In the debate over whether the SPL buys the broadcast rights to SFL games featuring Rangers, we’ve just spotted a rather interesting quirk. Sevco Scotland Limited was accepted to the SFL as an Associate Member, and will not be eligible for full Member status for four years. Rule 19 of the SFL Constitution says:
“An Associate Member shall have no financial interest in the assets of the League and shall not be accorded any voting rights.”
We assume “the assets of the League” include its media rights. (Indeed, as far as we can see those would be pretty much the only assets jointly owned by the League.) Rule 19 would seem to suggest that if the SFL does want to sell “Rangers” games to the SPL – or indeed to anyone else – not only will the newco not be entitled to a vote on the matter, but it won’t be entitled to any of the money either.
We haven’t seen anyone else mention this. It seems quite significant.
It looks as though we spoke far too soon when we suggested late last week that The Rangers Saga was effectively over. It had seemed that, with Charles Green having accepted the imposition of a deferred 12-month transfer embargo as a condition for assuming the old Rangers’ membership of the SFA, there were no remaining obstacles (in the short term, anyway) to his new club taking its place in SFL Division 3.
We know. We’re embarrassed too. What can we have been thinking? Yesterday saw a fresh outbreak of chaos and insanity which could yet derail the entire fiasco and see SFL3 kicking off with just nine teams, as Sevco Scotland manager Ally McCoist decided to act the chimp and launch a hefty pile of shit right at the fan(s).
As we predicted a few days ago, Sevco Scotland Limited has accepted the SFA’s condition of a 12-month transfer embargo in return for the company being allowed to take over the Association membership of the old Rangers Football Club PLC. In a novel twist, though, the SFA will not enforce the sanction until AFTER the closure of the summer transfer window on September 1st, allowing the Ibrox club to sign new players for the next six weeks, despite the embargo having been imposed in May.
Despite some of the wilder conspiracy theories circulating on the internet in recent days, the agreement was always going to happen, although we’re a little surprised (only a little, mind) at how blatantly the SFA has gone easy on the club – with over 40 players available to manager Ally McCoist even with the embargo in place, the deferral makes a mockery of the notion of punishment.
(An alert reader points out to us that the club will also be able to sign players, albeit briefly, in next summer’s transfer window, because a quirk of the calendar means it’ll be open for a day after Sevco’s embargo expires. There’s nothing to stop “Rangers” negotiating transfers next summer, then doing all the actual signings on September 2nd, so the punishment only really applies to the January 2013 window. In effect, rather than a 12-month ban it’s actually a four-week one.)
Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.
In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.
On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:
The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.
Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.
The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)
Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.
There are, we’re certain, some twists to come yet in the “Rangers” story. But while we’ve been able to pretty clearly identify and understand the motivations of all the concerned parties in events to date (and our assessments and predictions have accordingly almost always been bang on the money), we’ve finally run into a logical roadblock where we just can’t make sense of anything.
Because we can no longer for the life of us figure out what the SFA is playing at.
Charles Green’s new football club, currently registered under the name Sevco Scotland Ltd, is scheduled to play its first ever competitive game on July 28th, away to Brechin City in the Ramsden’s Cup. Three days after that, on July 31st, a meeting of the shareholders of Rangers Football Club PLC is due to take place.
The purpose of the meeting is to change the name of said Rangers Football Club PLC (the old about-to-be-liquidated Rangers) to RFC2012, in order that Sevco Scotland can then legally be renamed “The Rangers Football Club Limited”. (That name being too similar to that of the old Rangers for the two to be allowed to exist simultaneously.)
An interesting question therefore arises: What will be the name of the team that takes the field against Brechin on the 28th?
It can’t be “Rangers”. It has to be called something. What will it be?
We’re deeply flattered to be described as both a “key website” and part of “a renaissance in Scottish media”by the Guardian today, and to be mentioned in the same breath as such esteemed and high-quality entities as the Orwell Prize-winning Rangers Tax Case blog, the vibrant all-club news site/forum Pie And Bovril, the forensic and authoritative Random Thoughts Re Scots Law and more.
So we hope you’ll bear with us as we embark on what should be one of the very last few posts on the Rangers Fiasco. Events may overtake us as we write this, with the SPL meeting going on as we speak, but for the record we’ve rubbished the idea of an SPL2 being in any way feasible before and we absolutely don’t expect anything to have changed in that regard by the time we get to the end of this feature.
As things stand, and as we expect them to continue to stand for at least the next 24 hours, a football club of some sort and some name, owned by Sevco Scotland Ltd, will play in Division 3 of the Scottish Football League this coming season. More than that, though, it’s really not possible to say.
I was going to blog about Rangers today, but it can wait. I’ve been a professional journalist for over 20 years now, but I almost never write about my personal life. You can search those decades with a fine tooth comb for a mention of who I’m going out with and come up empty. When people ask “Are you really a Reverend?” I’ll go so far as to answer “Yes”, but when they then invariably enquire as to which church I always reply “The United Episcopalian Brotherhood Of Mind Your Own Damn Business”.
