DAILY RECORD RANGERS TAKEOVER DESPERATION PLUMBS NEW DEPTHS
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- May 11
- 3 min read
I’ve spoken a number of times here on the ACSOM Blog before about the importance for journalists to separate what is actually happening, from what they want to happen.
However, the Daily Record continues to lean into the latter at the expense of the former in its Rangers Takeover coverage.
Paul Dalglish Drafted in to Push Daily Record Rangers Takeover Narrative
According to Paul Dalglish, who to give him his due, enjoyed a fairly successful period in the MLS as both a player and a coach, “All of Scottish Football will benefit from the American Takeover of Rangers”.
Leaning further into the lies they themselves concocted the Record drops the following slop of utter fiction in the next paragraph: “Rangers were demoted to the bottom division after being struck down by financial crisis.”
No, they weren’t. That’s a matter of legal record. Just ask the poor guy who lost his court case after the bookies refused to pay out on his bet that Rangers would be relegated. The Record's report at the time directly contradicts the narrative the newspaper is pushing today
Rangers went out of business in 2012. They ceased to be, they became an ex-club. The Daily Record themselves ran headlines to that effect at the time. Their scattershot attempts at revisionism since then fool no-one.
The original Rangers died, in debt and in disgrace. We know that, The Rangers support knows that, and The Daily Record certainly knows that.
Dalglish elaborated further: “Yeah, Scottish football died a little bit when Rangers had their struggles. In my opinion. It lost its relevance.”
Hardly. For the first time in decades, fans actually felt empowered. It was their collective effort that saw the new club sent to the third division and made to earn their place at the top table.
It was the one time in recent Scottish football history that fans of almost all our clubs came together to see justice done.
Our game was stronger as a result.
However, Dalglish doubled down on this fallacy. He continued:
“Most people outside of Scotland watch Scottish football for the Old Firm game, and the amount of money that was invested in Scottish football when there was no Old Firm game, TV revenue, it all went down because there was no Old Firm game.”
How many people watch Bundesliga matches that don’t involve Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund? How many people are interested in Eredivisie games that don’t involve at least one member of the triumvirate that is Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV?
Every European league has big clubs and small clubs. Scotland, as a smaller country, has fewer big clubs than many others. It doesn’t mean our league is irrelevant when one of them disappears.
If anything, it’s the opposite. After 2012, if we’d have actually had competent administrators running our game, the emphasis should have been on building up historically big clubs like Aberdeen, Hearts, Hibs and Dundee United to genuinely challenge Celtic.
Scottish football didn’t suffer without Rangers. It suffered because of a lack of competition.
As I have said many times before, Celtic need to be challenged domestically. That challenge doesn’t need to come from a team that calls themselves Rangers.
The final part of this “story” sees Dalglish invoke the failed economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; an economic model that many see as the starting point for the horrific inequalities in we still see in today’s society.
Dalglish concluded: “If Rangers become stronger, Celtic need to become stronger because they want to stay ahead.
“It can only help everybody, and then there’s the trickle-down effect.”
I think poor Mr. Dalglish may have spent too long listening to the politics of division that currently plagues America.
Trickle-down economics doesn’t work. It didn’t work in the 80s, it doesn’t work now, and it certainly won’t work for the future of Scottish football.
Again, like every single puff-piece like this I read that proclaims “Scottish football needs a strong Rangers!” my response is always the same.
Where were you all in 1994?
Where were the demands that “Scottish football needs a strong Celtic”?
Maybe the Record simply couldn’t afford to pay a staffer to take on such a story at the time. Perhaps the entire sports desk budget for that week had already been blown on bevvy and the hiring of a hearse for a cheap photo-op at Celtic Park?
It’s sad that someone with as much respect internationally as Paul Dalglish has allowed himself to be draw into such a puerile excuse for journalism.
Still, I trust that we can all see it for what it is. This takeover may happen, it may not, but the conduct of The Daily Record throughout this saga has been totally unprofessional.
