It is an unassailable contention that any law is useless if it is not enforced.
The death of Rangers a decade ago largely resulted from football regulations not being implemented.
Ultimately it was outsiders who did for the original Ibrox club.
HMRC inspectors found evidence of serious fiscal malfeasance and pushed ahead through the various tribunal tiers.
With the bill for unpaid tax submitted to the club, Hector became a major creditor.
When HMRC was presented with a CVA ten years ago this month they refused.
Throughout it all the governing bodies on Planet Fitba looked the other way and hoped that it would all pan out.
It didn’t.
As regular readers will know the insolvency bomb should have landed on Edmiston Drive rather earlier.
Rangers should not have been awarded a UEFA license to play in European competitions for the season 2011-2012.
You can find all of the evidence here.
It is worth noting that when they were presented with ALL of this forensic information the Grey Brigade at Parkhead and their overmighty CEO decided to keep faith with their Old Firm business model.
They remain, to this day, at the back of the bus supplied by a certain company in Hamilton.
Today the very excellent Swiss Ramble Twitter account laid out the details of UEFA’s new Financial Sustainability regulations.
The competition organiser based in Nyon relies on the domestic associations to be the first line of enforcement for their ordinances.
UEFA director Andrea Traverso should be a familiar name to regular readers who have been flowing the Resolution 12 story.
UEFA Reply 8June16 to Redacted Lawyer
Of course, the succulent suspects cannot go near any of this.
Their job description is to provide a steady stream of good news Ibrox stories.
That is why it was this journalist on this independent platform that predicted the looming insolvency at Ibrox a decade ago.
It is also why any inspection of Sevco’s shaky finances is verboten for the compliant dullards on the sports desks.
The new UEFA regulations are, no doubt, well constructed.
However, they rely on people on the grounds to apply them rigorously to every club.
I think that I can see a problem right there on Planet Fitba.
The old conundrum remains:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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So true Tommy but it will not change sevco cheating spending money it does not have running up depts it has no intention of paying to appease the hordes while the complicit media and administration at Hampden behave like mushrooms when sevco go into liquidation they will create another entity to exist at the auld hoor of edmiston drive with the help of CELTIC PLC
And the irony is;
when it comes to corruption, [allegedly], UEFA makes the SFA look like amateurs.
The wages to turnover metric is going to be the big hurdle for most clubs. Rangers have actually been very upfront in their player wages reporting, and for the 2020-21 season it was 70% of gross revenue. That figure doesn’t neatly align with UEFA’s new reporting structure as it omits social payments as well as amortization on transfer fees on expense side in addition to profit on player sales on the income side, but those figures are easily found elsewhere in the reports. By my crude number crunching, Rangers came in at around 100% of revenue in the 2020-21 season with the caveat that revenue was depressed due to the pandemic. To bring that figure into eventual compliance, they’ll need to either add £20m in revenue and/or profit on player sales OR cut £14m in wages/benefits or amortization of transfer fees. My sense is that the 2021-22 season will see them within the 70% threshold due to player sales (Nathan Patterson) and increased UEFA income to say nothing of the increased match day income as fans were back in stadia.
Longer term, this is going to put a hard limit on overspending like we’ve seen in years past. It’s one thing to fudge the numbers with soft ‘loans’ from directors, but there’s no way around a limit on player expenses. Being a couple percentage points over the limit isn’t going to move the needle competitively , and running close to 100% like they did in 2020-21 is so far over the limit that UEFA & even the SFA won’t be able to ignore it.
Looks to me like the rule have been changed so the elite clubs like barca & real Madrid are not punished and stopped from playing in European competition.
You say RFC shouldn’t have been allowed to play in 2011/12, how the hell were the 2 big Spanish team allowed to play in Europe with over €1b of debt
Paul, there isn’t now nor has there even been a requirement around acceptable debt levels. Barcelona could, in theory, double or triple the amount of debt they have and as long as they pass the tests for income breakeven, 70% wage to income, and done have any unpaid debts to players, clubs, or the tax authorities, UEFA doesn’t care about debt.
At least HMRC and Dave King have something in commen.They both voted no for a CVA
Who watches the watchers indeed Phil. I’ve been calling for the sixth floor at Hampden to be gutted for years. Both the SFA and SPFL aren’t fit for purpose and the corruption involved in our game if properly investigated would likely involve custodial sentences. It’s a disgrace what both entities of the Ibrox club have gotten away with and our own board are complicit in this. It’ll be interesting to see what happens going forward but all of this has to come head at some point and your work exposing what that club gets away with is an embarrassment to the supposed “journalists” in this country. There’s a day of reckoning coming soon and it’s why we can never let them forget they died in 2012 and very likely to go to the wall again.
With reference to your Latin flourish, is the answer, no-one?, well; in Scotland at least, that’s been the custom thus far. We can all see what happens but no-one will challenge them, one klub tries to dictate and that’s wrong in so many ways. That has to change… eventually.
Thanks Phil🇮🇪