With Everton’s plight in the Premier League well-known, Scottish press have leapt on Jamie Carragher’s comments on Nathan Patterson’s signing for the Toffees and have happily dragged Rangers and the right back into the mess.

For those in a cave the past week, Everton got ‘done’ for violating Premier League guidelines on spending and FFP, being deducted 10 points, and it harks back to former manager Rafa Benitez shelling out £12M rising to £16M on Patterson two years ago.

Rangers got dragged in when Carragher noted that the authorities should have stepped in before this happened, that they watched Everton spending this big money on Rangers’ former player when at the time they were clearly under investigation for spending violations.

In other words, why weren’t they under an embargo to stop them potentially breaking FFP when the authorities were clearly monitoring their finances and finding discrepancies?

And now Carragher’s comments have been seized on by the press north of the border dragging Rangers into it.

And there is a legitimate problem here too.

As we spoke about recently, football transfers are rarely full fees up front – it’s usually annual instalments. And Patterson would be no different. Meaning if Everton are indeed relegated, their income will take a huge punch in the nose and they will find it a tonne harder to meet their financial obligations, and that could well be admin for them and Rangers losing out on the rest of the Patterson fee.

We obviously cannot know what the details of the transaction were, but it will be a modest chunk a year, over a course of years, and if Everton end up in the Championship and admin, Rangers’ chances of getting much of the rest of the fee diminish hugely.

So it’s feasible that we’re involved in this story indirectly, because it could cost us.