Details published of Ibrox price fixing cartel

The full extent of the price fixing deal that resulted in a £225,000 for the Ibrox Tribute Act has been published.

While Dave King was ditching Sports Direct in a deal that would cost his club £8m plus legal fees a new arrangement was being put into place with Hummel/Elite.

When the new shirts for the 2018/19 season came out JD Sports were selling them at £55 which was £5 dearer than the official club retailer Gers Online.

Rather than take the Gers Online price down to £55 the Ibrox club pressured JD Sport into adding £5 onto their price which seemed to suit all parties except the loyal fans.

The Times reports:

The competition regulator has revealed the private talks held between executives and their employees who colluded to fix the price of replica Rangers FC shirts.

The Competition and Markets Authority documents detail how an employee at JD Sports was “shitting himself” when he came under pressure from Elite, a sports supplier, to increase the price of a Rangers shirt by £5. The regulator’s investigation revealed how the football club, based in Glasgow, colluded with the two firms to increase the price of a Rangers shirt from £55 to £60.
JD Sports and Elite have been fined £1.49 million and £459,000 respectively, while Rangers was fined £225,000.

The watchdog’s report outlines how Rangers executives were concerned about “noise coming from the fans” and a “frenzy” on social media when customers saw that shirts were dearer on Elite’s website, Gers Online, than they were at JD Sports. Elite made Rangers-branded clothing and sold club-branded products through its online store and later in shops in Glasgow and Belfast, while JD was the only UK-wide major retailer also selling the shirts.

The regulator’s report said Rangers became focused on “normalising the club” after fans boycotted its merchandise in protest at a deal signed with Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct.

Elite won a contract to supply JD Sports with Rangers clothing and gave a recommended retail price of £55 for the shirts in a price list in May 2018. The supplier later agreed with the club to launch the shirt at a price of £60 on Gers Online but failed to communicate the price change to JD Sports, which started selling the shirt at the cheaper price in September 2018 before noting the price difference.

One employee emailed a colleague that changing the price “would get us terrible press”.

A Rangers director told the regulator that the club “got an avalanche of complaints from fans not long after the strips had gone on sale”. The director added: “We’ve got a lot of fans saying ‘wait a minute, what’s happened here?’, you know, ‘You’re ripping us off.’ ”

A club director was told to contact Elite to “see what they can do”. The director told the watchdog that the conversation “was along the lines of, ‘We’ve got a problem with the board. They’re kicking my ass here. What can be done about it?’ ”

A director at Elite told the regulator that they then called JD Sports “because I had the world raining down on me from Rangers”. They said that the conversation “was along the lines of, ‘Look, we’ve made a pretty major clerical error with our recommended retail prices we suggest to you … I would like to recommended that you adopt our revised recommended prices.’ ”

Elite then became concerned that the JD Sports employee was not senior enough to make the changes. The director texted a Rangers director to say the employee was “shitting himself with doing it” and the club should get in touch with JD directly.

The director at Elite later texted a director at JD asking if they could “call me when convenient please sir”, although the regulator said it was unclear whether the two spoke.

Elite was, however, able to report back to Rangers that “JD Sports had confirmed it would increase the price of the replica shirt to £60”.

Elite Sports Group has filed an intention to appoint administrators. The distributor, which supplied the retail outlets of a number of British clubs including Southampton and Coventry City, had an exclusive UK deal with Danish kit manufacturer Hummel.