KING, GREEN, KENNEDY AND ME
Ibrox legend recalls ownership battles
GRAEME SOUNESS is in an inquisitive mood.
He’s tried to keep up with the unrelenting Rangers soap opera from a distance over all these years – and at times he’s come close to becoming a central part of the narrative – but there have been too many plot twists.
Life on England’s idyllic south coast has left him too far removed. Perhaps it’s all a little too painful.
“Did anyone lose their jobs or have to go to court?” he asks with a surprising sense of naivety.
Last week’s news of Charles Green’s £6.4million payout from the Crown Office for wrongful prosecution is duly relayed. It lands right between the eyes.
“Say that again?” Souness is audibly gasping down the other end of the line. “Look, there are some things we probably can’t talk about for legal reasons but that’s just outrageous!”
With blood at boiling point, Souness takes a moment to process his thoughts.
Ironically, he is currently planning a whirlwind trip back over the border in a couple of months’ time.
He’ll be in Glasgow as the headline act at an ‘evening with’ style event in the city’s Armadillo before crossing the M8 to host a fundraiser for his charity Debra at Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House a couple of days later.
Given the searing honesty with which he is about to address his own part in the ownership battles at Ibrox, these sound like events not to be missed.
Souness’ spectre was never far from the story as the likes of Green, Craig Whyte and a gang of other main protagonists fought among each other in an unedifying scramble to cash in on the blue pound.
Time and again someone or other would claim to have secured the backing of the former Rangers boss, whose legendary status remains intact with the club’s supporters more than three decades since his revolutionary stint in charge in the late 80s.
But despite the constant name-dropping, Souness stayed well clear.
“Yes, during that period there were a couple of times when it nearly happened,” he says when asked if he ever did come close to making a dramatic return.
“Charles Green asked to see me several times but I said, ‘No, I’m involved with a pal of mine and we’re looking to buy it’.
“Then, one night I got a call around 10 o’clock and it was him again, saying he was on his way to see me.
“I said, ‘Don’t come to my house. I’ll meet you in a hotel’. So I met him around the corner in a hotel about 500 yards from where I live and I told him the same story again, ‘Look, I can’t get involved with you because my mate is trying to do a deal at the same time’.”
That friend was Edinburghborn business tycoon Brian Kennedy, the extroverted philanthropist who tried to block Green’s path up Edmiston Drive, only to be repeatedly thwarted by administrators Duff and Phelps.
Souness takes up the story. He said: “It didn’t happen but on two separate occasions Brian phoned me up late at night and said, ‘We’ve got it!’.
So he must have been getting told a tale by someone or other because, the next thing, lo and behold, Charles Green got it.
“Brian is a serious, serious businessman and whatever he was being told he genuinely believed he was going to get the football club.
“I was excited because I was going in with him and it was going to be my job to run the football side of it – not as manager, more of a director of football role.
“Of course it excited me but in life you never know what’s coming round the corner.”
Some years later another call – this time from then chairman Dave King. Souness is a wanted man all over again.
He goes on: “We had lunch at Scott’s restaurant in London. He asked me if I would come on board. This was before Steven Gerrard had been appointed as manager and at a time when things were not going great on or off the pitch. I thought about it because I love the football club.
“But I also thought to myself, ‘Why do they need me?’ And I reached the conclusion it was simply a matter of Dave King trying to relieve some of the pressure that was on him at the time.
“I think he bought the club with good intentions. Okay, he didn’t throw the tens of millions at it that maybe people expected. But I think he
was there for the right reasons – to save it – and I think he did save it. “He’s a realist and obviously a very intelligent man but at that time I didn’t feel I could help him other than by taking a bit of spotlight away from him and taking away a bit of the pressure. So I declined the offer. “If I was going to take on a position like that then it had to be for the right reasons. I would have needed to feel as if I would have the influence to change the course of that period in the club’s history. “You have to understand what that football club means to me. I don’t even call it a football club. “In my mind it’s an institution and there are only four institutions in British football – two in Glasgow, one in Manchester and one in Liverpool. “What makes them institutions is how much they mean to their supporters. “So all I can say is, if I was ever going to get involved again at Rangers I wouldn’t get involved with someone I didn’t know or someone who had an exit strategy after five years and was only interested in making a few quid. That was certainly not the intention when we were interested with Brian.
“And it was never the intention under David Murray either. But being a chairman is a bit like being a football manager. It ends in tears with people not liking you. “Anyway, if I was going to get involved then it would have to be for the right reasons and that’s the way Brian looked at it. It wasn’t about making money.
“Over the years I’ve had calls from financiers saying they were looking at doing something with Rangers and my answer was always the same, ‘I’m not interested! You want to load it with more debt and then, in a couple of years, you’re going to f ****** sell it? The thing will be skint again and you’ll f*** off with a few million quid. Not interested!’.
“That happened to me twice with vulture capitalists who just wanted to use my name. Not interested.
“But unlike these guys, Brian and I wouldn’t have been going in there to fill our pockets and leave.
“If Brian had got it he would have been there for the right reasons. And I might still have been there just now.”