We’ve been through all the papers and there’s still absolutely no Scottish politics news, so we’re going to take a moment out for one of our brief but always-popular tangential forays into the world of football. All the usual disclaimers apply.
Because the parlous state of current Scottish journalism can’t just be observed on the politics pages, with all their partisan spin, quarter-truths and hackery. Sometimes you get a better idea of it by stepping back and looking at the broader picture, and rarely is that picture more clear than when it’s a picture of “Rangers”.
The Daily Record devoted only a tiny corner of its back page on Thursday to the club’s latest financial reports, and the bulk of the text was devoted to Dave King enthusing about what great news it all was.
Pretty much every other piece of coverage to be found in the Scottish press was the same, shrugging the figures off as of no notable significance and all someone else’s fault anyway (in this case former manager Pedro Caixinha, even though one must suppose he didn’t spend any more money than the board told him he could), and we waited in vain for any in-depth analysis in the Sundays.
And we couldn’t help thinking we’d been here before.
Because the Scottish media was infamously asleep at the wheel in all the years before the original Rangers died in 2012, ignoring every warning light and clanging alarm bell and dismissing informed accounts as conspiracy theories from “internet bampots”, right up to the point where the club fell off the cliff owing creditors including the taxman (or in other words, Scotland’s schools and hospitals) tens of millions of pounds.
The old club ceased to exist because in addition to tax evasion it had simply lived far beyond its means, pledging to spend £10 for every £5 spent by rivals Celtic regardless of whether or not they actually had the money. And the new club formed out of the wreckage (in an appropriately shady deal) seems to be charging headlong down the same road, and hardly anyone has anything to say about it.
New Rangers’ bottom line since the club was founded in 2012 reads like this:
2013: £14.4m loss
2014: £8.3m loss (later updated to £9.8m)
2015: £9.9m loss
2016: £2.5m loss
2017: £6.3m loss
2018: £14.3m loss
So that’s a grand total of £57.2 million lost by a six-year-old football club with nothing but a Petrofac Training Cup victory over Peterhead two and a half years ago to show for a wage bill that’s more than those of the next three biggest clubs put together.
One can’t help but feel that third place in the Premiership could have been bought rather more cheaply than that. (The club currently sits level on points with Kilmarnock and one ahead of St Johnstone, whose combined wage bill is around one-third as high as that of “Rangers” alone. Interestingly, the team’s results at this stage are exactly the same under Steven Gerrard as the aforementioned Caixinha last season.)
But the more interesting question is: what’s going to change that in the future? Celtic can afford their wage bill because in the last two years alone they’ve trousered around £56 million – now there’s a familiar-sounding sum – in Champions League money from reaching the group stages twice.
(Which may have helped to cushion the pain of being humiliated both times, collecting just six points in total from a possible 36 and one win in 12 matches.)
The Rangers’ business model is completely predicated on emulating that feat, just as that of the old Rangers was. Nothing else offers Scottish football clubs anything like enough money to turn around an average £10m-a-year loss, but there’s no sign of the club getting anywhere near the CL, let alone to the groups, in the forseeable future.
For a start they’d obviously have to win the league, but already this season they’ve dropped points to Aberdeen, Motherwell, Celtic, Livingston and Kilmarnock in just 11 games, as well as being knocked out of the Betfred Cup. To compete with Celtic (who they’ve trailed by 12 points and 39 points in their two seasons in the top division so far) they’d realistically need to cough up still more money on transfers and player wages, cranking the losses even higher.
(Once again, clubs lower in the table are losing out to financial doping as the Ibrox club fields players it can’t actually afford, but this time without the truckload of trophies.)
And even if they somehow did capture the title thanks to their raft of other people’s money, they’d need even more of it to get through all the Champions League qualifying stages that the Scottish champions now have to negotiate and reach the big payoffs.
Even with the benefit of previous years’ money (having reached the group stages in four of the preceding six seasons), Celtic just about managed to stumble past sides from Northern Ireland, Norway and Kazakhstan to reach last year’s groups, and this year teams from Armenia, Norway (again) and Greece were too tall an order.
But enough sport. It seems to be assumed by the Scottish media that the business of running a mediocre football club out of Ibrox Stadium can continue to lose millions of pounds year after year indefinitely, just like the same thing was assumed about the previous occupants of the ground until it was too late.
The new club, meanwhile, has had to pile share issue on top of share issue in order to get from day to day, and chairman Dave King is strenuously resisting a court order to offer to buy up tens of millions of shares, which is odd as you’d think he’d be desperate to get his hands on as many as possible if the business was as strong as he claims it is. (Especially as the price he has to offer for them would be a bargain, 30% below what they’re nominally trading at, although they can’t be bought on the open market.)
But “Rangers” is plainly a fundamentally unviable business, the corporate equivalent of a desperate gambler chasing after unrecoverable losses by putting down bigger and bigger bets with money he doesn’t have. The stands are already packed, so there’s no scope for cramming in any more paying customers to watch those enthralling draws with Kilmarnock. And costs can only escalate exponentially in the pursuit of the fantasy of the shiny gold Champions League ring.
Yet the scrutineers of the press look on unmoved as history repeats itself. And readers, if you need us to spell out the parallels between the Scottish media’s determined turning of a blind eye to these uncomfortable facts and the way they report on Scottish politics, we really do despair.
