Wings Over Scotland

We’re really hoping that there’s going to be some proper Scottish-politics news when we get down to scouring the newspapers today. But in the meantime, just for a quick bit of Monday-morning fun and to offer up an entirely unnecessary hostage to fortune by sticking our heads on the chopping block purely for the thrill of it, we’re going to have a go at predicting the outcome of the imminent negotiations between Sevco Scotland Limited and the Scottish football authorities.

The clock is ticking, so it won’t be long until we find out if we’re right or wrong.

We already know that Sevco has agreed in principle to accepting the deferred transfer embargo and, apparently, the £160,000 fine imposed on the old Rangers by the SFA for bringing the game into disrepute in numerous ways last season. So the two main issues yet to be resolved are those of TV rights and possible future punishments in respect of EBTs/dual contracts, with a wee side order of Ally McCoist. Let’s go.

1. The SFL will NOT grant the SPL media rights to Sevco FC matches.

At least, not automatically. The SPL must know that ultimately it doesn’t have a leg to stand on in demanding these rights – the SFL’s commercial arrangements are its own business, and the SPL simply can’t make any sort of case for effectively holding Charles Green’s club hostage as a bargaining chip. We’re not even sure it wouldn’t be illegal, since the SPL hasn’t offered any actual reasons why it should get to take over the rights, other than that it really really wants to.

Like the threat to withhold payment of the settlement agreement, the suggestion that the SPL might block the transfer of Old Dead Rangers’ SFA membership to Shiny Fresh Rangers on those grounds is ultimately empty posturing. Attempting to do so would bring the hounds of Hell down on the SPL by casting the entirety of Scottish football into the abyss of the law courts, and FIFA would just nuke Scotland from orbit to be on the safe side.

What will happen is that the SPL will be invited to bid for the rights like anyone else, which means one of two things: either (a) they’ll make a sensible and reasonable bid that’s higher than anyone else’s (which surely means a minimum of £2m, and perhaps a maximum of £3m, a year for three years), or (b) Neil Doncaster will defy all known human science by proving himself to be an even more incompetent and witless idiot than we currently think he is.

(And seriously, we really can’t overstate what an achievement that would be.)

The SPL’s current unsigned deal with Sky is worth £16m a year. If “Rangers” games are included, even the hopelessly-inept negotiators of the League will have a strong hand to play and ought to be able to hold onto the vast bulk of that cash, especially as Sky don’t want to pull out unless they absolutely have to. Given that Doncaster has spent the last five months telling us that the SPL’s product is worthless without “Rangers” and that we’d lose every last penny if they were banished from the telly in Division 3, clearly it’s worth giving a £2m or £3m slice to the SFL in order to salvage the rest of the money.

In business terms that’s a no-brainer, and as we really can’t see any possibility of someone else showing up and offering more than £3m a year for SFL rights, it’s in everyone’s best interests. Problem solved.

2. Sevco, not the SPL, will back down over investigating dual contracts.

The SPL simply can’t. It’s absolutely unthinkable that, having decided there was a prima facie case, the League could then crumble. They would be even more of a laughing stock than they are now, FIFA and UEFA would be enraged, and every other team in the league would be given carte blanche to cheat in future.

Sevco, on the other hand, have nothing of any real significance at stake. Their objection was at best a piece of wildly optimistic, “you can’t win the raffle if you don’t buy a ticket” kite-flying, and at worst a cynical sop to the Rangers support to make it look as if they were at least trying to stand up for the club’s honour. (No sniggering at the back, there.)

As we noted at the weekend, if Sevco can come out of this whole affair with a club called “Rangers” with 90% of its trophy history intact, it will have pulled off a miracle. There’s not a chance, in this blog’s opinion, that Charles Green will sacrifice the newco’s ability to play professional football for the sake of something as essentially trivial as having 54 titles officially credited to its name rather than 49 – especially as Rangers fans will refuse to acknowledge the fact anyway and will continue to insist it’s 54 no matter what the record books say.

Green, as we’ve previously pointed out, doesn’t really want to be running a football club in the medium or long term, but killing “Rangers” stone dead at this precise moment in time isn’t in his business plan. He certainly wants it to survive at least long enough to flog off the remaining players who are worth anything, and he also probably doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder in fear. If the newco collapses through lack of funds at some point in mid-season – particularly if it does so because not enough fans turn up – he can say “Hey, I did my best, but YOU made the club fail, not me”.

3. Ally McCoist will remain as manager.

This is the prediction we’re least confident about. McCoist seems to have rather painted himself into a corner with his strident assertion that he’ll never accept the possibility of titles being stripped, and many people have plausibly speculated that the outburst was designed to give himself an escape route. But at the end of the day, we think there’s nothing in the world Ally McCoist wants to be more than the manager of Rangers, even if it’s in SFL3.

The deferral of the transfer embargo ought to mean that New Rangers can cobble together enough journeyman pros to comfortably secure promotion in their first season. (A frankly dubious report in today’s Herald suggests that the newco will still be offering wages 25 to 35 times the SFL3 average, but even if we take that as a wild exaggeration it seems reasonable to assume that they’ll be able to afford 10 times as much even if Ibrox is half- or two-thirds empty.) McCoist is accustomed to winning, and despite what will be a tricky initial period of adjustment, any fan of a relegated club will tell you that at the end of the day winning is winning no matter what league you’re in.

It’ll be an embarrassing climbdown, but a swift adoption of the Dr Jekyll-style loveable-cheeky-chappy Ally persona, and a generous dose of fake humility in front of a sympathetic media, will deal with that easily enough. Even the coldest-hearted of Old Firm haters will be hard-pressed to deny that McCoist’s had a stressful few months, and any sort of remotely convincing “Och, I’m awfy sorry, it was the heat-of-the-moment stuff, said out of love of my club” performance will save enough face to carry on.

So that’s how we see the next couple of days panning out. There are any number of possible ways in which we could be wrong, and the way things have gone until now we’re not absolutely ruling out an invasion of 900-FOOT TITANIUM SPACE DINOSAURS FROM MARS! playing some part in proceedings. But hey, at least we’ve stuck our heads above the parapet and taken a shot.