The Administration Day Massacre

On this day seven years ago  I allowed myself a little smile as I closed the laptop and decided to walk over the mountain.

Rusty approved of this course of action.

It was, for me, Vindication Day.

What I had said would happen to Rangers Football Club duly arrived.

The previous summer I had committed the heresy of stating that Mr Craig Whyte was not a billionaire.

Moreover, when Super Salary failed at his first and only European campaign the revenues that had been a central part of Craigie’s cunning plan simply evaporated.

I stated quite firmly in the aftermath of the final match against Maribor that the Ibrox club did not have the money to see out the season and that they would experience an insolvency event.

That was August 25th 2011 and I was very sure that it was curtains for Rangers unless they could find a genuine billionaire.

My contention was if Mr Whyte remained at the helm then insolvency was inevitable.

In response to this the chaps on the sports desks in Glasgow sneered and the klan smeared.

However, I was convinced I was correct.

Excellent sources at various vantage points confirmed to me the basic arithmetic of the situation.

So, on the 14^th February, 2012 something horrible happened to The People.

That thing was what the rest of call “reality”.

Twenty years of deficit financing and a decade of tax cheating had finally caught up with them.

People in the SFA might have been looking the other way apropos “imperfectly registered” players at Ibrox , but Hector wanted his money.

Today is also the 90^th anniversary of a shocking slaughter in Chicago.

Although he thought he could act with impunity, in the end, it was the taxman who got Al Capone.

Like his criminal empire, Rangers and their tainted titles are no more.

Sevco pretends to be the old club and the Ibrox klanbase are pleased by the pretence.

The media that said that Craig Whyte was a billionaire play along with continuation myth as their titles circle the circulation drain.

It is a dance of death, but real journalism has already largely expired there.

The mainstream was trashing my reportage right up until the moment Craig Whyte was in court announcing his intention to put the club in administration.

When the news of this broke on the afternoon of the 13^th it came as a terrible shock to the Ibrox klanbase.

In message board land the news had hit The People very hard.

Interestingly I do not see any mention of a Holding Company Vehicle in that anguished thread.

It would take some time before that chimera would emerge.

The club and company fiction would have a utility function once the club was consigned to liquidation.

This day seven years ago the mainstream was proffering the comforting idea that Rangers would emerge from administration with a CVA, as other Scottish clubs had done before them (Dundee, Motherwell) and therefore preserve their history.

I demurred.

You will note that the day after administration was made official I was writing here about the inevitable liquidation of Rangers.

Of course, one of the worst things for The People was that your humble correspondent had been flagging up this insolvency event up since the summer of 2011.

This site is searchable and free to view so you can see it all.

Journalists love to be vindicated and seven years ago on this day I was loving it!

More importantly, it was a victory for a new type of journalism.

An independent reporter, using a wholly controlled online platform and reaching out to a readership that was being force-fed PR generated shite via the mainstream.

One of the important parts of the media story is that this was not the output of an anonymous blogger, but a named member of the NUJ.

That, I think, lent some weight to the work, but it came at a personal cost and one that I’m still willing to pay.

Since Rangers died in the summer of 2012, I have charted the chaotic early life of Sevco by being faithful to tenets of good journalism.

Recently, Sevco director John Bennet stated what has become a mantra here:

That the club was loss-making and was only kept going by loans from the directors and that this could not continue indefinitely.

This statement of fact by Mr Bennet was totally at variance with the current tone of the mainstream that the new club is financially sound.

Although this platform is the product of the digital revolution being a thorn in the side of the powerful is a sine qua non of serving the public interest.

Some of ye have been here since the start of this unplanned success, many more have become regular readers since those days in 2012.

To all of you míle buíochas.