Rangers booted out of top Scottish league

Almost 50,000 for Rangers first home game in Div 3 against fellow giants...East Stirlingshire! A 5-1 result to keep the faithful happy. The remaining games drew an average of just over 600!! Has there ever been a league in any sport where the disparity between top and bottom is so massive?

Near on 40,000 at Ibrox for the first round League Cup tie between Rangers and East Fife overnight...the fans are sticking with them.

Absolutely amazing, but correct and proper, decision overnight...Glasgow Rangers will play next season in Division 3!!! They will have to spend a minimum of 3 seasons battling it out in the lower leagues before having a chance of being promoted into the SPL. Incredible. A club with average attendances of 45,000 will now be playing teams who have an average home gate of several hundred. Headaches coming up for authorities when Rangers come to play in some of the small towns and villages around Scotland. Well done to the SFL and also to the new owners of Rangers for accepting the punishment...interesting times ahead in Scottish football.

Haha yeah i guess so. And its workable sure, still they are attempting to game the system ...system needs busting imo ...tax schemes are unnecessary if they radically reduce the tax base. What govt - anywhere - would do that tho.

Fuss - You are undoubtedly a man of great wisdom. Tennant's is the favoured lager I believe. Cheers again jb

jb Like all good Catholic boys, I'd make sure I only went to Celtic pubs in Glasgow ... ... and, of course, like all good Catholic boys, I'd be ordering the local ale/lager/bitter; never a cocktail!

Good one Fuss,but a word of warning,don't ever decide to "crack" it in a Glasgow pub unless you are very ,very,very, sure of who is around you. jb

Nordster - The "schemes" are actually workable but what was ignored appears to be a little known tax proviso that states in order for it to be legal, the recipient has to be domiciled in the country where his "loan" is being deposited, for at least 3 consecutive months of the year and as you know that is an almost impossible"must" for a full time professional in European football to achieve. jb

Wow thats fascinating didnt know bout the tax thing ...anything involving Schemes i guess is just an attempt to game the system. Getting something for nothing like taking on debt in the case of man united. Kicking the can down the road till one day the road goes off a cliff....

Well, the jokes have started on Twitter ... "Just had one of those Glasgow Rangers cocktails, the one that's made from 60,000 bitter oranges and a bunch of sour grapes." :-)

I think you're misinterpreting my logic or i just didnt explain it very well :) Not in favour of the euro super league at all. A major backward step. The thing i dont like about that concept is its just a cartel by the currently large clubs to cement their dominant market positions. The Beauty of european football is the structural embrace of the free market. Any team from anywhere can progress all the way, in theory anyhow. Over the course of decades though the system is very fluid and healthier for it. A super league would be replicating the american and australian trend of closed shop sporting leagues. A weird reversal of broader economic trends. Though id argue not even the supposedly capitalist america is all that capitalist in a truer sense. More of a state/corporate oligopoly.

Nordster - Using your logic we should also include the EPL,LaLiga and ,if we went back a few years we could also add Serie A and the Bundesliga where the "money clubs have "ruled supreme" for years.So if you had taken all of these teams out of their leagues and formed a European Super League,as was suggested a few years ago what then would have happened to the lesser clubs??????Can you imagine the TV deal that would be made if a league made up of the 2 Manchesters,Spurs, Arsenal & Liverpool,the 2 Milans Juventus, Roma &Napoli,.Real and Barca,Munich & Dortmund,Ajax & Feyenoord (that's 16 and there are a few good teams still missing) were that competition to come to fruition. A forward or backward step for the rest????Your thoughts please. jb

Can i quote some hayek at u ...equality is important, but forcing equality cant be done. Or forcing good business sense. Some parameters in a football economy could be good. A salary floor in particular though forces too high a spending burden. And when u abolish that, well it undermines the concept of a cap as equalisation measure. To restrain wage growth it could have some benefit. But then u penalise sustainable ambition .say if melbourne victory one day can drum up the means to have a serious crack at asia. Well they should be free to do so. So for me when it happens time after time ...i think the structural factors that need addressing is not the need for more regulation but less. There is an intellectual underpinning to where im coming from, just so u know im not talking (completely) out my backside ;) I used to buy into the argument that open or free markets were somewhat responsible for our broader economic malaise. Then i realised we've never really had them. The economic liberalism argument has done a real number on this marxist leaning kid!

