Not even a 6-0 hammering of Bury can cover up the horrendous week that Dave King has had.
With news that the Takeover Panel were about to confirm a Contempt of Court charge he convinced Hummel to rush out pictures of the three new kits that the Tribute Act will be wearing.
Unfortunately for the gullible no launch details were included, last night the reasons for that emerged.
From June 4 Sevco have been in correspondence with Sports Direct over a new retail deal agreed with a third party.
In June 2017 King had apparently terminated the retail deal that they had with Mike Ashley’s firm- in November it emerged that a payment of £3m had been made to ‘terminate’ that deal.
Last night it was discovered that Sports Direct have the right to match any future retail offer- and they will.
Another costly and losing legal wrangle lies ahead with Billy in Larkhall unable to get a new orange top snuggled over his waist.
It seems that his chairman was acting like a glib and shameless liar when he told ‘Rangers TV‘:
“It is obviously well-known to all the supporters the situation with Sports Direct has been very, very difficult for a number of years. After regime change, the new board came in and we looked at the agreements which have been put in place, and we just felt, from the club’s point of view, they were so onerous. The club had signed away all the rights to Rangers Retail Limited, and we just felt there was a very, very inadequate return coming back to the club.
“That led to some very acrimonious litigation that was all in the public arena. There were threats to sue the directors, there was a threat to put me in jail for saying unkind things about Sports Direct, so it ended up an extremely toxic and acrimonious relationship with Sports Direct.
“Around about 10 months ago, we got to a point where Sports Direct said to us rather than continuing the litigation, and I think they could see we were fairly resolved, and we weren’t going to give in as we as Rangers could not live with the arrangements, they felt ‘let’s see if we can continue and see if we can negotiate new arrangements.’
“We took a view that we would do that obviously as getting a retail arrangement is very, very important to the club. Rangers has always, traditionally had the most successful retail operation in Scotland, by far, and one of the most successful in the UK.
“It was a great loss to the club in terms of competing locally and in Europe if we were going to continue to be denied access to that revenue stream. So we felt it was important – we agreed to enter into negotiations with Sports Direct and the fact it still took us nine months to get to the point where we are today, again reflects how difficult these discussions were, so I am absolutely delighted we have got to the position now where we do have a retail arrangement in place where I can genuinely say to supporters for the first time, please come and buy your kit now in the full knowledge that, by far, the largest benefit of that is going back into the club, and in particular, to the football squad.
“This is very favourable to Rangers. I think what it does is recognise what the previous board should have made sure was included in the earlier arrangements – i.e. Rangers is a very strong economic force and the level of retail kit we sell is far and above many of the English Premier League clubs.
“We feel that balance is recognised in the agreements. It’s a fair distribution in the sense that Sports Direct will be rewarded for the facilities they provide – they carry stock and save us a lot of cash flow in terms of carrying that stock for us and they must be rewarded for that.
“By far the largest proportion is now coming back into the club, and that’s the way we feel it always should have been.”
It seems that it was more than the £3m pay off to Ashley that King forgot to tell supporters about.