I’ll break your legs
WHO THREATENED MO AGENT IN 89?
BILL McMURDO can still vividly recall the threat to break his legs in the summer of 1989.
It didn’t come from irate Rangers fans, devastated at the dismantling of their club’s controversial signing policy when Mo Johnston signed on at Ibrox.
Nor did it come from angry Celtic fans, seeking ugly retribution as one of their favourites crossed the great divide and completed his switch to the Light Blues.
Instead, it came from colourful Montpellier chairman Louis Nicollin, the waste management tycoon who was threatening to take out more than the garbage.
McMurdo said: “It was the only time I felt threatened in that whole period – and it had nothing to do with Rangers or Celtic.”
The signing of Johnston was as controversial as it was surprising, 31 years ago today, when he became the first high profile Catholic of the post-war era to sign for Rangers.
Johnston was at the peak of his powers as a striker with Nantes and Scotland in 1989 but the French club were struggling to pay his wages.
Ever astute, even before the Bosman era, agent McMurdo had negotiated a deal with Nantes that would have seen his client become a free agent the following summer, when his contract expired.
Nantes gave McMurdo the mandate to sell on their star man, keen to land a hefty profit on a player they had signed two years previously from the Parkhead club for £400,000.
He shone in two seasons in Ligue 1, improving his overall game and netting 22 goals in a team that also included fledgling talents such as Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly.
McMurdo said: “Stuttgart and Torino were very interested and I was also taking phone calls from Spurs – and then Montpellier made contact.
“Maurice and I flew down from Paris and met with Nicollin and we laid out the nuts and bolts of the deal, with a transfer fee payable to Nantes of £750,000.
“He was a right hard b ****** but a lovely guy. He was in charge of refuge collection in Montpellier and was a man you knew not to cross.
“He agreed to the deal and then threatened that if it didn’t go ahead, he’d get my legs broken. As you can imagine, I was keen to get the transfer over the line.
“Six weeks later, Nantes had still heard nothing. In the end, it was Montpellier who pulled out of the deal to sign their second choice behind Maurice instead – a young striker by the name of Eric Cantona.”
The rest, as Scottish football knows, is history. Celtic thought they had a deal to seal Johnston’s return and he was paraded at the ground with boss Billy McNeill before taking in a game against St Mirren.
However, two months later he was walking into the Blue Room at Ibrox in front of a bemused media pack as Graeme Souness, never a man for understatement, revelled in the boldest move of his managerial career.
McMurdo said: “Billy McNeill exonerated me in his book and said I wasn’t to blame. The Celtic board at the time? Murder, polis. Really, they should never have let Maurice leave in the first place but negotiations on a new contract went on for months and months and they changed their minds time and again.”
The Rangers chief executive at the time, Alan Montgomery, remains adamant it was not a case of his club gaining bragging rights at the expense of their old rivals.
He said: “Due to the circumstances, some people tried to make a case for us deliberately putting one over on Celtic just to humiliate them. But it was never about that. It was the right deal for the right reasons.
“We knew there would be a backlash when the story came out – and there was. As I recall, however, that amounted to two cancelled season tickets and one burned Rangers scarf.”
McMurdo admits there’s not a day in his life when people don’t speak to him about the Johnston transfer.
He’s still involved in the
agency business these days, mostly negotiating on behalf of Spanish-speaking talents from South America looking to forge careers in the States, Europe and the Far East.
But it all comes back to Johnston, still easily the most talked about transfer deal in the history of the Scottish game.
McMurdo said: “Initially, I took a lot of stick from both sets of fans, although nothing untowards. Every day, even now, someone still wants to talk to me about that deal.
“Maurice could have signed for Rangers for a second time when he was at Hearts but David Murray pulled the plug and he went to Falkirk instead.
“I was speaking at a dinner last year and there was a Q and A at the end. One Rangers fan demanded to know how much I’d made out of Maurice’s move to Ibrox in 1989.
“We were 30 years down the line and he wanted to know the figures, down to the very last penny. I told him, ‘I’m sorry sir, I can’t give you an accurate figure – I’m still in the middle
of counting it all!’”