[Suspect Device]

Greenlantern, on 25 January 2012 - 08:14, said:

I'm looking forward to singing..."there's not a team like the Glasgow Ranjurs, no not one...."

Actually there is one almost exactly the same. You support it.

[Greenlantern]

Suspect Device, on 25 January 2012 - 13:02, said:

Actually there is one almost exactly the same. You support it.

Almost exactly the same but not quite, very much dissimilar and bearing no resemblance.

[Green&White Zebra]

Celtic's share issue in 1994 raised 9 million (discounting Dermot Desmond's initial 5 million investment). This represented about 12,000 fans investing a minimum of 650 a head. It was at the time the most successful share issue in British football history. But note the number of investors was still quite modest and that was a very enthusiastic take up.

The reasons for the success were twofold. One was McCann's personality - he enfranchised the support like never before. The second - and this is crucial - is that Celtic were building from just about their minimum base level. Due to being underachieving, any money coming in was bound to help the club grow. Also, Celtic's debt was more or less paid off.

These are crucial differences with Rangers now. They are maxed out in every sense and, worst of all, any money coming in will only pay off debts. No supporter will want to do that. It would also be a waste of supporter goodwill. The better to try and trade out of the debt (if possible) and even let the club downsize first. Thereafter, investment yields a better return, both financial and sporting.

[Captain_Sensible]

BigVicWanyama, on 25 January 2012 - 01:32, said:

Same old pish spouted over and over again, WE do not need them, we never have and never will, when Celtic had our troubles in the 90's no one ever said "oooooooooh but Rangers need Celtic to survive" we were just lambasted, remember the hearse and gravestone on the front page of the mail ?. Our club never cheated we were just badly run, Rangers have cheated, they've used EBT's to pay players wages for over a decade to evade paying tax on players salaries. Those players they otherwise couldn't have afforded so basically it was at the taxpayers expense. Their punishment should fit the crime, no easy let off as the laptop loyal and mainstream media seem to be pleading for.


Scotland will thrive when ra ranjurs are dead!.

From what I remember of Celtic in crisis in the 90s the media were saying that not only did Rangers need a strong Celtic but that Scottish football needed a strong Celtic.

The reality is though that without Celtic there would be no Rangers and vice versa. If one club goes bust then the other will die a slow death.

The rest of us don't need either of you. Indeed, its the Old Firm that needs us to have a league to play in. Without each other and without the diddy clubs, neither Old Firm club could survive.

As for cheating, as I've pointed out numerous times, building success on sectarianism, bigotry, hatred and violence is cheating in my eyes and cheating in the eyes of every single sensible person in this country!

[topcat(The most tip top)]

Captain_Sensible, on 25 January 2012 - 14:34, said:

From what I remember of Celtic in crisis in the 90s the media were saying that not only did Rangers need a strong Celtic but that Scottish football needed a strong Celtic.

The reality is though that without Celtic there would be no Rangers and vice versa. If one club goes bust then the other will die a slow death.

The rest of us don't need either of you. Indeed, its the Old Firm that needs us to have a league to play in. Without each other and without the diddy clubs, neither Old Firm club could survive.

As for cheating, as I've pointed out numerous times, building success on sectarianism, bigotry, hatred and violence is cheating in my eyes and cheating in the eyes of every single sensible person in this country!

How's that 10000 hours thing going?

[Green&White Zebra]

'Scottish football needs..', 'will die without....' etc. Football related chat is prone to hyperbole. The game in Scotland will plod on for as long as people are prepared to pay to watch it and even if the dominant forces become Fraserburgh and Eyemouth United.

The problem with making such grand statements about the contribution of a club is that it doesn't actually quantify what that contribution is.

It's tempting to ask what would have happened had McCann not stepped in and saved Celtic in 1994. Indeed, what if Celtic had been put into receivership and ultimately never recovered ? Rangers would have cruised to NIAR and perhaps a good few more. Equally, however, the stronger competition provided by Celtic in the late 90's certainly stimulated Rangers in a competitive sense (mind you it also may be the seed of their current woes !).

The real key question though is whether another club would have stepped in and become the main rivals to Rangers. I think eventually, yes, a club like Aberdeen or Hearts or Hibs would have become the undisputed challengers. There is even an historic precedent, because in the late 1940's, when Celtic were very poor, the challenge to Rangers was provided by Hibs (whose chairman entertained ambitions to make Hibs a dominant force in Scotland).

