31 March 2000
Murray’s blueprint; £53m investment is only the beginning of a new era for Rangers.
By Ken Gallacher
Just as promised, Rangers are moving on to another level from the rest of Scottish football, as chairman David Murray announced a new investment of £53m for the Ibrox club, with a further massive cash boost soon to follow.
The eventual cash injection could soar as high as £80m as Murray guides the club into what he believes will be a new, golden era for the Scottish champions.
The money involved, the biggest financial boost for any Scottish football club, will enable them to move into Europe’s elite over the next few years.
It is clear from this latest move that the Glasgow giants are setting an agenda that no other Scottish club can match – and that appears to include their Old Firm rivals, Celtic, who are trailing by 15 points in the Premier League championship and are now looking at a financial gap which the Parkhead club might not be able to bridge.
The Ibrox chairman promised his shareholders good news and a more prudent financial strategy at the last annual meeting of the club.
He has now delivered this by taking on board several very heavy financial hitters, South African-based David King is worth around £300m – £20m of which he is investing in the club he followed as a young man in Glasgow.
Trevor Hemmings is worth even more – around £500m – and he is also on board. Tom Hunter, also worth several hundred million, is liable to join up soon and Murray himself is investing in excess of £9m, which is more than he spent when he took control of the club.
The Ibrox chairman has spent several months and many sleepless nights piecing together the plans which will eliminate Rangers’ debt, currently sitting at around £40m, provide finance for the new training centre and the soccer academy which will be housed there, and still allow cash to invest in new players.
Yesterday, as he saw the months of delicate negotiation culminate in the announcement of a one-for-three rights issue of more than 15m shares being valued at £3.45p and the further news that he and King, as well as Alastair Johnston, a senior vice-president with IMG, the giant sports management group, were also taking up a number of shares, Murray was ready to talk about the new future for the club and his dreams for European success.
He said, ‘I want to make it clear from the outset that while our small shareholders, our supporters who have an interest in the club, will have the opportunity to invest again if they want, there is no pressure on them to do so.
‘The bulk of the rights issue is being taken up by myself and David King and some other smaller investors, including Alastair Johnston, who is a long-time Rangers supporter.
‘We also have Trevor Hemmings coming in as an investor and Tom Hunter will join us some time in the future.
‘Essentially, the investment we require is in place and we also have a major media deal in the pipeline which is very exciting and will bring in further serious investment to the club.
‘I told you earlier this week that I had run the club up to now on a high-risk strategy which has involved carrying large debt.
‘These days are over. The whole method of running the club is going to change, because we are in a situation right now where we do not need to take the risks we have had to take in the past.
‘We don’t have to spend the same money on players, for example, as we have had to do over the past two years when we were restructuring the team after the arrival of Dick Advocaat.
‘At the moment, we have two new players set for next season, Allan Johnston and Fernando Ricksen, and Dick is looking for another quality striker. He is working hard on that right now.
‘Dick and myself know what we are aiming for. We want to be in the Champions League every season. This is what we want for the club and this is what we have been working towards.
‘However, we shall not be going on any wild spending sprees in the transfer market.
‘We have a player or two to add to the squad – a top-class international front player, as I said, but we don’t need to buy Numan, van Bronckhorst, Mols, Reyna, or McCann – because we have these lads in place already.
‘Believe me when I tell you that we are going for it this time – we want to be successful in Europe, and the money we are raising now will take us there.
‘This is the last part of the jigsaw for me, but we shall always be a part of Scottish football and we will take our domestic responsibilities seriously. We respect the other teams in the Premier League and we know this news will make them try even harder against us. But, so be it.’
However, the mega-deals Murray has been working on are sure to carry Rangers out of the reach of their rivals here at home and unless Celtic can somehow find the means to strengthen their own financial standing even the age-old rivalry between the Glasgow giants will be threatened as the Ibrox men grow even stronger.
