Rangers appear to be at constant war with the SPFL and the latest disagreement isn’t going away any time soon.
Claims and counter claims have done nothing to make the game’s governing body look any less of a shambles with Stewart Robertson shaming Neil Doncaster et al with his very public and open letter to the other member clubs – at some point it would be nice if the SPFL executive could just get on with their jobs.
Hailed as a record deal – which it is – the sponsorship agreement with Cinch is still, however, some way below what other countries of similar standing get and football finance expert Kieran Maguire reckons that they will be far from happy at the current stand-off, as told to Football Insider:
“The SPFL deal is worth £8m, which is a record.
“They were criticised for not having a sponsor last season. As part of the deal, you’ve got to feature Cinch’s logo on the slveeve and in the matchday event.
“It works out at around £34,000 per club, per season. That’s a lot of money for a club League 2, though I presume the money is tiered not split equally between each team in the league system.
“But there is no love lost between the SPFL and Rangers. The club believes that, under Scottish law, they don’t have to comply with the deal.
“The downside is that Rangers are currently the biggest draw in Scottish football in terms of viewership and interest.
“That means that they are on TV every week. From Cinch’s point of view, if they refuse to play ball, it’s a bitter loss of profile. They’ll be furious.“
As Robertson explained in his letter, Rangers are well within their rights to refuse to display the league sponsors on their kit and around their ground, it is in the SPFL’s own rules that were raised as a concern before the agreement was signed – you really couldn’t make it up.
In terms of revenue, as Maguire explains, it isn’t worth anywhere near the sort of sum being mentioned to Rangers when you compare it to the Bitcii deal, for example, where they get their names on the players’ shorts having paid a seven-figure fee for a two-year contract.
As we, as a club, tried to highlight last summer, the SPFL executive really isn’t fit for purpose and it’s just the latest in a long line of examples that they are incapable of operating at a level that is of genuine benefit to Scottish football and it’s member clubs – if only they’d listened to us the first time.