Yes its absurd isnt it but thats how so much of the economy runs. That is a broad system wide failing tho not to do with the absence of a cap. That was my point to AR. Saddling an entity with debt is surely a bad way to kick off any acquisition yet its become so widespread. Shame for the fans of any club that goes downhill as a result.

I am a Celtic man and JB is correct Celtic were gone in 1994 and by 1999 we were the best supported club in britain with 60k attenandences compared to Man Utds 55k, On Rangers they did not go banrupt because they spent too much money like Leeds, Rangers had a scheme too pay players and staff so called tax free loans which were never going to be payed back and the Government had an investigation into these scheme's and found they were owed 70 millon pounds in taxes from these payments, Rangers believed this scheme was above board and fought the HMRS in court and lost, thus going into administration then liquidation. Rangers are being punished for being tax dodgers basically and I beleive they are not the only club to have done this tax scheme and others may fall in the future. Rangers did not over spend like so many clubs Leeds or Portsmouth etc they just cheated the government and now Scottish football is the big loser. Where ever Rangers finish up, this is a opportunity for all SPL clubs to change their philosophy on how they play the game and the type of players they produce, Celtic can lead the way here and I hope we go back to the days of the quality street gang where the likes of Kenny dalglish were produced, with no competition basically for the next few years this is the time for the Academy to build a way of playing right through to the 1st team.

Man U are a different situation. Essentially you had a corporate raider buy the company and then had the company borrow a whole lot of money to pay him back for the costs of taking them over. The owner is now proceeding to suck loose cash out of the company, and it isnt investing in new plant and material.

Nordster, When it happens to team after team, in code after code, I think you need to look at the structural factors. And that factor is that no-one cares if you come a prudent fourth or fifth.

Hardcore &Bondy- I'm afraid the sad and tumultuos period in Scottish football is not " coming" it has been with us for some years now and has gone on unchecked for at least 30 years. Why 30 years you may ask?. Going back that far we had 2 Scottish players Law and Baxter playing in a World team against England in a celebration match,every major team in the EPL had at least 3 or 4 Scots in their teams Bremner,Lorimer,and the Greys at Leeds,Buchan,Law,McQueen ,Crerand& Morgan at Utd,,Yeats,StJohn,at Anfield,Brown, Mackay and White at Spurs to name just a few.How many Scots are playing in those teams today?,very few.Why has this happened you may ask?,there are many varied reasons of course,modern lifestyle being one of the foremost arguments,but other countries,like Germany, have continued to produce world class players since 1950 onwards up till today. I feel that in that simple statement there is much to be examined and laid bare.For years Scottish Football has been run by individuals from those "quaintly named football clubs" that you mention and it is in that system of management that may be found the basis of Scotland's fall from grace jb

It is quite astounding to read so many comments about the financial well -being or otherwise of major clubs in the UK football scene. What is even more astounding that nowhere is there a mention of the "great survival" of Glasgow Celtic just a few short years ago in 1994. For years the club had been run as what only could be described as a "family company" and much of the club's surrounds ,ie.their field at Parkhead,showed the state of the clubs future planning for it could only be described as a "pre-war" dump,this despite being one of the best "supported" clubs in the UK.Then the bombshell, the club came within 8 hours of being declared bankrupt when the BofS demanded payment of debts totalling 7 million GBP. Enter a Scots born, Canadian based ,business man ,Fergus McCann, who stood as guarantor and stated his intentions of transforming the club in 5 years.He did this by various menoeuverings in the club's financial affairs,razed their "dump" , building a superb, modern, 60,000 seater, stadium,floated the company on the London SE,and at the time of his departure in 1999, the promised 5 years later, 63% of the club's stock was actually in the hands of the fans for whom he had initiated an "easy" entry into share purchasing.Although there are no figures available,it is rumoured that by the time of his leaving he had converted his 7 million "guarantee" into a 132 million GBP sale of his holding in the club, which had stood at 51%. Obviously a business man,not steeped in football history,who knew how to turn an ailng sleeping giant into a money making machine,all in 5 years. The odd thing is that Rangers were arguably a better proposition at that time for the same type of treatment ,but somewhere along the line the "magical touch" of McCann was obviously missing. jb

LOL Good one Mid. :)