Flawed governance- former SPL CEO admits that the SFA washed their hands over Financial Fair Play

Former SPL CEO Roger Mitchell has admitted that the SFA paid lip service to UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules.

Had they applied the rules Rangers would either have been refused a UEFA licence for season 2011/12 or they would have paid their overdue bill of £2.8m due to Her Majesty over payments made to Tore Andre Flo and Ronald de Boer.

Mitchell was head of the SPL when the token contracts for those players, signed from Chelsea and Barcelona, were approved despite recently receiving far higher contracts for Chris Sutton and Neil Lennon at a similar time.

Turning a blind eye at the time helped Mitchell pick up bonus payments on all commercial deals built around the O** F*** including the Sky Sports contracts. Even thought it was a financially doped club from Ibrox as long as they could fulfil fixtures Mitchell was raking in the cash.

That attitude of non-compliance continued throughout the first decade of the century, when the Met Police ordered a raid on Ibrox in July 2007 no-one in Scottish football thought about getting an an independent audit or investigation carried out..

Mitchell had fled the scene before the house of cards fell in. Dave Murray’s £30m asking price was reduced to £1 when Craig Whyte took on the growing tax liabilities.

The former billionaire was forced to accept Ally McCoist as manager, with the cheeky chappie in the dug-out of dignity Malmo and Maribor did the rest leading to administration, liquidation and the launch of The Banter Years which visited Amsterdam last week.

With no artificial funding source the Tribute Act were taken apart by Ajax, leaving angry bears to again grumble about ‘where’s the money gone’

Speaking to the Daily Record, Mitchell explained:

It’s good to see UEFA becoming directly involved in this matter. Financial Fair Play had become a bit of a shambles and the clubs with the best lawyers could just ignore it, as we saw in the past with Manchester City and Paris St-Germain.

If Rangers believe that these rules have teeth then they’re going to need to be careful when it comes to recruitment, especially since their finances have always been hand-to-mouth in recent years.

They’ve done incredibly well to get where they are but they’ll just have to watch it. Previously, it was down to the SFA to check their clubs’ finances but Celtic and Rangers are their biggest assets so the SFA were never going to refuse them European licenses.

That’s why it wasn’t working – it was flawed governance. It was the same all across Europe and I’m not surprised the SFA washed their hands of it. There was a conflict of interest and UEFA probably realised that.

Not many people benefitted more directly from the doping days more than Mitchell.

In 2013 the issue of the UEFA licence was brought up at the Celtic AGM with the club keen to distance themselves from asking questions of the SFA, initially claiming that they had been reassured by Stewart Regan despite Sheriff Officers visiting Ibrox in August 2011 over the unpaid tax due to Her Majesty.

Celtic have continued to kick the can on the issue even with Rod Petrie and Andrew Dickson, who were both on the Licence Committee, retaining senior positions within Scottish football.

At the 2019 Celtic AGM Peter Lawwell laughed that he had never seen the Five Way Agreement from 2012 that gives the Tribute Act immunity from certain football legislation.

Ian Bankier, Brian Wilson and Tom Allison have been Celtic directors throughout this period, those three men form the Remuneration Committee that awarded Lawwell pay and bonus totalling £3.5m in the year to 30 June 2019 despite failing to reach the UEFA Champions League.

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