Ally McCoist has shared a touching story of the sacrifices made by Rangers players in 2012 to ensure that they could walk away from the club as free agents.
When administration arrived in February 2012 massive wage cuts were required to complete the season.
While McCoist gave a heart-breaking story of an elderly club employee being saved from redundancy the reality was that players demanded cut price departures in return for taking a three month wage cut.
“The players took a salary sacrifice but, for that, they got clauses in their contracts which would allow them to leave on rock bottom prices if clubs came in for them,” Sandy Jardine told BBC Scotland. “I have to be honest and say I think the players have used our predicament to their gain.”
In the end those assurances weren’t required, when the CVA was rejected players could either TUPE over to the new club or get employment elsewhere. Steven Naismith, Kyle Lafferty and Allan McGregor were among the players that moved to other clubs as free agents.
McCoist provided a sugar-coated version of events on TalkSPORT with The Sun reporting:
One of the things that we were extremely proud of when we went into administration at Rangers was the fact that the playing staff, coaching staff, managerial staff rightly took a wage cut to save the jobs of everybody else on the staff.
One of the pleasing things to come out of that horrendous situation was the fact we managed to keep everybody’s jobs. Obviously players left the club eventually on freedom of contract and all that stuff but everybody took a wage cut.
I remember one of the older lads coming in and I don’t mean a player, an older member of staff. He was in tears and I was talking to him about 7.45am one morning – he was telling me he was going to lose his job.
I had a look at it and he was only in three or four days and was only on a couple of hundred quid a week. I was thinking to myself that this absolutely cannot be right.
This is his job, something he has been doing for years and years. And they are going to pay him off rather than ask a player or manager to take a wage cut so we eventually got all that sorted.
And once Charles Green created the new club a few weeks later McCoist TUPE’d over his contract which is believed to have paid him a basic of £700,000 for managing in the fourth tier of Scottish football.
McCoist bought 1,000,000 penny shares as soon as the new company was set up with fans buying shares at 70p each on the public listing in December 2012.
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The players never left on freedom of contract as McCoist claimed, they declined to TUPE and left as free agents.
Davis, McGregor, Steven Whittaker, Lafferty, Jamie Ness, John Fleck, Sone Aluko and Rhys McCabe left under TUPE regulations, attracting the anger of Sandy Jardine.
CLICK HERE for PFA Scotland statement on players leaving as free agents