‘How were they doing that?’ Former Celtic Boss Calls Out Ibrox Cheats

JOHN BARNES has spoken in-depth about his time at Celtic 20 years on since his appointment to the Celtic Park Role to Herald Sport.

The Englishman spent an ill-fated 8-month spell at the club which finished in an embarrassing defeat to lower league Inverness. The former Celtic manager still has a lot of what ifs and believes had Henrik stayed fit and the squad were together the club could have done damage.

He did cite the biggest and most bogus thing about what was happening at the time and referred to Rangers spending big money they didn’t have to maintain their dominance in the Scottish game.

The England legend still can’t understand why this wasn’t questioned at the time. There were players coming up to Scotland to join Rangers who were snubbing English Premiership deals for money on offer at Ibrox.

We would find out a while later that they certainly couldn’t afford these players and were using illegal side letters and paying them with a tax avoidance scheme – something that would go onto cripple the club and their unmanageable debt.

Barnes said: “Rangers were going through a period of spending a lot of money they didn’t have,” he said.

“I don’t know how people couldn’t have understood that when you had the best players from England coming up here and getting paid what they were getting paid. How were they doing that? They were winning so football fans didn’t care.

“When I came Rangers still had those players, such as Van Bronckhorst, who they were paying more.”

Rangers entered administration in 2012 and never came out. The club was insolvent and a CVA to save the Ibrox club was rejected by creditors. A new entity had to make their way through the leagues after getting a leg up to join Scotland’s bottom tier. There seems to be a weird pact in the media not to talk about this, pass it off as a non-story or blatantly pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.