Fergus McCann Versus David Murray by Stephen O’Donnell

Author:Stephen O’Donnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7.

Distortion

DAVID Murray’s fury at losing the league to Celtic in 1998 was perhaps understandable – it was, after all, the first time his club had failed to secure the championship since the chairman’s involvement at Ibrox, but his subsequent reaction set Rangers on a path to ruin. With the liabilities in the balance sheet continuing to grow, over the next few months the Bank of Scotland, which had previously indulged Murray’s every appetite, moved to acquire a 7 per cent stake in The Rangers Football Club plc as part of a process of ‘corporate restructuring’ at the club’s parent company MIH. At the same time, the bank also secured a floating charge over the company’s assets, including Ibrox Park and the Albion training ground, just as they had with Celtic under the old board earlier in the decade, meaning that, in the case of an insolvency event at Rangers, the bank would be at the head of the queue of the club’s creditors.

Any concerns being expressed around this time, however, over the condition of the finances at Ibrox or the direction in which the chairman seemed to be taking the club, proved to be a warning that Murray showed no signs of heeding, as by any standards, the spending spree that Rangers embarked on over the summer of 1998 was as enormous as it was reckless. The wholesale restructuring of the playing department after the team had failed to secure a trophy during the previous campaign was overseen by the new managerial partnership of the experienced Dutch duo, Dick Advocaat and his assistant Bert van Lingen. Their outlay on expensive foreign imports – players of considerable pedigree with a proven track record in the game – was funded to a very large extent at this time by a business deal secured with ENIC, the sports and media investment arm of the Tavistock Group, owned by the Bahamas-based businessman Joe Lewis. In late 1996, Murray had persuaded Lewis to add Rangers to his company’s growing portfolio of football clubs around Europe, which included Slavia Prague, AEK Athens, Vicenza and Tottenham Hotspur, in a deal that brought a headline-grabbing £40m into the coffers at Ibrox. This revenue had immediately been deployed by the chairman as part of his spending strategy for the club, with Rangers matching and surpassing the wages on offer in Serie A to bring, among many others, top Italian players such as Lorenzo Amoruso, Marco Negri, Sergio Porrini and Rino Gattuso to Glasgow at the start of Walter Smith’s final season in charge at Ibrox.

ENIC were effectively playing with loose change, but having taken their money, Murray subsequently treated his business partners with contempt once the funds were safely secured. The group had initially believed, presumably as a consequence of the chairman’s unctuous solicitations, that their investment in Rangers would quickly yield a profitable return, but they soon found themselves out of the loop at Ibrox, despite the presence of company man Daniel Levy on the club’s board. Crucially,

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