It wasn’t a typo, then. When the Rangers accounts revealed that the Ibrox club raked in a paltry £810,000 for Todd Cantwell, Scott Wright, Sam Lammers, Connor Goldson and Robby McCrorie, supporters assumed it was a mix-up at the printers.
Someone, somewhere, had stuck a decimal point in the wrong place.
Turns out it was right all along. Directors really had been so desperate to get high earners off the wage bill they’d punted a job lot of first-team players out the door for three times less than Celtic raked in for Mikey Johnston.
There were audible gasps from shareholders at the AGM when they learned that the collective transfer sales from the last window raised less than half the cash banked by Aberdeen for Ross McCrorie.
No prizes for guessing which club sent the full-back up to Pittodrie for a knockdown price in the first place.
When it comes to transfer fees, journalists should probably come clean on one of the unspoken truths around the whole business.
Scott Wright, Sam Lammers and Todd Cantwell left Rangers in the summer for paltry sums
Connor Goldson and Robby McCrorie also left, with Rangers making just £810k for five players
While agents have been known to offer off-the-record steers on how much a player costs from time to time, clubs rarely offer up any info at all.
Steeped in secrecy, the ‘undisclosed fees’ reported every time a player moves are often approximations, assumptions or speculation. Or, in the case of Sam Lammers, completely made up.
A lost cause in Glasgow, the striker moved to FC Utrecht on loan last January and immediately went on the kind of scoring run no-one knew he had in his locker.
When he started banging them in like Ruud van Nistelrooy on performance-enhancing steroids, Rangers fans rubbed their eyes in disbelief.
They were at it again when finance director James Taylor confessed that a No 9 who had scored 19 goals in 41 Dutch league appearances since January was one of the players who’d left for buttons instead of the £2.5million fee the club seemed happy to let people run with.
In hindsight, full disclosure was never really an option.
It’s easier to let fans labour under the misapprehension that the club had recouped a chunk of their losses than it is to phone round journalists and own up to the fact that they’d allowed one of the Dutch league’s top scorers to walk out the door for next to nothing.
Todd Cantwell was another one punted in the great DFS sale.
Finance director James Taylor confirmed players had gone for £810,000 to gasps at AGM
Mikey Johnston earned Celtic three times more than the five Rangers players combined
Remembered with no great fondness for kissing the badge after a goal against Dundee when the league was already gone, TikTok Todd came, saw and flattered to deceive.
From day one he was never Philippe Clement’s kind of player.
Fast forward six months and John Eustace now describes the midfielder as the ‘focal point’ of a Blackburn team gunning for promotion to the English Premier League.
You can almost predict what happens now. Stick the kettle on for a club down south shelling out £10m for his services in the next 18 months.
Asked to comment on where Rangers go from here, former chairman Alastair Johnston rattled on at length about lunches in Nice and Jim Ratcliffe and club formations before lobbing a dead cat on the table.
Identifying the key priorities for the next chairman, incoming CEO Patrick Stewart and a reconfigured board, Johnston asked: ‘Why do we get such poor media money? Why do the club finishing bottom of the EPL get 28 times more than we do?’
A man with his background must know, more than most, that the biggest impediment to the SPFL raking in more cash for television rights is Premiership clubs refusing to flog any more than 60 games a season to broadcasters.
And that two of the clubs most resistant to blanket coverage of top-flight games are Rangers and Celtic.
While a lousy television deal played some part in the Ibrox outfit making a £17m loss, it’s not even close to the biggest factor.
The more glaring explanation lies in the knowledge that arch-rivals Celtic could earn more from a sell-on clause for Jeremie Frimpong than Rangers have raked in for players over the last four transfer windows.
Back at the AGM of 2020, former chairman John Bennett identified the ‘four pillars’ of fan income, commercial deals, European achievement and player trading as the cornerstones of a sustainable football club.
Strip away the bumper year in 2022, when the club reached a European final and sold Nathan Patterson, Calvin Bassey and Joe Aribo, and the player-trading model has been a catalogue of persistent failure.
When Jose Cifuentes represents the best hope of raking in a decent transfer fee, it might be time to acknowledge that they’re signing the wrong players.
Former Rangers chairman Alastair Johnston made call for more TV cash at AGM
Doncaster doing Old Firm’s dirty work over pyro
The Premier Sports Cup showdown between Celtic and Rangers is the first major final of the year.
And the last thing the occasion needs is a 15-minute delay to kick-off while they wait for the acrid smoke from the fireworks to clear.
There’s an accusation levelled at the SPFL that they’re tough on the little clubs and easy on the big ones.
A decision to discipline Celtic, Rangers and Motherwell over the disruption pyrotechnics cause to the semi-finals feels like a significant departure from the norm.
Scottish football has been slow to get to grips with the irresponsibility of yobs chucking fireworks around.
The day Celtic and Rangers created their own ultra groups, they forged a Frankenstein’s monster.
And neither club shows much inclination to bring them to heel every time they bend the rules.
A cynic might suspect, then, that it suits the clubs just fine for the SPFL to grab the bull by the horns.
Neil Doncaster is paid a handsome salary to act as a human shield for the clubs and couldn’t give two hoots if a crackdown paints another target on his back. It’s not like he has any popularity to lose in the first place.
The SFA, led by chief executive Neil Doncaster (left), has clamped down on clubs over pyro
Fans set off pyrotechnics at the Premier Sports Cup semi final with Motherwell and Rangers
A supporter holds a pyrotechnic aloft during the Celtic and Aberdeen semi-final at Hampden
Forget Ange, Levy is the real panto villain at Spurs
Ange Postecoglou’s return to Scotland should be one of the highlights of the panto season.
The way things are going at Spurs, Big Ange could pitch up at Ibrox in the Europa League on Thursday night to boos from both sets of fans. Assuming he makes it back to Glasgow at all.
Two weeks since they thumped Manchester City 4-0, the great underachievers of English football slid to a wretched defeat at Bournemouth the other night.
An awful performance, the former Celtic boss became involved in an exchange with his own supporters after the final whistle.
Ange Postecoglous saw his Spurs side slide to defeat at Bournemouth on Thursday night
‘They gave me some direct feedback which is taken on board,’ he explained afterwards.
The fourth permanent Spurs manager in five years, Postecoglou will inevitably meet with the same grim end as Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte before him.
And, when he does, an entitled fanbase might finally be forced to ask why managers who’ve delivered trophies and titles everywhere else crash and burn at Spurs.
Is it really down to the bosses? Or does the real problem lie with Daniel Levy, the common denominator during years of failure?
