A tale of two cities

The two great industrial and maritime centres on the west coast of Britain have much in common historically.

Clydeside and Merseyside were engines of the Industrial Revolution and attracted, through oppressive circumstances, the huddled masses of conquered Ireland.

They were also provided employment opportunities to the labour aristocracy of the Belfast shipbuilding industry.

Consequently, the toxic subculture of Orangeism infected both places.

British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once joked that he had more Irish constituents than lived in Dublin.

Both Glasgow and Liverpool are football-daft cities.

Full disclosure: I have no skin in the Merseyside psychodrama. I know that there are two teams there, and they’re rivals.

Rather, they ONCE WERE rivals.

In the 21st century, no one can reasonably argue that Everton is equal to the Anfield outfit.

Financially, it isn’t even close, and it’s a total mismatch on the pitch.

Everton’s victory in April was notable because it was so unlikely.

Moreover, it is risible to think that the Goodison Park club has the same cultural heft globally as its city neighbours.

It was not always thus.

Everton is now a financial basket case.

How did it happen?

Well, as Mike Campbell, a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, explained when asked how he went bankrupt:

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Campbell is an alcoholic Scot who has anger issues and is prone to self-pity.

If he was a Glasgow football club, then he would probably play his home games at Ibrox.

For the avoidance of doubt, it is still too early to assess the significance of Celtic’s most recent league title triumph.

However, I sense that it will be epoch-making.

That is why the victory in the derby match was hugely significant, and the last few minutes were so tense from a Hoops perspective.

Quite simply, we KNEW what was at stake, and it wasn’t just those three points.

That’s why my nerves were shredded as  Sevco’s finest launched a final hoofball effort to get an equaliser.

In my 2012 book Downfall (which, despite the best efforts of the Ibrox klanbase, sold very well and is still in print.) I referred to only THREE football matches:

Firstly, another cup final will be held on the 25^th of May. You know the own.

Cesar lifting the big cup inflicted a psychic wound on the snarling nativists of Ibrox.

Then, with Ten In A Row denied them in 1998, owner David Murray could only pursue the dream of equalling that day in May 1967. As they say in fiction circles, this opened the door to the folly of chasing the European dream.

Essentially Dick  Advocaat was permitted to bankrupt Rangers during those years.

The club owner had to face the fact that his city rival, who had been minutes away from insolvency in 1994, had a stadium with ten thousand more seats than Ibrox.

Moreover, they were filled with season ticket holders.

Perhaps he thought that the EBT wheeze would never come back and bite them.

Trying to win the European Cup was a fatal grail quest, and the denouement unfolded in 2012 when the HMRC blocked the CVA.

It was all too beautifully contrived for a novel.

The second match I mentioned in Downfall was the away leg in Malmo in August 2011.

It was the second and last time that Super Salary managed a match in the Champions League.

After that, Maribor of Slovenia made sure that Rangers, in their last season of existence, would not be in a European competition after August.

This site is an archive of the contemporaneous reporting of your humble correspondent when I stated that, bereft of UEFA revenue, the Ibrox club would not survive the season without suffering an insolvency event.

You know the rest.

The cup final tomorrow should not be seen as a sign that the Glasgow football landscape is starting to resemble Merseyside.

As they say, the league doesn’t lie.

Just count the trophies since the Bunnet redeveloped Celtic Park.

In 2024, even the Stenography Corps cannot claim that this is a battle of financial equals.

The only thing to be established is whether the Parkhead club have a lot of money or lots and lots of money.

Consequently, only Celtic can stop Celtic.

The last time that a planned insolvency event was discussed in the Blue Room was a decade ago.

That conversation occurred because chaps representing the institutional investors thought that was a way to divest the company of the infamous “onerous contracts”.

However, they had underestimated Charles of Normandy and his business partners.

I’m told that only liquidation would eradicate those legally binding agreements, which involved sending large amounts of cash every month to the Sevco Triangle.

In fairness, the new entity has worked perfectly for the original investors who shelled out £5m for the basket of assets.

Within a year, all of the IPO cash brought in by the launch of Rangers International Football Club (RIFC) was gone, and the new club, the re-branded Sevco Scotland Limited, needed emergency funding from directors.

With the rigid enforcement of UEFA’s new FSR ordinances, Sevco, just like everyone else, will have to live within their means.

So, it comes down to whether or not they can grow the brand.

As their Ibrox klanbase wave Israeli flags as the Gaza genocide is being live-streamed, they might find that supremacism is going out of fashion.

Indeed, the trip to the USA will reinforce the Celtic brand as one that is globally attractive to millions outside this archipelago.

To characterise the new club at Ibrox as Espanyol Glasgow has some merit.

However, the Everton/Liverpool comparison also works to an extent.

Regardless of what transpires at Hampden tomorrow, this isn’t a battle of equals.

The league table proves that, and the title haul in this century is incontestable.

This is what a generation of domestic domination looks like.

Perhaps it is dawning on the illiterati of Ibrox that this might be what the future looks like.

Either that or they’ve discovered an antidote to that debilitating malady called “battle fever”.