Rangers' bust-down and football's working-class fan base

In Glasgow this February, I ran into some Celtic supporters from Ireland in a chip-shop and asked what was going on with Rangers. Almost in tears they explained that if Rangers fell it was the end of Celtic. I asked a Rangers-supporting friend, and he said much the same thing. It seems that working-class Old Firm supporters understand we’re all in it together better than David Cameron did when he said it.

Sponsorship deals for televising Scottish Premier League matches are given on the understanding that there will be four Old Firm matches per year. Now Rangers is being busted down to Third Division I suppose some quasi-legal fiction could be devised to allow Celtic and Rangers to play, but it’s difficult to see how the two can compete as anything less than equals. Where will the money come from now?

Rangers’ downfall seems to have been the use of trusts to pay players – the same thing that Jimmy Carr (right) did to pay himself: and got off scot-free.

Given the absorption of trade-unionism’s higher reaches into the sharp-elbowed middle classes, I suspect the powers-that-be are unhappy that football is the last remaining bastion of working-class unity. Why else would John Terry have been taken to court on the basis of racist remarks that Rio Ferdinand (left) never heard and were never proved to have been said? Like Rangers’ punishment, the real object was enshrining football as an object of middle-class derision.

But Rangers’ fan base is too big and too loyal to give up on such a major part of their lives without doing their best to cheer them back up to the top of the tree. And in that, for the sake of every British football club that fears finding itself in the same position soon, I hope they succeed.

Gerry Dorrian 300 words