Henrik Larsson and the pornographer

In the summer of 1997 Celtic faced the prospect of their historic Nine In A Row record being eclipsed by a Rangers side on financial steroids.

The new manager Wim Jansen was fully aware that he needed to get his recruitment sport on.

There was hardly any margin for error as history hung in the balance.

Then the Parkhead club splashed out £650,000 on a player from Feyenoord.

After his disastrous lay off to Chic Charnley of Hibs, my expert eye quickly wrote off this Larsson guy as a dud.

However, I was sure that Regi Blinker would be a star in the Hoops.

I know, I know…

Of course, Henke had already played in a World Cup tournament.

Sweden got as far as the semi-finals in USA 94 and won the third-place match, defeating Bulgaria.

The man who would come to be revered at Parkhead scored a trademark goal in that game, slaloming around the Bulgarian keeper.

So, despite your humble correspondent’s expert analysis based on only a  few minutes of play against Hibernian this guy Larsson could play a bit.

Fergus McCann, the wee bloke who had saved Celtic from oblivion in 1994, had steered a steady course since taking over from the old board.

When it was still possible to throw money at the team to stop Rangers doing 9 IAR he demurred.

He instead was determined to build a stadium that would be considerably bigger than Ibrox.

His plan was to, quite literally, to lay the foundations of long term financial stability at Celtic.

When the Swede arrived from Holland, it would never have occurred to the Bunnet to inflate the size of the transfer fee via a compliant journalist.

That was a  PR parlour game that held no appeal for McCann.

Across the city, there was a different zeitgeist extant, and in David Murray’s time, it had some substance.

He was able to bankroll Rangers with what was essentially a massive overdraft.

When McCann rebuilt Celtic and Parkhead, Murray had to recalibrate his response to the new challenge in the East End.

He decided that paying tax was an overhead that he couldn’t afford if he were to match Celtic.

Consequently, he took expert fiscal advice from a pornographer.

You know the rest.

One of the things that TUPEd over to Sevco from the original Rangers was the swaggering hubris apropos transfer spending.

In the twenty years before Murray bought Rangers in 1988, the Ibrox club had only won the league four times.

His reign of error ushered in a period of unparalleled success for the Light Blues.

It was almost as if having greater financial resources than everyone else amounted to some kind of sporting advantage.

A controversial view that I tend to agree with.

The noise level yesterday that signalled the arrival of two players to Sevco was redolent of the Murray years in several regards.

One was the fanfare from gushing journalists who know that it isn’t their place to ask difficult questions of anyone at Ibrox.

For the avoidance of doubt, it is relatively easy to inflate a putative fee for a player if the overall cost of the contract is included in the headline figure.

In the mind of the supporter, it means that the reported quantum was handed over as in a simple shop transaction.

Of course, it rarely works like that.

Anyone who thinks that Sevco has access to £9m  for anything, let along two footballers, hasn’t been paying attention.

This site has over a dozen years or so, often sketched out a very contrarian narrative apropos matters Ibrox.

In the round, the version of events here is usually vindicated by events.

If you think all is financially well at Ibrox then just keep taking the tabloids.

Stay safe.

 

This isn’t a drill.