If, somehow, Rangers went bust, then it would probably trigger an extinction event in the game. We may lose a few clubs. Celtic's income would certainly take a sharp drop, but they would still be the strongest club for the time being. But give it ten years and a new balance of power will come into force - quite feasibly on a East-West axis too.

The problem for the hacks is that the road to that destination will be a painful one for all.

[BigVicWanyama]

Quote

BigVicWanyama, on 25 January 2012 - 01:32, said:

Same old pish spouted over and over again, WE do not need them, we never have and never will, when Celtic had our troubles in the 90's no one ever said "oooooooooh but Rangers need Celtic to survive" we were just lambasted, remember the hearse and gravestone on the front page of the mail ?. Our club never cheated we were just badly run, Rangers have cheated, they've used EBT's to pay players wages for over a decade to evade paying tax on players salaries. Those players they otherwise couldn't have afforded so basically it was at the taxpayers expense. Their punishment should fit the crime, no easy let off as the laptop loyal and mainstream media seem to be pleading for.


Scotland will thrive when ra ranjurs are dead!.

Bawdeep, on 25 January 2012 - 12:43, said:

If you don't need them why all the pissing and moaning to keep the 4 old firm games in favour of a bigger league?

What pissing and moaning was that ? news to me, I for one wanted a bigger league.

[TheLip69]

Greenlantern, on 25 January 2012 - 14:21, said:

Almost exactly the same but not quite, very much dissimilar and bearing no resemblance.

Same mum, different fathers, still brothers.

[Paulo Sergio]

[SandyCromarty]

NorthBank, on 24 January 2012 - 22:36, said:

How much as Rangers spunked away on complete wasters? I cannot believe over the years the amount of money they have spend on transfers and wages for players that have never kicked a ball for them. Even in times of crisis Ally signs three players that aren't good enough. They still have Healy and last season Beattie. And they pushed Charlie boy out the club when he didn't want to go.

I know not every signing is a success for any team but Rangers must be top of the League by miles for wasting money on transfers and salaries on players that are shite and not paying decent money for Scottish players that are good. The policy seems to be if they are foreign, English or Northern Irish they must be paid huge salaries and command large transfers.

Three words emphasises your post.

Tore Andre Flo.

Ten million pounds of shite.

[Swello]

Can anyone remind me of the countless occasions where these bitter rivals have voted against each other when the SPL have decided on anything - such ideologically opposed institutions must disagree on everything surely? And of course two age-old enemies would never use collective bargaining when it came to sponsorship - that would be helping the enemy! Given that Celtic are the club specifically founded for downtrodden souls regardless of race, religion or creed, surely they would be campaigning for equal voting rights and TV money for every club and would hate to enter into an unholy alliance with the Establishment to trample those less fortunate underfoot for the sake of greed and avarice?

Yep - we should all be grateful that Rangers and Celtic are so different.

[Dosser91]

Swello, on 29 January 2012 - 18:36, said:

Can anyone remind me of the countless occasions where these bitter rivals have voted against each other when the SPL have decided on anything - such ideologically opposed institutions must disagree on everything surely? And of course two age-old enemies would never use collective bargaining when it came to sponsorship - that would be helping the enemy! Given that Celtic are the club specifically founded for downtrodden souls regardless of race, religion or creed, surely they would be campaigning for equal voting rights and TV money for every club and would hate to enter into an unholy alliance with the Establishment to trample those less fortunate underfoot for the sake of greed and avarice?

Yep - we should all be grateful that Rangers and Celtic are so different.

The 10-2 voting rule in the SPL was designed specifically with the OF in mind. Nothing much will change until that rule is abolished.

[vanpablo79]

Bawdeep, on 25 January 2012 - 12:43, said:

If you don't need them why all the pissing and moaning to keep the 4 old firm games in favour of a bigger league?

it isn't our pissing and moaning.

all the diddy clubs want 4 home games a season they can break even from, that is why there are 4 Glasgow derbies a season.

There will be 10 SPL clubs that will miss rangers long before Celtic ever will.

Do you think Celtic fans from Asia, Germany, United States, Canada etc will stop pumping us full of money for merchandising just because of the demise of Scotland's shame.....

[THE KING]

I think rangers going under would be a good thing for Scottish football all the thousands of ex rangers fans who travelled from all over Scotland would now just go to their local clubs not to mention the staggering drop in domestic abuse.

[Green&White Zebra]

Any supporter would be off their trolley to put any additional money into Rangers at present. You don't know how big the black hole is that it would go into. Who knows, it may just be a top up for Mr Whyte's planned retirement home somewhere very far from Motherwell !

