Rangers £8.28m reveal made by Graeme Souness amid ‘depressing’ development

Graeme Souness has delivered his verdict on the unfair financial distribution in Europe as Rangers and Celtic suffered heavy defeats this week.

Gers were humiliated 4-1 at home to Lyon in the Europa League while Celtic were dismantled 7-1 by Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League.

Souness revealed that while his former side pocketed £8.28million last season from TV money despite being in Europe, Premier League side Bournemouth got north of £100million.

He wrote in the Scottish Daily Mail, as quoted by the Daily Record: “This last week has been a sobering one for Scottish football and a reminder of how the game has evolved in a cruel way for our clubs. Both of the giants in Glasgow have suffered depressing defeats.

“Celtic faced a Dortmund team who lost 5-1 at Stuttgart two weeks ago and had to come from 2-0 down to beat Bochum last week, so Brendan Rodgers’ thinking would have been: ‘We’re firing on all cylinders and they’re not, so we can go there and take them on and outscore them’. I can understand that thinking, but it didn’t happen and Celtic came unstuck on a grand scale, losing 7-1.

In my old team Rangers’ case, they were playing at home in a European competition where they had previously gone to Malmo and won, and thought they could take on the opposition this time — Lyon. They also got beat up badly, which again showed up the huge gulf.

“It’s a simple question of economics and where the money is in football, now. Rangers earned £8.28million in domestic and European TV money last season. My local team Bournemouth — which is not a football town and where 11,000 will attend home games — got in excess of £100million. That’s the gulf in money we are looking at. It came to the surface all too quickly in Dortmund and Glasgow.”