Former Rangers administrator blames fans for Bill Miller deal to stay in Premiership collapsing
Rangers could have stayed in the Premiership and avoided “10 years of doom and gloom” if Bill Miller had bought the club in 2012, claims David Whitehouse.
The former administrator who, along with Paul Clark, eventually sold the club assets to Charles Green’s newco, says the American would have prevented Gers from spending four years in the lower leagues with an £11.2million.
Whitehouse has told the Daily Mail’s Sportsmail: “The tragedy for Rangers is that Bill Miller was not allowed to acquire the club.
“He had a plan which was fully funded and supported by professional advice in the sports industry and he was prepared to invest many tens of millions in the business after acquisition.
“Had he taken over, the club would not have dropped down all those divisions…
“He was dissuaded not to proceed for only one reason. He was intimidated.
“A bunch of fans flew out to Miami to intimidate his wife and that’s the tragedy around this story.”
Major accusation
It is unlikely to make him popular with any Light Blues fans to be pointing the finger of blame at them now, but Whitehouse appears to hold some resentment towards the Ibrox support from a decade ago.
He clearly feels the deal he had lined up was beneficial and still feels unhappy with the fact that it did not go through.
In any situation such as this there are going to be endless different perspectives, but it is a big claim to say that the wilderness years Gers fans went through were their own fault.
At the time the fans’ view of an American buyer who had never before been to Scotland was not positive, with the trucking magnate acknowledging he had got the message “loud and clear” (via Guardian).
The BBC’s Tom English wrote last year of how Miller was “spooked by the intrusion into his personal life” from journalists.
Surely a combination of these factors contributed to a poor fit between a club in crisis and a man who had little awareness of the fabric of the club, and was apparently unwilling to invest the effort into understanding it.
Former Ibrox chairman Alastair Johnston said at the time that the American was using the fans’ opposition as a “red herring” having pulled out at a similar stage of negotiations over Tranmere Rovers and Sheffield Wednesday (Daily Record).
It is likely that recriminations will continue for years still over one of the darkest periods in the club’s recent history, but Miller and Whitehouse will not become any more popular with stories like this one.
In other Rangers news, former favourite is now desperate to return to the club “at any level”.