http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/sports/soccer/scottish-premier-league-rangers-celtic-rivalry.html 2016-09-08 13:56:36 In Scottish Premier League, a Most Bitter Rivalry Takes Root Again Rangers and Celtic, known as the Old Firm, have not met in a league match in four years, since financial mismanagement led to Rangers’ liquidation. === GLASGOW — The police and the courts were still dealing with the depressingly familiar aftermath of a meeting between Celtic and Rangers — identifying suspects, filing charges, hearing cases — as the finishing touches were being put on the 40-yard mural that now runs along one side of London Road. The work of a collective of local graffiti artists, the mural covers a wall in the shadow of Celtic Park. Its iconography is beautifully rendered, if a little muddled: a lion and a buffalo, a fire-breathing dragon, two dinosaurs, Batman and the Joker. The message it sends, by contrast, is perfectly clear. “Sectarianism divides,” it reads. “Fear, anger. They all fight, it’s not right; it’s your choice, it’s your voice. Respect each other’s view: the green and white, the white and blue.” In the middle sits a badge adorned with three words: “Rivals Not Enemies.” When it was unveiled, two days after the two biggest teams in the city — and, by some distance, the country — had met in a bilious, spiteful Scottish Cup semifinal, it seemed like a slogan of forlorn hope. Of the 18 people arrested that day in April, half were charged with sectarian offenses or under Scotland’s Offensive Behavior at Football Act, an unpopular piece of legislation largely designed to criminalize sectarianism. Still, it seemed, Rangers and Celtic could not escape the poison of the past. Many expect Saturday to be no different. The two teams have not met in the Scottish Premier League for four years, ever since years of financial mismanagement and misdeeds caught up with Rangers and led to their liquidation. The club was dissolved and forced to start again, in the country’s fourth tier. Since then, Celtic and Rangers have encountered each other only twice: both in the Scottish Cup, both on neutral territory. The city, then, is crackling with anticipation for the teams’ first league meeting at Celtic Park. As early as Tuesday, The Evening Herald was devoting six pages to the game. A slew of former players, from both sides, have spent the week being wheeled out for sound bites. With that excitement, though, comes trepidation. This is an enmity with roots that run far deeper than mere sport: Rangers and Celtic is not soccer, it is religion and politics and history. It is Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Irish Nationalist, the Union Jack and the Tricolor: two sides of several unbridgeable divides. Just as no well-intentioned mural can salve more than a century of animosity, nobody believes absence has made the heart grow fonder. There was a feeling, in 2012, that perhaps the two clubs might somehow come to realize they were locked, however unwillingly, in a mutually beneficial arrangement, that they needed each other for reasons both financial and sporting. As Peter Lawwell, the Celtic chief executive, has admitted, Rangers’ demise has cost his club £40 million ($53 million) in lost revenue. Celtic, and Scottish football in general, were supposed to wither and die without one of the league’s twin titans. Stewart Regan, then in charge of the Scottish Football Association, even predicted “social unrest” if Rangers were not immediately readmitted to the top flight. Such concerns, it is fair to say, do not seem to have permeated the fan base. “I didn’t miss them at all,” said Matt McGlone, editor of the Celtic fanzine Alternative View. “I understand there has to be competition, but it didn’t bother me.” That the animosity has not dimmed in the last four years, though, does not mean it has not changed. Before that Scottish Cup meeting in April, two days before the mural was finished, Celtic’s Green Brigade ultra group unfurled a banner. It came complete with a vitriolic payoff — one met with a no less offensive message displayed by Rangers supporters — but its primary purpose offered a telling indication about what now fires this deepest of rivalries. “Denial is the first stage of grief,” it read. “Rangers then, Zombies now.” Across the world, Rangers and Celtic have always been known as the Old Firm. To many on the Celtic side, as that banner made abundantly apparent, that label no longer applies. The Old Firm, they say, died when Rangers did, in 2012. “The game on Saturday,” as McGlone said, “is just the Glasgow derby.” At the root of this debate is what happened to Rangers four years ago. When the old club was liquidated, its debts running into hundreds of millions of pounds