Yes, odd title for this piece,
but bear with me; all will be revealed.
As we know whales are the largest
creatures on earth. Their dietary requirements are vast and the vast oceans
provide immeasurable plunder to sustain them. Take the blue whale. It can devour well beyond 40 million krill
per day, krill being the tiny shrimp-esque crustaceans whales survive on.
So what happens if you take the
blue whale out of the ocean and plonk it in a large swimming pool? Does it
suddenly require less krill/food in order to survive? Of course not – its
dietary requirements remain exactly the same, and if they are not provided it
will perish.
Ok, enough zoology, but I am
hoping regular readers will already know where I am going with this logic.
Rangers fans are irate at the
loss of cash, the bleeding of revenue, and blame everyone from the board at Ibrox to
Whyte, to Murray
for being responsible for it. They certainly had their part to play, but they
are not around now and the board is. So the board gets both barrels.
However, going back to my
metaphor, Rangers are the whale, the SPL was the ocean, and the lower tiers are
the large swimming pool.
Let us take a look at the hard
numbers:
Winning the SPL nets a club £2.4M.
By contrast, winning the Third
Division earned us £42,000.
In one, instant, catastrophic
fell-swoop Rangers just lost nearly £2.4M.
League One gave us £54,000.
Not much better is it?
Now TV money:
SPL winners take £2.7M of the domestic pot for
themselves.
By contrast the National League
has to share £2M among 20 clubs
(thanks to the blackmail in order to gain SFA membership), which means Rangers
receive anywhere from £50,000 to £200,000.
Now we move onto CL cash.
Qualification for the CL group
stage guarantees £6.7M. That is a
basic payout simply for being in the group stage, be it by automatic slot or
qualifying.
Teams are then guaranteed a
further £3.3M for the 6 certain
matches they play in the group stage.
And let us not forget the CL TV
rights’ cash.
As Celtic were the only Scottish
side in this season’s competition, they secured the entire pot of £7.8M allocated to the country by UEFA.
Now we have season tickets.
In 2011/2012 Rangers sold 38,000
season tickets at around £550 each. That is £20.1M.
Charles Green reduced the price
to £350, reducing income to £13.3M
So, those are the big numbers.
Let us sum them up in one big
fell swoop:
Pre-admin income per season – £42.9M
Post-admin income per season – £13.5M
Naturally I have not taken into
account shirt sales, sponsorship revenue and other sources of income but the
numbers above give some idea of the catastrophic shortfall Rangers have
suffered in the past two seasons. No CL, no SPL prize money, wildly reduced TV
income.
Rangers are the whale, SPL was
the sea, and now League 2 then 1 are the swimming pools.
No wonder this whale is
struggling.