Scottish football eats itself « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

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By Tony Attwood

I keep writing about Rangers and football in Scotland because at each twist and turn it seems to me that the club’s position and the entire state of football in Scotland, is not always well analysed in the English media, and because most people interested in football in England don’t realise just how easy it is for the whole edifice of football to topple over.

You’ll have heard Rangers have been relegated to the Third Division – the 4th tier of the Scottish national league system.

Now various groupings are trying to get around this by creating a new league (SPL2) which could invite Ranger to join it, and so bypass the vote of the clubs.

And Neil Doncaster of the SPL has told the league clubs that the SPL won’t be able to pay the league clubs the annual £1.9 million settlement agreement because Rangers were not in the  First Division or the Premier League, and so the TV companies won’t pay up.

That payment failure means that the SPL will be insolvent.  So the Premier League clubs will then be forced to apply for membership of the Scottish League as there will be no Premier League.  C

Meanwhile the SFA’s judicial panel still has to rule on what to do about Rangers, after Rangers went to court to challenge the SFA’s ruling that it could not sign any players over 21 for a year. The SFA also fined Rangers.  None of these matters is yet resolved and almost daily players are saying that they are leaving Rangers.  Rangers say that the players can’t because they (Rangers) have bought the rights to the players.  Under football law they might have done.  Under UK law they certainly have not.

Very few season tickets have been sold at Rangers, I am told, but if Rangers do play in division 3 and do manage to raise a team despite many of their current players leaving, they will presumably still get a decent crowd by selling tickets match by match.  But any players who do stay will still have to be paid their past salary.  And I am not sure Rangers was filling the stadium last season in the Premier League, so there is still a question of how many will turn up in January for a third division game of no consequence.

Oh yes, and the big tax case is still out there, with stories about who is going to be sued – famous names are spoken of – and who indeed is going to have to pay.

Meanwhile if the top clubs create SPL2 with Rangers and nine other teams they will then have to decide if they are within or without the SFA.  If outside then they would be outside all of football and Fifa would ban all players from playing from those clubs. To solve this the SPL could offer Rangers a place in the top division, to stop the in-fighting and get the money flowing again, but it seems unlikely. So we are back to the key issue: the Scottish Football Association must take a look at Rangers’ membership application as a third division club and then having given them that, start punishing them in relation to the court case that Rangers brought against the SFA all before the taxman gets going and the courts roll into action over fraud issues from the old Rangers.

But there is more.  Rangers were given a place in the bottom tier of the league – to which various clubs apply each year for places (just as in the old days clubs used to apply for a place in the 4th division – before England had automatic promotion from from the Conference to the 4th.)   So some smaller clubs are feeling a bit miffed.I am of course nowhere near the centre of Scottish football, but what I hear is that some of those small clubs are now thinking of legal action against the Scottish FA on the grounds that their application for a place in the third division were not heard alongside Rangers’ application.Personally I still like the idea of Arsenal II playing in the Scottish League under any banner or name.  No one else ever picks up on the idea, and obviously it won’t happen, but I still think it was a neat idea.

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