Fans also need hope when they're investing as well. Celtic fans invested in the club back in 1994 when it was a case of the only way is up - indeed it could be argued that losing that Cup Final to Raith may even have stimulated it. Therefore the time to invest in Rangers is equivalently when they are finally in a position when they will finally start to grow. Of course at that point, they may be in the 3rd division, so your pound will go a lot further then.

[WaffenThinMint]

THE KING, on 05 February 2012 - 07:01, said:

I think rangers going under would be a good thing for Scottish football all the thousands of ex rangers fans who travelled from all over Scotland would now just go to their local clubs not to mention the staggering drop in domestic abuse.

Yes, they'd go to other clubs, but uncured.

The whole "master race" mentality would remain intact and so spread their poison not merely to the likes of Airdrie, Dundee, Hearts, Kilmarnock, Queen Of The South, St Mirren and their other popular bolt holes whenever Rangers were doing pish, but Irvine Meadow, Bo'ness United and the more successful of the Juniors - where they'd find to their delight little to no stewarding or policing so they would be able to have themselves a few little mini-Manchesters and the clubs would get the blame for it for "their" fans. Not a pretty thought.

The chances are the real hardcore morons would go to Linfield instead - which would make them not know whether to laugh or cry, having made plans to downsize stadiums because of the number of locals foregoing Windsor Park on a Saturday to take the ferry at Larne - or simply become Chelsea "pub supporters", but getting rid of Rangers (which is still a long shot) only solves part of the problem for Scottish football. There's an unhealthy attitude towards the game up here that needs solved just as much.

[Drew Brees]

THE KING, on 05 February 2012 - 07:01, said:

I think rangers going under would be a good thing for Scottish football all the thousands of ex rangers fans who travelled from all over Scotland would now just go to their local clubs not to mention the staggering drop in domestic abuse.

from a poster on RTCblog

Quote

The table below shows the loss as I have calculated it if RFC do disappear from the SPL:

Club RFC loss (one game per season) RFC loss (two games per season)

Celtic £320,000 £640,000
Hearts £93,000 £186,000
Hibernian £112,000 £224,000
Aberdeen £140,000 £280,000
Dundee Utd £100,000 £200,000
Kilmarnock £135,000 £270,000
Inverness CT £90,000 £180,000
Motherwell £125,000 £250,000
Dunfermline £72,000 £144,000
St Mirren £75,000 £150,000
St Johnstone £69,000 £138,000
AN Other £79,800 £159,600

I have used a whole bunch of assumptions and averages to get to these figures however I’m pretty confident they stack up as the figures enabled me to get pretty close to the sales figures quoted in club accounts which would indicate that I am on the right track. If possible I will get the spreadsheets emailed to RTC and he can post them in full if so desired.

Points to note:

1. I averaged out attendance over the past three years as this would give a fairer picture rather than just one year and would pick up any shifts in attendance patterns at clubs.
2. I took published data for attendances involving RFC and compared that to three years of attendances at each ground in order to come up with a figure for RFC ticket allocation at each ground. This ranged from 8,000 at Celtic to 3,000 at the smaller grounds such as St Mirren.
3. I have spoken to senior contacts in Sodexo and Compass Group who are the two largest contract caterers in the world and they have run through the catering figures so I am happy that these are broadly accurate. In the end, they are not that important because clubs do not actually make a huge amount of profit on them and the sales from visiting fans is actually quite low.
4.I have not made any allowance for savings on policing costs, however, from the information I could gather this would save all clubs about £15k per RFC match apart from Celtic who would save about £75k per RFC match.
5. Critically, I have made no allowance for TV income. I included it in my pre-RFC bankruptcy model as a check to ensure my assumptions were about right (again they were). In the end, it actually doesn’t matter because all that we need to know at this stage is that the loss of RFC would mean an uplift of a minimum of £90k for all clubs.
6. If clubs can attract roughly 6,000 additional fans over a season (ie 6,000 additional people attending one game per season or 315 additional people per game) then this would negate any loss following the disappearance of RFC. I have made no allowance for any additional home fans.

At the risk of offending some, if we took the “traditional” bottom six (Aberdeen, Hibs, Inverness, Dunfermline, St Mirren and St Johnstone), these would stand to lose between £69,000 (St Johnstone) and £140,000 (Aberdeen) per annum. On the plus side, however, they would benefit from a saving on policing costs of £15,000 and should also benefit from a minimum uplift in TV income of £90,000. In other words, Aberdeen would be worse off by about £35k, Hibs would be about even, and the others would benefit by about £30k.

