I don’t need to dig up the quotes from various Scottish
football experts, blazers, ex-Rangers players and pundits. We’ve all seen them
too often to need them. Scottish football needs a strong Rangers. Rangers has
always been a giant of our game, part of the “O** F***” duopoly that has
reigned over Scottish football since time immemorial. It’s often presented as “having
one dominant club is bad for the game.”
Except it’s a myth. Apart from the last 30 years, the “O**
F***” has never been a duopoly. Scottish football has always been dominated by
one club.
I’m not arguing that Rangers were never a big club, or never
the dominant force in Scottish football, because obviously they were both at
different times, but when you look at the history of the game in Scotland,
there never was a time when one club wasn’t in the ascendancy, and we haven’t had
a legitimately strong Rangers for forty years.
Historians like to divide time into convenient chunks in
order to make sense of history. It’s a narrative that is usually imposed with
the benefit of hindsight and a study of the “switchover” period between eras usually
reveals no seismic changes had taken place. The people living through it do not
notice any difference.
In early 15th Century Italy, no one was conscious
that society was experiencing “the Renaissance.” Life went on exactly as before
for the vast majority of the people. Similarly, no one woke up on 1st
January 1500 thinking, “well, that’s the Middle Ages over,” but nevertheless,
the division of history into different eras does make sense. Society changed
far less between 1200 and 1400 than it did between 1400 and 1600.
Organised association football in Scotland goes back to the
1860’s. There’s approximately 150 years of history there and neither Celtic nor
Rangers were around for all of it. As historians, if we want to truly
understand the story of Scottish football, it makes sense to divide it into
eras. A problem is that different historians of Scottish football would
identify different eras and there might be wide disagreements about the time
frames of those eras and why they should be recognised as different eras. I’m
going to have a stab at it here.
My first era of Scottish football runs from the formation of
Queen’s Park in 1867 to the foundation of the Scottish Football League in 1890.
This would encompass a period when Scottish clubs played in the FA Cup, through
the beginnings of the Scottish Cup and the clandestine development of
professionalism. This is the origin story of Scottish football, at the end of
which it is recognisably the game we all know and love today. From a single
club, we now have a national cup competition, a national league competition,
and paid players. It has become a major business.
My second era of Scottish football runs from 1890 to 1920.
In this 30 year period, the league grew in importance and a second tier was
added. By this time, the League was now almost the equal of the Scottish Cup in
prestige and we are now firmly into the 20th Century. It’s a convenient
finishing point for two reasons – the end of WWI, and a handing over of power.
Celtic were unquestionably the dominant club. It was Celtic’s first Golden Age
with Willie Maley’s team sweeping all before them, including a 62 game unbeaten
run between 1915 and 1917. Legends like Kelly, Quinn and Gallacher were the
bedrock of Celtic’s dominance. By the end of WWI, things were changing.
My third era of Scottish football runs from 1920 to 1939.
Celtic still had some great players. Gallacher was around till 1925, then the
torch was passed to the Jimmys McGrory and McStay, but it was a very
unsuccessful period for Celtic, with only flashes of glory. Despite those
intermittent League and Cup wins, the inter-war period was Rangers’ time in the
sun. Hitching themselves to the Orange bandwagon in the aftermath of an influx
of Ulster Protestant shipyard workers to the new Harland & Woolf shipyard
in Govan, their new sectarian signing policy and a positioning of themselves as
the Scottish response to the Irish Celtic, saw Rangers became the dominant force
in Scottish football and Celtic lapsed into a long, long period of
underachievement. Rangers would win 15 of the 20 League Titles in those years.
They won three in a row between 1922-23 and 1924-25, five in a row from 1926-27
to 1930-31, and three in a row again from 1932-33 to 1934-35.
World War Two saw an end to official football competition in
Scotland (only the Scottish Cup was suspended in WWI, which shows it was still
regarded as the premier competition) and my fourth era of Scottish football
runs from 1946 to 1965. My reasoning for this division is that Rangers
continued to dominate the game, with Celtic winning just one league title and a
handful of Scottish and League Cups in that 20 year period. It ends with the
arrival at Celtic as manager of Jock Stein, after which all is changed, changed
utterly.
In that post-war period, Rangers were not unchallenged, but
their challenge came from various teams. Between their league titles (never
more than two in a row), there were league title wins for Hibernian, Aberdeen,
Hearts, Dundee and Kilmarnock. They won half of the league titles in that
period, with none of the other winners taking more than two titles.
