Heysel locked English football out of Europe. For five years the most ambitious English internationals had one obvious way back in, and it ran up the M74 to Govan.
The first thing Terry Butcher noticed about Scottish football was the bus. On 9 August 1986 the Rangers coach crawled through Leith towards Easter Road for the opening game of the Premier Division season. The England captain had won the UEFA Cup with Ipswich and he’d just come back from a World Cup in Mexico. He looked out of the window and saw something he recognised from the rougher corners of the old First Division, only more of it. “As the bus travelled through the streets there was anger and provocation from the crowds,” he told Follow Follow years later. “It was pretty meaty.”
What happened next has gone into Scottish football folklore. Thirty-seven minutes in, Graeme Souness, the new player-manager, already booked, went through George McCluskey and was sent off. Every outfield player on the pitch, plus Chris Woods, the other Englishman, who’d come charging out of his goal to the halfway line, ended up in a scrum in the centre circle. Only Alan Rough, in the Hibs goal, stayed out of it. Rangers lost 2-1. The SFA later booked everybody involved in the melee, so Butcher, who insisted he’d been trying to keep the peace, finished his first competitive match in Scotland with two yellow cards and a suspension. “It was certainly a rude awakening,” he said.
Souness has never pretended otherwise. “Of course that first day is something I would like to change,” he told FourFourTwo. “Getting sent off wasn’t the best of starts – especially as my Dad was watching.”
It’s a good story, and it tends to swallow the rest. The fight at Easter Road was the noise. The real event was in the line-up: the England captain and England’s second-choice goalkeeper in the blue of a Scottish club, signed by a Scot fresh from Italy, at a time when the traffic across the border had run one way for as long as anyone could remember. Scotland had always exported its best players to England. Law, Dalglish, Souness himself, the whole tartan conveyor belt. Now, for a few strange years, it ran in reverse.
A door closes in Brussels
To understand why, start with the timing. On 29 May 1985, 39 people died at the Heysel Stadium before the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus. Within days English clubs were banned indefinitely from European competition. Everton, the champions, couldn’t play in the European Cup. Manchester United, the FA Cup winners, couldn’t play in the Cup Winners’ Cup. FBH has told how the English game tried to fill the hole with the Super Cup, a competition nobody wanted, and what the ban did to the clubs over the following seasons.
Seen from the players’ side, the ban did something very simple. It took away the best part of the job. For a footballer at an English club in 1985, Europe was the stage: midweek nights in Munich or Milan, the European Cup, the reason you joined a big club rather than a comfortable one. Trevor Steven had just won the Cup Winners’ Cup with Everton, scoring in the final against Rapid Vienna. He’d been looking forward to the European Cup. “We were all set to challenge for the European Cup the following season and that was a crashing blow,” he said later, as quoted in the Everton Encyclopedia. “It threw a hell of a cloud over the English League. It’s one of the reasons I came away from English football. At the time it didn’t look as though we’d get back into Europe.”
That last sentence is the important one. Nobody in 1986 knew the ban would end in 1990. Indefinite meant indefinite. If you were an English international in your mid-twenties, your European career might simply be over unless you moved. Italy, Spain and France were the obvious exits, and some took them: Gary Lineker went to Barcelona in 1986, Glenn Hoddle to Monaco in 1987, following the road Mark Hateley and Ray Wilkins had already taken to Milan. But the Continent meant a new language, a new culture and, usually, the end of the move for your family. Scotland was the loophole. Scottish clubs were still in Europe. Scotland had a different football association and a different league, yet the same language, the same newspapers and the same motorway home.
Somebody just had to see it.
The man from John Lawrence
The man who saw it wasn’t a football man at all. David Holmes was a director of John Lawrence (Glasgow) Ltd, the building firm controlled by Lawrence Marlborough. In 1984 Marlborough had asked him to review the efficiency of the group’s subsidiaries, and one of those subsidiaries was Rangers Football Club. As the Rangers Archives’ account of 1986-87 sets out, Holmes began building a recovery plan that year, joined the board in November 1985, and a couple of months later Marlborough took a 65.9% controlling interest in the club.
What Holmes found was a giant asleep. Rangers hadn’t won the league since 1978. Aberdeen under Alex Ferguson and Dundee United under Jim McLean had broken up the Old Firm duopoly, Celtic had kept winning, and in 1985-86 Hearts lost the title only on the last day of the season. Ibrox, rebuilt after the 1971 disaster, was a fine modern stadium waiting for a team.
Holmes wanted a statement signing, and his thinking went sideways in the best way. He wanted Graeme Souness, the Liverpool captain and Scotland midfielder then at Sampdoria, but realised he’d need a manager of real stature to persuade Souness to leave Italy. So, as the Archives put it, he “thought outside the box”: rather than find a manager who could recruit Souness as a player, he’d offer Souness the job himself.
