Team still paying the price for EBT years
NINE new players, European football, Mike Ashley off the premises, the retail deal gone, fans buying shirts again and Dave King lobbing verbal hand grenades in Celtic’s direction. In recent weeks, Rangers have borne a rosier glow than Rod Stewart at a Scottish Cup draw. A football club irresistibly drawn to turmoil, it couldn’t last. On Tuesday, Pedro Caixinha led the club to the most humiliating European defeat in their history. They were lying on the ground gasping for air when Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs stepped in to deliver a boot to the nether regions which is destined to cast Scottish football into a new bout of tribal in-fighting and demands for title stripping. It would be easy to think the two events are unrelated. Freakish outbreaks of overlapping misfortune. Easy, but mistaken. Because the humiliation of Luxembourg and the Court of Session ruling on Employee Benefits Trusts (EBTs) are linked by one common thread. Risky, unnecessary, boardroom folly. There was no need for the Murray Group to attract HMRC’s curiosity by making low tax payments to impossibly wealthy footballers. They would still have been perfectly capable of winning trophies. Neither was there any need to gamble on Caixinha as manager. Not when there was a perfectly good alternative in Aberdeen. Rangers have spent the last decade paying for a culture of boardroom hubris. The belief that being a huge club in a small pond offers immunity from bad management. The events of the last 48 hours prove otherwise. Make no mistake. In a keenly contested category, defeat to Progres Niederkorn takes the prize for the most embarrassing result by a Scottish club in Europe hands down. A new low in the race to the bottom of UEFA’s coefficient table. Consider the evidence. Progres finished fourth in the Luxembourg league last year, 21 points behind champions F91 Dudelange. The last time they won their national league, John Greig was still the Rangers manager. Their last Luxembourg cup triumph was almost 40 years ago. They have scored just three goals in Europe since 1977 — two of them were against Caixinha’s team on Tuesday. In recent years, they have played League of Ireland teams six times and lost every game home and away. To call Progres minnows flatters them. They are plankton. Losing to Luxembourg’s provincial also-rans would be an embarrassment for a team of San Marino carpenters. For Rangers, it’s an abject and dismal humiliation. The damage caused to Caixinha’s credibility as manager can’t be overstated. Scrutiny and criticism of the Ibrox boss has been met with
accusations of xenophobia and racism amongst supporters. Yet, since taking control, he has racked up some desperate results. Last season, Rangers suffered their heaviest home defeat to Celtic in living memory. They lost at home to Aberdeen for the first time in 26 years. If Mark Warburton’s legacy of poor recruitment didn’t help, then neither did some iffy tactical decisions. Rangers won’t sack him; not yet. The Ibrox board have invested too much cash revamping the squad for that. Of the nine new players signed in the current window, most have three-year contracts and have yet to play a game. With Bruno Alves and Graham Dorrans in the team, Rangers
see improvement. Whether Caixinha is the man to oversee it is the question. Worryingly, the manager can’t explain the performance in Luxembourg. Neither, he claims, is he a miracle worker. The truth is, he didn’t need to be. This wasn’t Real Madrid that Rangers were playing. Not even Kaunas or Unirea Urziceni. Spare us the hand-wringing nonsense about summer football. Or the technique of Scottish players. The Rangers defeat to Progres is down to none of these factors. Last season a three-man selection panel chose a new manager with an underwhelming CV. A coach who had occupied no fewer than 10 jobs in 12 years and was plying his trade in Qatar. There was little or nothing in Caixinha’s resumé to suggest he was a Rangers manager. An approach to Aberdeen for Derek McInnes looked a no-brainer at the time. In the aftermath of Luxembourg, it still does. Caixinha will argue — with some justification — that he has yet to knit together his best team. But the European exit means Rangers now face 31 days without a game before the opening Premiership fixture against Motherwell. Woe betide the Portuguese if he fails to hit the ground running. Adding to Rangers’ woes is the crescendo calling for titles to be stripped after yesterday’s Court of Session verdict. It’s clear by now how this goes. Fans of rival clubs want titles won during the EBT years to be declared null and void and Lord Nimmo Smith’s dubious claim of no competitive advantage overturned. Rangers will warn everyone to leave their titles alone. And the SPFL and SFA will do their usual by trying to kick the whole business into the long grass until the fuss dies down. It’s a tactic that won’t work if Celtic come out kicking and screaming. The saving grace for Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster lies in the fact that this issue is a political minefield for Peter Lawwell and the Parkhead board. If they sit quiet and say nothing, a vociferous Resolution 12 crowd will kick up merry hell. Take it all the way and Scottish football is plunged into a new, damaging and ugly civil war rooted in tribalism. If title stripping is the name of the game then let’s start with an easy one. The ‘Sir’ preceding David Murray’s name. The former Rangers owner was knighted in 2007 for his services to business. Yesterday a flawed scheme run by the Murray Group was laid bare by the Supreme Court ruling in favour of HMRC. What happened in Luxembourg can’t be laid directly at Murray’s door. But Rangers have paid a hell of a price — on and off the field — for the EBT years. A mediocre performance in Luxembourg suggests they’re still paying it now.