Reading between the lines of this execrable guff, a more sceptical observer might have gleaned from Murray’s unchallenged assertions something along the lines of: we’re £40m in debt, I’m having to put the brakes on the spending (despite what I told you after the Dortmund defeat), hopefully some investment may be coming into the club soon but I don’t really know… let’s hope it does some good, because otherwise we’re mullered.
That said, the most subversive and unsettling aspect of this piece is how effortlessly convincing it all sounds. Written in a supposedly respectable broadsheet newspaper by a veteran correspondent in the days before the criticism offered by social media and citizen journalism was widely available, there was very little comeback or right to reply in the face of all this hoopla. Without the benefit of hindsight, the reader of the day had little choice but to accept Gallacher’s frenzied proclamations of imminent utopia at face value, especially as the message was being delivered across all platforms, with a parallel report appearing in the tabloid Daily Record a few days earlier.
It’s certainly true that, following the rights issue, Dave King invested £20m through his Ben Nevis Holdings and became a non-executive director, remaining on the Rangers board until the club’s liquidation in 2012, and Alistair Johnston, who introduced Murray to King, eventually joined up in February 2004 and succeeded Murray as chairman in 2009, but King’s money soon disappeared down a financial black hole, while the other putative investors who Murray had name-dropped into the conversation must have gotten wise and headed for the hills over the months and years ahead, with a mere £3m eventually raised from private financiers, including Hemmings, the owner of Blackpool Tower.
Whatever the brave new world that Murray and his cronies were anticipating, it failed to materialise and in the summer, just a few months after this piece was published, Rangers signed Ronald de Boer from Barcelona and started cheating the taxman.
Even from the start, it seemed apparent that something wasn’t quite right in all of this. Ducking and weaving among the rhetoric, Murray seemed to be stating quite categorically that there would be no need for vast fortunes to be spent on new players in the future because the Neil McCanns of this world were already in place at Ibrox. Yet over the close season and beyond, as well as the £4.5m to Barcelona for de Boer, Rangers spent a total on player acquisitions which again exceeded the £30m mark, securing the services of defender Bert Konterman from Feyenoord (£3.5m), who had apparently outshone Jaap Stam at Euro 2000, but in Scotland would acquire a reputation for not being able to tackle, head or pass the ball, right-back Fernando Ricksen from AZ Alkmaar (£4m), another target for the Ibrox boo-boys after a string of mistakes in big games, back-up goalkeeper Jesper Christiansen (£1.2m) from Odense, and Peter Lovenkrands from AB Copenhagen (£1.5m), who contributed some important goals but would later gain a reputation for only playing well when it suited him.
The manager also tried to augment the Scottish influence in the squad with the signatures of winger Allan Johnston from Sunderland (free), striker Kenny Miller from Hibs (£2m) and defender Paul Ritchie, a Bosm
an signing from Hearts who was sold to Manchester City a few weeks later for £500,000 before he could play a proper game for the first team. ‘I felt sorry for him but I had a duty to the club so we sold him for a profit,’ Advocaat said of the bizarre move, but his wheeling and dealing left the player inconsolable. ‘Not to have played a competitive game for Rangers is something I’ll find hard to deal with for the rest of my life,’ Ritchie later lamented.
Then, on 30 August 2000, two days ahead of the Champions League transfer deadline, Ronald de Boer arrived in Glasgow and announced, ‘I’ve agreed a four-year contract,’ before adding enigmatically, ‘Apparently there are a few minor issues to be sorted out between the clubs, but I fully expect to become a Rangers player.’ Foreign footballers, wary of the various tax systems operating in different countries, often demand their wages to be paid net, leaving their agents along with the accountancy boffins to sort out the full structure of their remuneration. Whatever those ‘minor issues’ were, which de Boer had so fleetingly referred to, Rangers, having made a mockery of the concept of financial fair play since the early days of Souness, were now confirmed in their entry into the far murkier world of the tax wheeze.