“I got a call from David Holmes at my home in Genoa. We agreed to meet in London and then we subsequently met in Milan,” Souness told FourFourTwo. “Being a Rangers supporter as a boy I knew how big the club was and it was something I couldn’t turn down. To say David put his neck on the line was an understatement. I was 33 and I had no experience. He gave me the chance to be the manager of Rangers – the biggest club in Britain in my view – and that must have been a worry to him.”
On 8 April 1986 Souness was unveiled in the Blue Room at Ibrox as the club’s first player-manager, replacing Jock Wallace. He brought Walter Smith across from Dundee United as his assistant, a man he knew from the Scotland set-up. Then he spent the summer at the World Cup in Mexico, as Scotland’s captain, drawing up a shopping list.
The shop window
He went shopping in England, and he explained why with the frankness of a man who’d spent a decade in English dressing rooms. “England was the market I knew and that’s why I went there,” he said. “We also knew that if we signed a player from an English club and he didn’t work out we could sell him to another English club and not lose money. In fact, in most cases we made money.”
That is the whole business model in two sentences, and it’s less romantic than the legend. English players were proven, they were available because of the ban, and they were liquid. A Scottish club buying a Scottish player was buying something only Scottish clubs wanted. A Scottish club buying an English international was buying an asset with a ready resale market a few hundred miles south. Souness was trading on the spread.
He had two other things to sell. The first was money. Rangers, FourFourTwo noted, were now paying some of the highest salaries in the UK, which mattered at a time when English wages were held down by falling crowds and the loss of European income. The second, less often credited, was the stadium. “One of the other great lures for players was Ibrox Stadium,” Souness said. “This was pre-Hillsborough and before Justice Taylor’s Report, and a lot of grounds in England were old-fashioned and not really up to scratch. It was a real selling point to bring a player to see Ibrox, because it was easily the top stadium in the country at that time. I remember thinking that if I could get Terry Butcher up to see it, we could get him.”
Colin West, a striker from Watford, was the first Englishman through the door. Chris Woods, Peter Shilton’s understudy for England, came from Norwich. Then came the big one.
Butcher
Terry Butcher hadn’t wanted to leave Ipswich at all. The club had just been relegated from the First Division, but he was captain and had just signed a new four-year contract. Then the manager, Bobby Ferguson, called him in. “The manager told me I had to leave as the club needed money to meet the payments for recent redevelopment work that had been carried out at Portman Road,” Butcher told Follow Follow.
The obvious destination was Manchester United. On that the accounts differ. The Rangers Archives say Ron Atkinson wanted to take Butcher to Old Trafford and Souness talked him round. Butcher’s own memory is sharper and more wounded: “I had been linked with Manchester United for about three years and had spoken to some of their players when we were away on international duty. But when I became available, United didn’t come in for me. It was disappointing, but then I heard that Rangers were interested. And the main reason I went to speak to them was Graeme Souness.” Tottenham were interested too. It didn’t matter. “Graeme can be very persuasive, and I had no doubt after we first met that I would sign for Rangers,” he said. “Another big factor was that Scottish clubs like Rangers were in European competition whereas English clubs weren’t following the events at Heysel the previous year. I really enjoyed playing in Europe with Ipswich, winning the UEFA Cup in 1981, so getting the chance to keep doing that with Rangers was an added bonus.”
The Archives’ diary of that summer records Rangers bidding £700,000 on 24 July and Butcher signing on 1 August for £725,000, a Scottish record. The fee alone was a declaration. The man was a statement: the England captain, 6ft 4in, a centre-half who’d played in two World Cups and would go on to bleed through a bandage for his country in Stockholm three years later. Souness had his cornerstone, and Butcher would be exactly that. He missed one league game all season, and that was the suspension from Easter Road.
Learning the league
The first weeks were chaos. After losing at Easter Road, Rangers scraped past Falkirk and then went 2-0 up at home to Dundee United and lost 3-2. Butcher’s description of that afternoon could stand for a whole generation of English players arriving in Scotland and finding the league tougher than they’d been told. “At 2-0 up I think we all thought it was party time and started to show off a few tricks,” he said. “In the dressing room after the game nobody spoke, but at that moment I think collectively we realised that we had to get things going. We couldn’t expect just to turn up and win games.”
Souness had expected hostility, though not this much. “My experience from Liverpool and also being a foreigner playing in Italy was that other teams treated it as their cup final when they played against you, so I was prepared for what lay in store,” he said. “However, it was far more intense in Scotland. I was regarded as some big-head coming back to Scotland to show people how it was done.”
