It’s no secret that Rangers and the directorate of the SPFL haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye as of late as the Ibrox club invoke one of the organisation’s rules to avoid promoting a new cinch partnership.
The Gers have been clear in recent weeks that they believe the game is being undersold north of the border and Ibrox Managing Director Stewart Robertson made that clear in a recent interview.
Whilst the cinch fiasco relates more closely to previously arranged and conflicting retail contracts – believed to be concerned with chairman Douglas Park – plenty aren’t convinced the deal itself represents value for money.
In a letter to member clubs – written after SPFL chair Murdoch MacLennan took aim at Rangers for snubbing cinch branding this season – Stewart Robertson questioned the use of third-party contractors in securing the deal.
Namely, this involved a £100k per season fee over the course of five seasons delivered to the third party for the duration of the cinch deal.
This is a substantial fee in any instance, but even more so when you read that the deal is reportedly worth only £1.6m per season to the SPFL, or £8m over five years [Daily Mail].
To get some perspective on this – and to highlight Rangers’ apparent disagreement with the incompetency of the SPFL board – cinch are appearing here, there and everywhere at present.
Those watching the first weekend of the Premier League might’ve noticed that Tottenham Hotspur – one of the division’s biggest clubs – were sporting cinch branding on their sleeves.
According to reports, the online used car trading company could be paying a whopping £10m per season to advertise on the Premier League side’s sleeves.
This is the going rate at “big six” Premier League clubs south of the border, according to Sports Pro Media.
If that is true, cinch are paying £2m less than that to advertise in the stadiums, on the sleeves and to offer a Man of the Match at the grounds of all 42 member clubs of the SPFL – FOR FIVE YEARS.
That includes Rangers – dispute aside – and Celtic; two of the biggest clubs in Europe and the UK.
Some of you might claim that this has something to do with the disparity of the English game and the Scottish game. And you might have a point.
But the suggestion that this is anywhere near representative, or that this is a good deal for Scottish football, or that the jokers running the SPFL have sold the game here well, is laughable.
Perhaps the cut-price SPFL deal is also one of the reasons why cinch have managed to afford headline partnerships with five of the biggest music festivals in Britain this year [cinch].
Rangers – the biggest club in the country – have largely transformed their commercial department with the hiring of Director of Commercial and Marketing James Bisgrove.
The work done here highlights the incompetency of those at the SPFL.
Bisgrove has grown Rangers’ partner portfolio to close to 40 and whilst the details of these are largely kept under wraps, consider the deal with Turkish cryptocurrency company Bitci.
Signed last season, the deal has seen the launch of a new Rangers Fan Token which sold out to the tune of €3m on its launch earlier this year.
But for a place on the Ibrox club’s shorts and as a partner, that deal was said to be worth an initial £1.5m over 12 months to Rangers.
That is only £300k less than the total amount being shared across the entire 42 clubs of Scottish professional football for this season.
If one club can command this sort of fee, then how, to paraphrase Robertson, can we say we’ve sold the game as a whole well enough? It’s simple – we can’t.
Scottish football needs to stop eating itself alive over tribal loyalties and properly hold those incompetent to account.
The Scottish game deserves better – surely Rangers aren’t the only ones who can see that?
Meanwhile, Rangers fans have been taking aim at their Celtic rivals and making an Ibrox Stadium demand of the Gers board ahead of an upcoming Old Firm.