And finally, in November, the pièce de resistance, as Rangers forked out £12m to sign Norwegian striker Tore André Flo from Chelsea. This was Murray’s arrogance and recklessness at its most unforgivable – he was aware that Rangers’ debt was out of control and had to be addressed. Even his allies in the media had recorded him admitting as much. He had talked unequivocally of the need for prudence, yet Murray, almost as if he was starting to believe his own press, went on to completely ignore his own advice.
The signings of Flo and de Boer would come back to haunt Rangers, not just because the players turned out to be expensive flops on the field, with Flo out of form and de Boer suffering a series of niggling injuries, but because of the nature of their contracts. Along with defender Craig Moore, who returned to the club from Crystal Palace in 1999, Flo and de Boer had agreed, through their representatives, to receive some of their pay through the ‘discounted option scheme’, which required part of a player’s salary to be promised through side letters, in addition to the formal contract. These secret letters, guaranteeing tax-free income, would later alert HMRC and, in what became known colloquially as ‘the wee tax case’, the revenue and customs service eventually served Rangers with a bill of £2.8m in overdue tax and penalties on these contracts, an amount which would ultimately remain unpaid, despite the club admitting liability for the claim. The use of these side letters to sign and reward players such as Flo, de Boer, Moore and Stefan Klos would represent the start not only of Rangers’ policy of tax avoidance, but also, a fortiori, of their acquiring and remunerating players whom they would otherwise have been unable to afford.
With the signing of Flo, Rangers were responding, in part at least, to the appointment of Martin O’Neill as Celtic manager, the Northern Irishman who galvanised his talented but underachieving squad and, over the course of the season, augmented it with the purchase of players who were experienced campaigners in the English Premier League, such as Neil Lennon (£5.75m from Leicester City), Alan Thompson (£2.75m from Aston Villa) and Chris Sutton (£6m from Chelsea), the English striker stating purposefully on his arrival that his team’s job was to put Rangers in their place. Celtic, now free of Fergus McCann’s scrupulous penny-pinching, had shown that they were prepared to flex their own financial muscles and, if not to match Rangers’ exorbitant level of spending, at least to compete financially and use the transfer market to their advantage.
The impact was immediate and irrevocable. In the first Old Firm game of the season, played at Celtic Park on 27 August, Advocaat’s side were trounced 6-2 by a rampant home team, who raced into a 3-0 lead after just 11 minutes with early goals from Sutton, Petrov and Lambert. Rangers’ Dutch full-back Fernando Ricksen had to be hauled off by his manager midway through the first half after being tormented by his countryman, the previously ineffectual winger Bobby Petta, and, as one wag reported at the time, Ricksen left the Celtic Park pitch looking like he’d seen a ghost. Larsson, who had emerged as a converted world-class striker under Vengloš, scored a further two goals; the first a sublime effort, chipping the ball over Klos after waltzing past the soft-tackling Bert Konterman, and the Swede would go on to surpass Jimmy McGrory’s goalscoring record over the course of the season, netting 53 times for the Parkhead side. Celtic historian David Potter later observed of the game, ‘It was the start of the modern Celtic.’
The defeat had knocked Rangers off their perch, but they didn’t fully start to implode until October when they suffered consecutive defeats to Hibs, St Johnstone and then 3-0 at home to Kilmarnock, in a game which saw captain Lorenzo Amoruso barracked repeatedly by the Ibrox crowd. The result left Rangers, who had been top of the league before the Celtic Park debacle, fully 13 points off the pace in fourth position. Advocaat by now was furious with his players, accusing them of being ‘fat-necks’, a Dutch expression roughly equivalent to ‘big-heads’, and admitting that he could sense their complacency.
It was clear that the manager was aiming his criticism in particular at the Netherlands contingent, which by now numbered six players, all first team regulars, plus coaches and doctors, although there were also rumours of unrest within the dressing room caused by Advocaat’s perceived favouritism towards his clique of compatriots. As a result of the in-fighting, and on the back of such a poor run of results, Amoruso was stripped of the captaincy, with the big defender’s team-mates having long since lost confidence in the player. Amoruso, it seemed, with his long hair and shaved legs, was an Italian defender straight from central casting, whose vanity even extended to referring to himself in interviews in the third person. He irritated his team-mates with his inflated sense of self-importance, which manifested itself most visibly on the field with his insistence on taking long-range free kicks, most of which flew straight off the Italian’s boot and into row Z.