For the “traditional” top six, it would be worse because they would lose 2 RFC home games per season which would amount to a loss of £186k in the case of Hearts and £270k in the case of Kilmarnock. Again, each club would save on policing costs (£30K) and would benefit from a minimum uplift in TV income of £90k. In the current TV deal they would of course be playing for the potential of an uplift of £180k if they could get 3rd spot and an uplift of £1m if they can secure 2nd spot. Even jumping from 6th to 4th would net a club an additional £180k; suddenly even the potential losses of Kilmarnock and Motherwell pale.

The big unknown now is the SKY TV Deal and Neal Doncaster’s rather dramatic statements. I cannot for the life of me believe that it states or gives the impression that neither Celtic or Rangers can be relegated or in the bottom 6 – that would surely fall foul of all football statutes and I suspect would fall foul of EU legislation as well as national legislation (trading standards?).

I believe the contract will state that the contract is worth £x per season provided SKY have rights to broadcast 4 CFC-RFC games per season otherwise the contract will reduce by x%. Personally I believe that when you compare the SPL contract with the EPL or any other major league, it is actually pretty rubbish and cannot be much cheaper so if RFC disappeared we would be looking at an overall reduction of no more than 10 – 15% in the total value of the contract. That’s the kind of percentage that could easily be absorbed to allow for a more equitable distribution of income so that clubs would not be any worse off in terms of TV income.

[Captain_Sensible]

The analysis above doesn't take into account increased gates in general as a result of increased competition in the league with no Old Firm. Nor does it take into account increased policing and stewarding costs for the Old Firm games

We got bigger gates against Morton last time we were in the First Division than we do now against the Old Firm. A more competitive league with Morton replacing Rangers and we'd actually be better off.

It always amuses me when Old Firm fans desperately try to convince us all that we need their clubs. Why are they so desperate to convince us all?

This post has been edited by Captain_Sensible: 05 February 2012 - 11:40

[Fife Saint]

Captain_Sensible, on 05 February 2012 - 11:39, said:

The analysis above doesn't take into account increased gates in general as a result of increased competition in the league with no Old Firm. Nor does it take into account increased policing and stewarding costs for the Old Firm games

We got bigger gates against Morton last time we were in the First Division than we do now against the Old Firm. A more competitive league with Morton replacing Rangers and we'd actually be better off.

It always amuses me when Old Firm fans desperately try to convince us all that we need their clubs. Why are they so desperate to convince us all?

It's good that Morton are in such great shape to make the leap into the SPL then.

[vanpablo79]

Captain_Sensible, on 05 February 2012 - 11:39, said:

The analysis above doesn't take into account increased gates in general as a result of increased competition in the league with no Old Firm. Nor does it take into account increased policing and stewarding costs for the Old Firm games

We got bigger gates against Morton last time we were in the First Division than we do now against the Old Firm. A more competitive league with Morton replacing Rangers and we'd actually be better off.

It always amuses me when Old Firm fans desperately try to convince us all that we need their clubs. Why are they so desperate to convince us all?

yes but the ticket price was substantially different.

few dunfermline fans will pay spl prices but will pay sfl prices especially when you take TV into consideration.

[Captain_Sensible]

vanpablo79, on 05 February 2012 - 18:21, said:

yes but the ticket price was substantially different.

"Substantially"? No, don't think so!

Quote

few dunfermline fans will pay spl prices but will pay sfl prices especially when you take TV into consideration.

Few would pay sfl prices either!

Fans would rather see their team battling at the top of a league rather than the bottom end or stuck in the middle. Get shot of the Old Firm and you open up a competitive league and gates will rise.

Even if clubs do lose income, it doesn't realy matter - the same players will just get paid less.

As I keep saying - why are Old Firm so keen on convincing us all that we need their clubs?

[wisbit]

Captain_Sensible, on 05 February 2012 - 20:30, said:

"Substantially"? No, don't think so!



Few would pay sfl prices either!

Fans would rather see their team battling at the top of a league rather than the bottom end or stuck in the middle. Get shot of the Old Firm and you open up a competitive league and gates will rise.

Even if clubs do lose income, it doesn't realy matter - the same players will just get paid less.

As I keep saying - why are Old Firm so keen on convincing us all that we need their clubs?

An there will be no Pars fans left.

[Clayhole Blue]

THE KING, on 05 February 2012 - 07:01, said:

I think rangers going under would be a good thing for Scottish football all the thousands of ex rangers fans who travelled from all over Scotland would now just go to their local clubs

Errrrr.........?