Funny business of a football club

WHEN Lawrence Marlborough announced, in November 1988, he had sold his controlling stake in Rangers Football Club for 6 million, a plaintive cry went round my newsroom. “Who is this guy David Murray? Anyone ever heard of him?” I was the only journalist around that day who had.

A few years earlier I had been sent to do an in-depth interview with Murray at his then-headquarters in an old West Lothian mansion. He had won the Scottish Business Achievement Award and the trust that organised this annual ceremony liked to include a major profile of the previous winner in the following year’s programme. Murray’s was a colourful, poignant and inspiring story. He had been sent to board at Fettes by his father, an Ayrshire coal merchant but had had to leave in his early teens when his father’s heavy gambling brought his business to its knees. David talked about his own early entrepreneurial instincts, selling anything he could create demand for to his fellow pupils, then starting his own metals trading business in his early twenties. He also talked about the day, aged 23, when, coming home from playing rugby in his Lotus sports car, he hit a tree and lost both his legs.

Our first encounter was lively and engaging. I stayed in touch as his business interests developed into areas like property and sub-assembly for the electronics industry. I knew he had tried and failed to buy the football club he supported as a boy, Ayr United. But when the news came through that he was buying Rangers, I was as astonished as everyone else.

Some three years on, with the early 1990s recession beginning to bite, my editor called me into his office. “I’ve heard there are serious problems with David Murray’s property interests. Could you check it out?” he suggested. I talked to my contacts and checked out the relevant company accounts. It rapidly became clear there were problems. They were big ones.

The auditors had qualified their opinion on some of the accounts. Drilling into the numbers it was easy to see that these businesses, covering everything from a big spread of development land around Edinburgh airport to a landmark building in Charlotte Square, were only still able to trade because Bank of Scotland had pumped very big loans and additional equity into the businesses.

And this was happening at the same time when a recently-acquired Rangers’ overdraft had tripled in the space of a year. All in all, my editor’s whispers had substance. This was a story of considerable significance for both the bank and for the credibility of David Murray’s growing business empire.

When the stories on what I had found appeared, he went ballistic. There were demands I be sacked. I have never spoken to David Murray from that day to this. I once found myself in his company, tried to broker a peace and was right royally snubbed for my pains.

I’m telling you all this because it illustrates how the events of recent days – plunging one half of the Old Firm into ignominious administration and threatening its very existence in its present form – have been incubating for a very long time indeed. Craig Whyte will have to account for his stewardship of Rangers since last May. What happened to the Ticketus millions? Why, since last May, 9m in taxes wasn’t remitted to HMRC but used to pay for club operating costs instead?

However the idea that the way to run a sustainable football club is to pay whatever it takes to buy success on the field, leverage the business as high as the highest tier in the stands and trust that the bank will still be standing right behind you if it all goes wrong was already there, in Rangers’ case, the day David Murray did that deal nearly a quarter of a century ago.

This whole saga also exposes some of the malign forces and the crony relationships that led us to the great banking crash of 2008 and the protracted slump that has followed.

In the boom years we had bankers who thought they were entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs who thought the special relationships they built up with individual bankers would see them through the ups and downs of the economic cycle, no matter how much they owed.

David Murray revelled in being one of the chosen highly-leveraged few. At the beginning of the 1990s, when his property interests already had 40m in overdraft facilities and a further 11.5m in equity from Bank of Scotland to keep them afloat, he explained away his “exceptional” treatment as being down to “sixteen years of never letting the bank down”.

But that bank, in essence, brought itself down because of its vast exposure to commercial property lending in businesses like Murray’s, when the tide turned. Bank of Scotland has paid a very heavy price. Today it is little more than a brand name within the wider Lloyds Banking Group, itself still 43 per cent state-owned. Once that happened David Murray must have known the party was finally over. He too will have to account for why he saw fit to sell Rangers on, in the way he did, to Craig Whyte.

Scottish politicians, clamouring to get a early settlement between HMRC and the administrators so that another part of the institutional “fabric of the Scottish nation” doesn’t go the way of Bank of Scotland should reflect a little more on some of the other lessons to be learned from this debacle.

A leading Scottish bank, a leading Scottish entrepreneur and a leading Scottish football club have all, in their own ways, been consumed by this crisis. What does that say about how we do business in Scotland? What are the shortcomings? What should we be doing differently?

Motherwell FC is another Scottish Premier League club that has tasted administration in recent times. When Motherwell’s owner John Boyle decide to stand down he gifted control of his shares to the Motherwell board.