The turn came on the last day of August. Celtic came to Ibrox, and Ian Durrant scored the only goal from a reverse pass by Davie Cooper that people who were there still describe with their hands. Butcher had played in front of big crowds all his career. He’d never heard anything like it. “I had never experienced noise like what I heard that afternoon,” he said. “I remember a number of English journalists came up to watch the game, and I met a few of them in the foyer after the game. They were awestruck and with a big smile on my face I told them that this was one of the main reasons why I had come to Rangers.”
Pay attention to the English journalists in the foyer. Part of the invasion’s strangeness was that it was watched from England. The Scottish Premier Division, usually a footnote south of the border, suddenly had the England captain and goalkeeper in it, and the London papers sent people up. Butcher and Woods were playing for their places in Bobby Robson’s team every Saturday at Tynecastle and Pittodrie. That made the league visible in a way it hadn’t been, and it made Rangers’ players visible to England in a way that would matter by 1990.
In October Rangers beat Celtic 2-1 at Hampden to win the League Cup, Souness’s first trophy, won with Derek Ferguson outstanding and the player-manager injured. The league was harder. By 6 December, after a goalless draw at Easter Road, Rangers were fourth, eight points behind Celtic with a game in hand.
Roberts, and the dinner-table scouting
What changed it was another Englishman, recruited in a way that says a lot about how Souness ran things. Butcher, Souness’s captain, was also his sounding board. “I would often go out for dinner with Graeme Souness and he would talk about English players,” Butcher said. “Graham Roberts was one of the players he talked about. He knew about Graham and had played against him, but he wanted my opinion on him. Not many managers do that.”
Roberts, a hard, left-sided centre-half from Tottenham with an England cap and a UEFA Cup winner’s medal, arrived in December. “Graham and I understood each other very well, having played together before for England,” Butcher said. “When he came in the back four was now more solid and we went on a good run after he arrived.”
It was more than a good run. It was a wall. The last goal Rangers had conceded was scored by Uwe Rahn of Borussia Mönchengladbach in the UEFA Cup at Ibrox, the goal that put them out on away goals. After that Woods kept twelve successive clean sheets. Celtic dropped points at Fir Park, against Aberdeen and at Kilbowie; Rangers won 4-0, 2-0, 2-0. On New Year’s Day Celtic came to Ibrox in the rain and lost 2-0, Robert Fleck and Ally McCoist scoring and Souness, by every account, majestic. A 2-0 win over Hamilton in January, in which Roberts and Durrant were both sent off, took Rangers top. They wouldn’t come down.
The 1,196th minute
Some records are ended by great players. Woods’ was ended by a full-back from Hamilton Academical, at Ibrox, in the Scottish Cup.
On 31 January 1987 Hamilton came back to Glasgow two weeks after losing there in the league. Woods went in at half-time knowing he’d just passed the British record for consecutive minutes without conceding. In the 70th minute a ball came across the edge of the Rangers box, and Adrian Sprott scored. Twenty-three years later Woods could still describe it to the Glasgow Times frame by frame. “It was a ball played across the edge of our penalty area, but it bobbled under big Davie McPherson’s foot and Adrian hit a low shot to my right-hand side and into the back of the net,” he said. “I was so pleased when I managed to set a new record during the first half. Every goalkeeper will tell you they pride themselves on clean sheets and when you go over a 1000 minutes of football without conceding a goal then it’s a fantastic achievement… I was doubly disappointed at the end of the game having not extended it as long as I would have liked and also to have lost the game.”
The run stopped at 1,196 minutes. Rangers went out of the Scottish Cup. Butcher remembered the dressing room’s sense of a treble slipping away: “Having won the League Cup and closed the gap between ourselves and Celtic, we felt we could win the Treble. It was a real kick in the teeth, but sometimes you need that in football. It’s how you recover from blips like that that is more important.”
They recovered the following week by winning 5-2 at Tynecastle, Hearts’ first home defeat in 21 months. That score says something too. The Englishmen hadn’t simply made Rangers harder to beat. They’d brought a ruthlessness that the Scottish league, for all its intensity, hadn’t seen from Ibrox in years. In the next eleven league games Rangers dropped three points.
Pittodrie
The title was won where nobody expected it. Rangers went to Pittodrie for their penultimate game on 2 May 1987 three points clear, at a ground where, the Archives note, they’d won only once in the league since the Premier Division began in 1975. Celtic were at home to Falkirk, who were fighting relegation.
The goal came from Butcher’s head and Cooper’s left foot. “It still gives me goosebumps,” Butcher said. “It was probably one of my best headers ever and the delivery came from one the best players ever, Davie Cooper. Whatever you wanted, you knew he would deliver. And that day at Pittodrie, we just looked at each other and as I ran forward, he had already gauged where the ball had to be played. All I had to do was redirect it. Jim Leighton never moved.”
