

Good piece in the Glasgow Herald this morning asking some searching questions about where all the money can have gone by the second week in February: By all accounts, HMRC officials were on their way to serve papers to the Court of Session in Edinburgh on Monday, but Whyte beat them to it. Speculation had been mounting this course of action from the taxman was linked to other unpaid bills and yesterday it was confirmed HMRC is investigating non-payment of …

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