How the Scottish Football Press Rewrites History

On June 14th 2012, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs rejected the Company Voluntary Agreement proposed by the administrators of Rangers Football Club plc. The next day’s newspapers were unambiguous. “RIP RFC - Taxman passes death sentence on 140 years of Rangers history,” declared the Daily Record. The Herald ran a simple epitaph: “RFC. Born 1872. Died 2012.”

For months, the narrative from the Scottish football press (SFP) had been consistent. Liquidation meant the end of the club and its history. Keith Jackson of the Daily Record had reported on March 13th that the Blue Knights consortium’s primary aim was to “prevent the club from sliding into liquidation and breaking its 140-year history.” His editor, James Traynor, fumed in April that the club’s history “would end with liquidation.” The message was clear, repeated, and seemingly well-researched. This was not a fringe opinion; it was the established fact presented to the public.

A History Rewritten

Yet, somewhere between the wreaths-a-plenty front pages of June 2012 and the Scottish Cup semi-final draw this season, that history has been quietly revised. The 140-year-old club, whose death was reported with such certainty, is now presented as a 144-year-old institution. The SFP has not explained this U-turn. Instead, a new, evasive language has emerged. Journalists now refer to the liquidation of Rangers’ “operating company,” its “holding company,” or, in one particularly imaginative Herald piece, its “engine room Rangers subsidiary.”

This linguistic gymnastics reached an absurd peak during a televised Celtic vs Rangers League Cup match last season. BBC commentator Liam MacLeod told viewers that midfielder Lee Wallace had chosen “to sign up for the Charles Green company away back in the wake of the financial situation Rangers found themselves in.” This careful phrasing avoids the core issue: that Green’s company was a new entity buying assets from a liquidated one. The press, which once shouted about the death of a club, now whispers about corporate structures.

Even governing bodies have been used to cement the new reality. A news agency story in May 2015 ran with the headline “Fifa insist Rangers ARE the same club.” The piece suggested an official ruling had been made. The basis for this claim was not a formal declaration but a brief mention in a weekly FIFA magazine stating that “Glasgow Rangers are in the hunt for promotion back to Scotland’s top flight.” Meanwhile, SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster was allowed to declare Rangers a new club on the BBC, using selectively edited quotes from a report by Lord Nimmo-Smith, without a single question on the subject from his interviewer.

An Inconsistent Standard

This policy of protecting a club’s history from the consequences of its corporate body’s failure appears to apply only to Rangers. When Gretna went into liquidation in 2008, the BBC reported that the club had “ceased to exist.” No one pretends that the new entity, Gretna FC 2008, competed in the Scottish Cup final of 2006. The Scotsman reported clearly that a “new club” had been formed while the old one was “the extinct football club.”

The treatment of Heart of Midlothian and Dunfermline Athletic during their financial crises offers a further contrast. The threats of liquidation were reported as direct threats to the clubs themselves. In March 2013, the Herald reported that Dunfermline “the club owes £134k to the tax man,” and failure to pay would lead HMRC to “liquidate the club.” There was no talk of an “engine room subsidiary.” A BBC article by Richard Wilson in April 2014 stated that “liquidation was the worst-case scenario for Hearts,” before making a single reference to “Rangers Football Club plc” as a precedent. The contradiction was stark.

A Question of Trust

Some journalists have grown weary of the debate. BBC Sportsound’s Kenny Macintyre recently dismissed the topic on Twitter, asking if it was the “most pressing” issue in Scottish football. But the pressing issue is not the age of Rangers; it is the credibility of the Scottish football press. When journalists report one thing with certainty in 2012 and the complete opposite four years later, their trustworthiness is fundamentally undermined.

They have shaped a narrative rather than reporting events. Former Daily Record sports editor James Traynor, shortly before becoming Rangers’ director of communications, offered a flimsy excuse for his own reversal. Having written repeatedly of the club’s death, he claimed in July 2013 that after speaking to “corporate lawyers and legal experts,” he realised he had “made a mistake.” This admission, framed as humility, revealed a shocking professional failure.

It suggests that for eight months, while covering one of the biggest stories in Scottish football history, he had not undertaken the basic legal research any competent journalist would have done before writing a single word. If a senior editor operated with such negligence, can any of his colleagues be trusted?