and its then-owners accused of running an illegal tax avoidance scheme, its place in the Scottish league was taken by a new company: Rangers Sevco. On the blue side of the city, the old and the new are one and the same; they support a team, not a holding company. On the other, the view is very different. McGlone simply said, “They are Sevco, no doubt about it.” Stephen Murray, a Celtic fan and author of “Ten Men Won the League,” said he believed that “you cannot cherry-pick what you get to keep.” He added: “Their membership of the league had died. That is why they had to reapply to be in the Third Division, the fourth tier. They wanted to drop their debts but keep their history, and they wanted everyone to collude in that illusion.” It is this argument, over what precisely this team that looks like Rangers, plays in the same stadium as Rangers and calls itself Rangers actually is, that has been the “main source of heat” between the two clubs for the last four years, said Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at Glasgow University. “The league has been on hiatus,” he said. “Celtic has won the title virtually unchallenged. There has not been the normal stuff to get into around games, because they have not played each other, so the debate around what the club is has superseded everything else. For some, it is now the driver of the rivalry. If the idea of most arguments is to change someone’s mind, then this is a dialogue of the deaf. It’s sustained the rivalry, at the very least, if not made it worse.” The Old Firm rivalry has always been a mixture of the poisonous and the petty, the menacing and the melodramatic — from sectarian songs and bullets in the mail to sidewalks outside Celtic pubs being painted blue and white — to such an extent that it can be hard to separate the real from the apocryphal. There is one story that Rangers stopped serving eggs Benedict at Ibrox Stadium when a pope who took that name was chosen. That one is a myth, but it is no less hard to believe than the tales about the largely Protestant town of Larkhall, where traffic lights had to be protected from vandals after a number of green lights were smashed, and the Subway sandwich chain decided, all things considered, that its local outlet might be safer with black, rather than green, livery. The rivalry’s new, updated version is no different. If anything, because it is largely cast through the playground prism of social media, it has developed a particularly vindictive edge. Seventy-eight people, for example, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority last year about an advertisement for Rangers season tickets that described Ibrox as home to “Scotland’s most successful club”; the authority’s chief executive, Guy Parker, described investigating the claims as “not a good use of our time.” Several websites, staffed by lawyers and accountants, have pored over the various historic financial accusations against Rangers in minute, obsessive detail. “Celtic supporters have had a lot of spare energy in the last four years,” said Chris Graham, a veteran of several Rangers fan groups. “The more active among them have directed that into things that are not really anything to do with Celtic, but are about hurting Rangers. That has become the outlet for the rivalry.” If that sense of seeking what they perceive to be justice for Rangers’ offenses has provided a focus for Celtic supporters, Boyle suggested that their rivals had been “sustained” by the “deeply ironic” belief in their own victimhood. “In a football sense, they had as big a punishment as they could have had,” he said. “But this idea they were wrongly or harshly punished, I do not see as being the case. That has become the narrative, though, a way of identifying themselves not by who they are but by who they are against.” In both cases, supporters claim Scottish football’s establishment has been arrayed against them. McGlone suggested that the authorities had “bent over backwards to help” Rangers. Graham smiled at that, saying: “At no point in the last four years in the lower leagues, seeing all our players leave, have I thought, ‘Thank God we’re the establishment club, or it could have been really bad.’” Fans of both sides have indulged in this endless game of claim and counterclaim for the last four years. From the outside, it has looked like little more than an exercise in point-scoring; from the inside, perhaps it has served some purpose. If that is to be the root of the hostility in the New Firm, and the sectarian divide increasingly abandoned as a relic of the old, many would consider that progress. Celtic and Rangers may not be ready to heed the message of the mural and respect each other’s view. Better, though, to argue about finances, rather than faith.