Wings Over Scotland

The BBC is reporting today that the Scottish football establishment hasn’t yet resigned itself to a reanimated zombie form of Rangers playing in Division 3 of the SFL next season. Despite half-a-dozen SPL clubs having made it clear that they won’t allow Charles Green’s new company directly back into their league, and despite it being the overwhelming wish of almost 100% of the fans of every other team in Scotland – and a large percentage of Rangers fans too, for varying reasons – that any new club start at the bottom, the craven moneymen of the SPL are still trying to find ways to get the Ibrox side back into the top division with the absolute barest minimum of delay.

It’s a mindboggling plan, and one we find it hard to attach much credibility to for a whole raft of reasons. Let’s look at just a few of them.

1. Fans aren’t that stupid.

We know the men in charge of Scottish football have a low opinion of the fans, but if they think the supporters of other SPL clubs – who have forced their chairmen to reject the idea of an immediate re-entry for Sevco 5088 FC in an unprecedented show of consumer power – would fall for a seedy compromise that could have Rangers 2012 back in the SPL a year from now, we’re forced to conclude that their heads button up the back.

Any chairman who votes to accept such a plan will, we’ll hazard a guess, be bombarded with an avalanche of angry letters, emails and abuse in the street that’ll make the last one look like a surprise birthday party in a sweetshop.

2. There might not be a New Rangers at all.

It’s far from clear that Charles Green is going to be able to field a football team in the 2012-13 season whatever happens. The business of setting up the new company is dragging on at a snail’s pace, beset by serious problems on all sides. It’s a matter of very considerable doubt that Green can afford to bankroll the club until August, half of the playing staff has already walked away, and the Rangers support’s opposition to his ownership hardened significantly this week with the bizarre and belligerent intervention of John Brown.

We simply can’t see that Sevco Rangers is currently a viable corporate entity, even if it somehow overcame all the other obstacles that are currently in its way. And furthermore, we’ve never believed Charles Green actually wants to run a football club in Glasgow in the first place.

3. Most of the SFL has little to gain from the plan.

The clubs in Scotland’s lower leagues have been until now the most likely winners from the whole Rangers fiasco, excitedly eyeing hefty financial bonuses from gate receipts and TV money as the Ibrox club makes its way up through the divisions (and in our view, perhaps not quite as quickly as everyone thinks). Now they’re facing the prospect of having that taken away, and being offered not much by way of compensation – indeed, the proposed new pyramid system represents a danger that some of them might fall out of the senior leagues altogether.

It only takes eight of the 30 SFL clubs voting No for any proposal to be thrown out, and there are numerous different reasons for them to object. We can’t see a play-off spot for Division 1 representing much of a carrot to Elgin City or Stranraer or Montrose or Clyde or Peterhead, when set against what they’d get from the presence of Rangers in SFL3 for even a single season.

(It’s been suggested that the SFL could be bypassed by the SPL relegating Rangers, which compels the SFL to accept them into Division 1. But there are all sorts of holes in that plan. For the newco Rangers to be relegated, they’d first have to be accepted into the SPL and acknowledged as a continuation of the old club, before then being immediately punished for the oldco Rangers’ crimes. That would need several of the clubs who’ve already explicitly stated they’ll vote against that to change their minds, incurring very great wrath from their supporters. And that’s not the half of the difficulties such a process would entail.)

So those are just three of the most immediately obvious reasons why the SPL’s latest cunning plan is doomed from the off. The internet is already alive with furious reaction from fans of every club in the land (including Rangers), and we don’t see it dying down any time soon. We’ll go out on a limb and say it, as we’ve done since the saga began and been (so far) right every time – this isn’t going to happen. No form of Rangers will play in either the SPL or SFL1 in the coming season. Everyone calm down.