I have no objections at all to others baring their souls for the world to see if that’s how they want to go about their affairs, but I like to keep my private life private and that’s not about to change now, except for this picture and the paragraph after it.
It’s of my lovely Auntie Isobel, a saintly woman at whom life threw just about every crappy card in the deck but who always came back smiling and laughing, barely even acknowledging her own troubles as she devoted herself to caring for others. I hadn’t seen her in many years, and now I never will again after I helped my cousins and uncles and my dad, whose little sister she was, carry her coffin from a tiny village church to a quiet leafy graveyard and lower it gently into the ground of Argyll.
Rest in peace, Auntie Isobel. I think, and I hope, you’d forgive me for mentioning you on a politics blog – I have no idea who you voted for – because coming home to say goodbye to you showed me why it is that I do it.
The Clyde FC website is struggling to cope with the weight of traffic again after it released a statement on yesterday’s events. It took us ten minutes and many reloads to reach the page, so here it is for anyone who can’t get through. All emphasis ours.
“The club chairman attended a very sobering meeting of the SFL today where the 30 clubs voted on resolutions in the manner that they felt were, on balance, for the good of the game. Nobody had arrived at decisions easily and all had been placed in intolerable positions of having to decide without the basic information that would reflect good governance and having to speculate about unresolved matters around sanctions and membership of the SFA that other bodies had so far failed to deal with.
The outcome was never going to be a good one, but it was one of significant unity amongst the clubs, and even where clubs voted differently, it was not a divisive difference of views, everyone understood the complex mix of circumstances facing each club would never deliver unanimity of voting.
We reported this morning prior to the vote of all clubs that “Sevco Scotland Ltd will not be playing in the Third Division in the coming season”. Nothing heard today altered that opinion, in fact, it strengthened it.
For the good of the game we need to see the SFA accept the will of its members, who all voted today, as members of the SFL, in the clear knowledge that the SFA had it in its power to refuse to transfer SFA membership to Sevco Scotland Ltd should the vote support the entry of Sevco Scotland Ltd into SFL3.
We were asked to respect the confidentiality of those presenting today as only that agreement would allow them to be as candid as they were, we cannot therefore share what was said, however Mr Green left the SFL member clubs in no doubt about what he had been told by the SFA.
The SFL saw a level of unity and unselfishness that owes significant credit to the first division clubs who stated their intention to seek a 42 club solution and not to take part in a divisive alternative. This kind of unity if maintained will help deliver the change that the game so badly needs and the first division clubs in particular will merit.
If the SFA now act to support any process to undermine the clear views of the SFL members, who are also members of the SFA, then this club will join others in questioning those in leadership.
Sadly for our game, this saga is not over, teams cannot plan and that includes Rangers, who may yet be denied the opportunity to play football in SFL 3 because it suits the interests of others.”
After a seemingly endless “phoney war“, we’ve now reached the point where both teams for the 2014 independence referendum have ended their pre-season training and taken to the field for real. The “Yes” campaign saw the launch of the Yes Scotland in a cinema in Edinburgh, with readings from politicians and celebrities, music, the affirmation of goals and the rolling out of a new independence declaration.
Yes Scotland set an ambitious target of 1 million signatures to the declaration, and backed up the document with stirring calls to action from the likes of former Labour MP and independent MSP Dennis Canavan, Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Green Party, Alex Salmond of the SNP and the always-brilliant Hollywood actor Brian Cox – a man who was proud to support Labour at the start of the Blair project but subsequently became disillusioned and convinced of the merits of independence as a means to improve the chances of achieving what were once traditional Labour goals.
The Yes Scotland site argues that the core reasons for independence are good governance, an end to nuclear weapons on the Clyde, the divergence in cultures and attitudes between the rest of the UK and Scotland (reflected by Scotland’s consistent rejection of the Tories), the maintenance of the social contract, control over our own resources to secure the best returns, and the maintenance of health and education as cornerstones of our society rather than generators of private profit.
By explicitly targetting specific groups like women, “New Scots”, young Scots, businesspeople and creatives for independence, the Yes campaign’s website seeks to provide an all-encompassing platform of civic nationalism focused on inclusiveness and positivity. In contrast, while the “Better Together” hub pays lip service to those two ideals, the essence of its approach is entirely different.
You are, it appears, being placed under almost intolerable pressure to do Scottish football’s dirty work for it. You’ve been handed the responsibility for dealing with a farcical mess of a situation despite having had no part in creating it. You’ve been threatened, cajoled and bullied into doing what the SFA and SPL didn’t have the guts to do for themselves. Over recent days you’ve been fed a great deal of misinformation,scaremongering and outright abuse designed to intimidate you into going along with a course of action that undermines every principle of sporting integrity.
I understand, however, that as chairman your job is to take hard-headed business decisions in your club’s interests, rather than to uphold lofty ideals even where doing so would lead your club into bankruptcy. So I hope you’ll consider the following facts before you decide how to vote at the SFL’s Special General Meeting on July 13.
