Scottish Football’s Stockholm Syndrome

Good news!  Good news!
The liquidation of Rangers is no longer the probable outcome of their travails; it is absolutely inevitable.
It’s time for all of Scotland’s premier football clubs individually, and the SPL as a collective organisation, to recognise this and plan boldly for the new circumstances.

Those club chairmen who are still in fear of radical change have not left themselves much time to adjust to a situation which they had wrongly assumed could never come to pass. But there is no excuse now for delusions that somehow Rangers can avoid the worst.
They can’t.
They’re finished.
Completely.

There will be no Rangers of any kind, old or new, playing in the SPL next season. There is no guarantee that any form of Rangers will even be playing in the Third Division of the SFL either.  Yet there is still uncertainty in some quarters about embracing the new reality.  

The baleful effect of Rangers on the confidence of other Scottish clubs seems to have caused a kind of Stockholm syndrome where the victims paradoxically develop an emotional attachment to their abuser. Having spent so much of their existence trying not to challenge the malevolent power of the seemingly all-powerful Rangers, a number of clubs have lost the ability to think clearly for themselves and have lost sight of what is in their own best interests.

They have found ways to survive in the lair of the beast and can scarcely imagine what life will be like when the beast is slain.
“Things may never be the same again,” they whimper, as if that were a bad thing. 

Why would any decent person want Scottish football to be the “same again”?
It has become clearer and clearer with each development that for many years Scottish football was trapped in a process of being devoured by an insatiable parasite called Rangers FC. Scottish football has been revealed to be merely a façade behind which the scandalous conduct of Rangers FC hid itself from scrutiny.

Rangers did not generate wealth; they misappropriated it.
They do not stimulate the Scottish economy; they are a drain on it.
They have not increased sporting competition; they have stifled and destroyed it.

In order to allay fears of what Scottish football will be like without Rangers it’s only necessary to consider what the damage will be if they continue in any form.
It is now apparent in the real world that the wealth and power of Rangers has been a myth for many years.
Therefore the sacred TV deals with Sky and others have always been negotiated on the basis of a falsehood.
The selling-point was that there were two major Scottish clubs – the so-called Old Firm – whose head-to-head matches could provide broadcasters with the commercially attractive spectacle of a pair of well-matched heavyweights locked in close competition.
But one of those clubs, Rangers, has clearly been spending money which it did not have in order to maintain the sham of its competitive status.
It has been living so far beyond its means that it is completely insolvent and facing oblivion.

Any attempt to restore the illusion that Rangers is a major club requires every other party to engage in a major deception.
Whatever damage the other clubs may sustain without Rangers is nothing in comparison to the self-harm that they’ll suffer from continuing to take their share of the proceeds of TV deal which requires a level of financial doping, shameful governance and fiscal irresponsibility which brings the entire game into disrepute.

Those clubs and broadcasters may have had some excuse when they could reasonably claim not to have known what Rangers tried so hard to conceal. They do not have that excuse now and they have even less reason to assume that Rangers have learned their lesson.  Nobody has spoken on behalf of Rangers to suggest that they are determined to face up to the consequences of their past wrongdoing.  There has not been a word of apology nor any hint of an acknowledgement that they alone have been the architects of their own misfortune.

If anything we have seen the reverse – the club seems to think that its best chance of riding through this crisis is to insist on its own indispensability, regardless of what it has done wrong, and to issue threats to other clubs that they’ll regret it later if they stand up to Rangers today.

That has always been The Rangers way.
The psychopathic inability to express or feel genuine remorse is a key characteristic of the club’s mentality.
Similarly, their arrogant sense of entitlement and the belief that the world revolves around their interests are defining traits.
They are no more capable of abandoning their bullying than a crocodile is capable of learning to walk to heel.

That psychological trauma is still having an effect on some minds but the fears are unfounded now.
A new day is about to dawn in which the creatures of the night will be hopelessly exposed and vulnerable.
By the end of this week even the most dedicated Rangers apologists will be left speechless in the face of damning evidence of the club’s indefensible conduct.
And those who have previously been indecisive when given the chance to point the finger of condemnation at Rangers will finally join the stampede to be at the front of the queue to sink the boot in.  

There will be a brighter future as soon as the root cause of most of Scottish football’s ills is discredited and permanently removed.
That will go a long way to alleviating whatever pain accompanies the adjustment.
We should neither fear pain nor expect that we can get through our lives without experiencing it.
It’s an intrinsic part of the process of developing, growing, striving and achieving.
A period of pain for Scottish football doesn’t frighten me in the slightest if it leads to a fairer sport and a better society in the long run.
It’s time to get over the Stockholm syndrome.