Time for Rangers and SPFL to end this rancorous war... just don’t hold your breath
IT’S good to talk. and the time has come for Rangers and the SPFL to sit round a table and thrash out their differences. The Ibrox club have been gunning for League chief executive neil Doncaster and chairman Murdoch MacLennan since Madonna could still move her face.
and the cinch sponsorship row won’t be the last shots fired in a personal and damaging spat where the only real winners are the lawyers raking in sky-high fees. When two sides emerge from a legal tussle claiming victory, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.
Court papers showed that until June 7 last year Rangers were negotiating with cinch to sell them the naming rights to Ibrox.
When the car retailer chose to do a sponsorship deal with the SPFL instead, it went down as well as you might expect.
Rangers cited SPFL rule I7 as a justification to display no cinch branding inside Ibrox because they already had their own car tie-up with Park’s of Hamilton, the business owned by chairman Douglas Park.
It’s not unusual for football clubs to have conflicting sponsorship deals. Half the Premiership had rival betting firms on the front of their shirts when they were competing for the Betfred Cup.
arguing they had a legitimate case under the League’s own rules and had issued advance warnings, however, Rangers stood firm.
Facing the prospect of cinch ripping up the contract and walking away, the SPFL salvaged what they could. and Wednesday brought news of a new, revised contract which allows one of the League’s biggest clubs to opt out completely while still trousering the money.
Rangers claimed this ‘fully vindicated’ their stance. The SPFL, meanwhile, claimed it was a ‘great outcome’.
It’s hard to see how anyone emerges from this fiasco a winner. If this is a ‘great outcome’, then you’d hate to see the alternative.
Clubs are on the hook for the legal costs, with the final figure yet to come out. The League has been forced to rip up a flagship contract and renegotiate it without the co-operation of last season’s runners-up. The latest Rangers attempt to decapitate Doncaster, meanwhile, has yet to convince the other clubs the chief exec has outlived his usefulness.
now into his 13th year on Hampden’s sixth floor, the bulletproof vest of the Teflon Don-caster shows no sign of fraying. Like a human pinata, his enemies keep taking a free swing and finding out he’s actually made of rubber.
Doncaster vs Rangers is like a Loony Tunes cartoon where Wile E. Coyote tries every trick in the book to turn the Road Runner into his evening meal.
The more cunning and contrived the attempts to blow up his target, the more likely it is that a stick of dynamite will explode in his own face before the prey races into the distance with a derisory ‘beep beep’.
Had cinch said ‘stuff this’ and walked away from Scottish football, Doncaster would have been toast.
He kept his job because he found a way to keep cinch sweet. But patching up one relationship does nothing to repair the bitter, personal rift with key figures at Rangers.
It’s now two years since the Ibrox hierarchy went to war with the former norwich chief over a resolution calling for a premature end to a Covid-ravaged season.
a divisive vote gift-wrapped nine-in-a-row for Celtic and, at one point, Doncaster claimed Ibrox chairman Park ‘crossed the line’ by making an alleged threat towards him during a telephone call on april 10, 2020. Park replied by saying the claim was ‘offensive, crass and downright wrong’.
animosity between the League chief executive and the chairman of one of the nation’s biggest clubs is bad news for the game at large. It placed the cinch deal at risk of being ripped up completely and resulted in huge legal fees.
Potential new sponsors, meanwhile, will take one look at the situation and ask if Rangers will play ball with them.
To bring matters to a head, Rangers managing director Stewart Robertson has emailed all 12 Premiership clubs seeking an ‘open and transparent’ meeting to establish the full facts of the saga. The Ibrox side believe other clubs share their concerns, but past evidence shows that the chairmen who offer sympathetic noises down the phone have a habit of lending their backing to Doncaster when the time comes to vote on the matter.
an open and transparent discussion could be no bad thing if it resolves some of the rancour between the two sides and finds a way to work together for the greater good of Scottish football.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for that.