Keith Wyness: Rangers have forsaken sporting integrity.
I have followed the sad Rangers story over the past few months, and from long before, since the start of the decade, when I was on the inside of Scottish football. I have thought long and hard about my position on this and tried to ensure that there was no kneejerk reaction based on any football loyalties or misplaced schadenfreude after my time at Aberdeen.
The need for Scottish football to be creative and innovative to maintain its place as a football country with a vibrant league has been more urgent since the turn of the millennium. Any change must always have, as its bedrock, sporting integrity.
The blockage for many changes has been the Old Firm voting together with a determined self-interest. In many Scottish Premier League (SPL) board meetings I witnessed this and the attitude that bordered on arrogance. They felt that they had this right because of their dominance on the pitch.
The voting system has always been based on an 11-vote majority needed for significant changes, so if the Old Firm vote together they can block most things. This was always the stumbling block. Such was the frustration that this caused, the other ten clubs actually resigned from the SPL in 2002. It took such a desperate measure to bring about a more reasonable distribution of television income.
One consequence of Rangers’ present travails is that this voting system must be changed. It cannot be enough just to accept that change and allow Rangers back in for such a compromise; this change must happen regardless, to release the stranglehold on the status quo.
Recent events indicate that Rangers may have maintained their dominance by dubious means. Terms such as “financial doping” seem to ring a bell. Such means have led in part to the ruinous financial state of the club and the crisis-ridden decisions of the past year. So the sporting integrity of the league has been put in serious question over the past ten years by owners hell-bent on their own myopic rivalry. How can the most serious of sanctions not apply?
Unless sanctions are real and meaningful, how can any sporting competition that claims to be the premier competition in its national game have any credibility?
To claim that short-term commercial imperatives are more important than sporting integrity is misplaced. This has been an embarrassing chapter for Rangers, but it is only a small period in the history of Scottish football and the game will go on.
Allowing Rangers to form a “newco” to come straight back into the SPL would show a lack of judgment by the SPL board and its club members. If it does not, why would either of the Old Firm fear any sanction about anything? Just like the playground bully, they must realise that their actions have serious consequences, that there is something bigger than them.
Even Italy managed to punish clubs by dropping them several divisions, yet those clubs came back after learning a lesson that they could be punished if they broke the rules of sporting integrity.
In ten years, will Scottish football look back with pride that it stood for its principles, or will it just have an embarrassed nod and a wink about its little dirty secret?