My fifth era of Scottish football runs from 1965 to 1986.
This was Celtic’s second Golden Age and even though Jock Stein left the club in
1978, to me it was still the Stein era as his apprentices McNeill and Hay
continued his work. It is easy to regard the 1978-86 period as a separate era
as Aberdeen and Dundee Utd launched a serious challenge to Celtic’s hegemony,
but despite that, Celtic still won more titles in that period than Aberdeen did
(4 to 3). Celtic were still No1.
My sixth era of Scottish football is 1986 to 2000. This was
the Murray era at Rangers (yes, he only took over in late 1988, but the massive
spending began under Graeme Souness in 1986), with Advocaat coming in at the
tail-end. Celtic were in a tailspin in this period, being saved in 1994 by
Fergus McCann, but our on-field recovery by necessity took a little longer.
This was another period of Rangers dominance, fuelled by the
unsustainable spending which sowed the seeds of their liquidation in 2012. The
O** F*** didn’t dominate in this period. Celtic won the league only twice in 14
years. But for the Centenary Year double, the last hurrah of the Stein era
Celtic, Rangers would have won the league eleven times in a row. Take away Wim
Jansen’s title win and that would have been fourteen.
My seventh era of Scottish football is 2000-2012. It began
with the arrival at Celtic of Martin O’Neill and ended with Rangers’
liquidation. This era also sees the beginning of Celtic’s third Golden Age. In
that 12 year period, Rangers won five titles (2002-03, 2004-05, 2008-09,
2009-10, 2010-11), all of them EBT fuelled, and all of them in any other
country would be expunged from the record. This era is the first time since the
pre-WWI era when it could reasonably be argued that such a thing as an O** F***
duopoly exists, and it was all built on an illusion. There was no legitimately strong
Rangers in that period.
If ever there was an O** F*** duopoly in Scottish football,
it was the second era, which ran from 1890 to 1920 which saw Celtic take 15
league titles to Rangers’ 10.
That apart, we have had long periods of dominance by one
club, not two.
The first era, before the beginnings of league competition,
was dominated by Queen’s Park. Their hegemony was briefly threatened by Vale of
Leven in the late 1870’s but had been re-established in the 1880’s. Although a few
other clubs did manage to win the Scottish Cup, Queen’s Park won it as late as
1893, by which time they were playing clubs who were professional in all but
name. Newspaper reports of the 1892 final in which Celtic defeated Queen’s Park
refer to the Spiders as, “the premier club.”
Celtic and Rangers between them dominated the second era,
with Celtic on top, then comes a long 40 year spell with Rangers as undisputed
No1 up to 1965.
Since then, for 50 years Celtic has been No1, broken only by
a brief period in the early 1980’s when Aberdeen emerged as serious contenders,
and a ten year spell when Rangers spent their way to nine in a row and a
further ten year spell when an EBT-fuelled Rangers just about managed to keep
pace with Celtic before expiring.
So the idea of an O** F*** duopoly in Scottish football is
really a myth. It belongs to a period which ended nearly a century ago. The
norm in Scottish football has historically been dominance to a greater or
lesser extent by one club.
Rangers* fans make a great deal of their “54 titles,” which
is actually 53 and a half as the first was shared with Dumbarton and if goal
average or goal difference had been used to split the teams, it would have been
Dumbarton’s alone. The reality is that 33 of them were won before 1965, which
is the AD of Scottish football. Most of their titles are BS as it were. 60% of
them were won before Jock Stein became Celtic manager.
In the 52 years since, Rangers had one period of dominance,
from 1986 – 2000, which ultimately killed them. They were finished off by the
EBT’s it took to keep them anywhere near Celtic after the arrival of O’Neill.
So when you hear that “Scottish football needs a strong
Rangers,” and that “One club dominating is bad for the game,” remember two
things:
1)
Historically, one club has always dominated in
Scottish football. It has merely alternated between Celtic and Rangers for most
of that time. It has been more like a pendulum swinging back and forth than a
duopoly.
2)
We haven’t had a legitimately strong Rangers
since the mid 1970’s, and even then they did no more than interrupt a period of
Celtic dominance.
Winning the odd title here and there does not equate to
dominance. That comes from a sustained period of league title wins (eg more
than half in a 10 year period) and only twice since the mid 1960’s has Rangers
had a sustained period of league title wins – the nine in a row which was
bought at a cost that brought them to their knees, and five more this century paid
for by EBT’s which killed them.
A strong Rangers is history. The O** F*** is mythology.