Amoruso was resentful and unhappy at his public humiliation and he later claimed that the decision to replace him as captain was the turning point in the fortunes of Advocaat’s Rangers, pointing out that the Dutchman, following a trophy-laden first couple of years at the club, subsequently won nothing in Scotland. The new skipper was 22-year-old Barry Ferguson, who led the team out at Ibrox three days after the Kilmarnock defeat for a League Cup tie against Dundee United. The disgruntled Amoruso, still smarting at his very public demotion, berated the young Scot from the start of the match, until Ferguson scored to give his team a 2-0 lead, which sealed the game and finally silenced the carping Italian.
The slump in domestic form occurred at the same time as Rangers were squandering a positive start to their Champions League group, having won the opening two games of their section against Sturm Graz and Monaco. The European campaign had started slowly as Rangers struggled to overcome Lithuanian non-entities Zalgiris Kaunas at Ibrox, with two late goals from substitute Dodds putting a gloss on the eventual 4-1 scoreline against a side reduced to nine men. Dodds in fact was in fine goalscoring form for the club, but was rated as ‘not top quality’ by Advocaat and underused by the manager, especially in Europe. Any complaints the striker may have had were dismissed by the Dutchman with typical brusqueness. ‘He made a fortune in salary when he moved to Rangers, so he should be grateful to me,’ Advocaat commented.
After a tedious second leg in the Baltic state, which finished goalless, Rangers dismissed Danish champions Herfolge 6-0 on aggregate to progress to the group stages, where a 5-0 win over Graz at Ibrox was followed by an equally impressive 1-0 defeat of Monaco in the Stade Louis II.
With the competition now formatted over two group stages, the games were coming thick and fast and Rangers’ run of domestic defeats and the ‘fat-necks’ controversy couldn’t have been more awkwardly timed, with a double-header looming against Galatasaray, the holders of the UEFA Cup following their tense victory over Arsenal on penalties in the Copenhagen fin
al in May.
After a scoreless first half in Istanbul at the intimidating Ali Sami Yen stadium, there were five strikes in the second period, with the home team soon racing into a three-goal lead and although Rangers pulled it back to 3-2 in the dying stages, it was too little too late. Before the game, a spat developed between Advocaat and his counterpart with the Turkish champions, Mircea Lucescu, who claimed publicly that almost anyone who had access to the Dutchman’s budget would be able to build a successful team. Advocaat’s response was to call the 70-times capped Romanian an ‘asshole’, although he waited until he was on the point of departure in the foyer of Istanbul’s Atatürk airport before delivering his rebuke.
The return leg, which finished goalless in Glasgow, was followed swiftly by a demoralising defeat in Austria, 2-0 to Sturm Graz. Rangers could still qualify from the group but another Ibrox draw, 2-2 against Monaco in the final game, with Amoruso once more copping flak from the home fans for defensive lapses at both goals, saw Rangers relegated into the UEFA Cup, where they were summarily dispatched by the unexceptional German side Kaiserslautern, meaning elimination yet again from Europe before Christmas.
It had looked like as easy a group as could be expected at this level, but for all their spending, increasing exponentially, on foreign talent, and despite a brief flirtation with respectability under the Dutchman, Rangers’ best season in Europe in recent memory remained the class of ’93, when they were led by a manager who was supposedly out of his depth at this level and the club was impeded by the three-foreigner rule, which limited his selection to a minimum of eight Scots. Only a repetition of the success of Walter Smith’s Champions League trailblazers and participation in the latter stages of European competition, season after season, would have rendered Rangers’ profligate spending policies financially viable, so defeat at any stage short of the quarter-finals had to be considered as a failure on the part of everyone at the club.
Tangled Up in Blue Page 31