Brian Irvine equalised for Aberdeen just before half-time and the game finished 1-1. Then news came through from Parkhead: Falkirk had won 2-1. Rangers were champions for the first time in nine years, and the Pittodrie stands erupted in places they had no right to. “As I looked around the ground there was Rangers fans jumping up and down everywhere, not just in the Rangers end,” Butcher said. “It was bizarre as you don’t expect that.”
FBH readers will know the irony in the man beaten. Leighton was Ferguson’s goalkeeper in Gothenburg and the last line of the Aberdeen team that had broken the Old Firm, and Butcher’s header was one of the last things that era saw. Ferguson had left for Old Trafford six months earlier, and Aberdeen’s challenge would never be quite the same again. The invasion didn’t just restore Rangers. It ended the age of the New Firm.
Butcher’s memory of the journey home is the most human part of the whole story. “We all got into the big communal bath and had a beer,” he said. “We then got dressed and got on the bus. We stopped at a hotel to pick up some refreshments. There were two sections on the bus: staff and players. We all had beer and they had champagne. The journey back to Glasgow was very slow as there were thousands of Rangers fans trying to stop the bus. That showed what it meant to them.”
For all the talk of English imports, the goals that season came from two Scots. McCoist scored 34 in the league, with Fleck his partner. Cooper, the old Rangers winger whom Souness inherited rather than bought, made the decisive cross. That’s worth remembering whenever this era is told as a story of chequebooks. Souness bought a spine. The heart was already there.
Year two: the bill arrives
The second season is where the invasion stops looking like a fairy tale, and where it gets more interesting.
On 17 October 1987 Celtic came to Ibrox four points clear. Seventeen minutes in, Frank McAvennie barged into Woods as he took a pass-back. Woods grabbed him by the neck, Butcher and Roberts piled in, McAvennie went down, and referee Jim Duncan sent off Woods and McAvennie. The Scotsman’s account catalogues the rest like a charge sheet: an Andy Walker goal, a Butcher own goal, Butcher sent off after a second booking for a clash with the Celtic goalkeeper Allen McKnight, a McCoist goal, a last-minute Richard Gough equaliser for 2-2 and, with Roberts in goal in Woods’ jersey because nobody named substitute keepers, the Rangers defender conducting the singing behind his goal. The Scotsman’s verdict: “An own goal, a last-minute equaliser, three red cards, four post-match court appearances, two fines, 60 arrests – this game had everything.”
The court appearances were the remarkable bit. Glasgow’s procurator fiscal, Sandy Jessop, called for a police report into the game. Woods, Butcher, Roberts and McAvennie were charged with conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace. The lawyer the clubs turned to, Len Murray of Levy & McRae, was a Celtic supporter who ended up acting for all four. He told the Glasgow Times that three Glasgow lawyers with Rangers leanings had phoned Holmes to point out that Murray was a Catholic and a Celtic fan, and that the Rangers board had treated the offers “with the contempt that they merited”. “At the meeting Mr Holmes made it clear that I was the best man for the job notwithstanding the team that I supported,” Murray said.
At Glasgow Sheriff Court the following spring, Woods was fined £500 and Butcher £250. Roberts’ charge was found not proven and McAvennie was found not guilty. Butcher sat through it on crutches, and he remembers it with a gallows grin. “If you remember it was also the season of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,'” he told Football Scotland. “I was in court with a broken leg for a week in March and April. Graeme Roberts, Chris Woods and Frank McAvennie were all still playing and I was stuck watching.”
The broken leg came on 17 November 1987, at home to Aberdeen. “In the seventh minute we got a corner and it dropped in the box between me and Alex McLeish,” Butcher said. “I thought I could shoot, made contact with the ball but Alex put his foot up to block and I followed through, connected with his studs and snapped my tibia… I wasn’t stretchered off. I was carried off with my leg dangling and rushed to hospital.” Rangers lost 1-0, their first home defeat in twelve months. Butcher didn’t play again until the next season and missed England’s European Championship in West Germany. He has the decency to say Celtic, in their centenary season, would probably have won the league anyway. Rangers finished third, twelve points behind. “1987/88 wasn’t my best season,” he said. “It was probably my annus horribilis.”
The English imports in this period carry a reputation for swagger, sometimes deserved. But the shame game and its aftermath show the other side. These players had walked into the most politically charged fixture in British football, carrying none of its history and all of its consequences. Butcher, Woods and Roberts had no inherited stake in the Old Firm’s sectarian divide. They had every incentive to win the game in front of them, and they found that in Glasgow winning a game, or losing one, was never just a football matter. Roberts later said he hadn’t been able to hear what the Ibrox crowd behind him was singing as he conducted it. Whether or not that’s believable, it captures the position of the English at Ibrox: in the middle of something they hadn’t been raised in.
The European nights
And yet the reason they came was being honoured. That autumn Rangers drew Dynamo Kiev in the first round of the European Cup: Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s side, the core of the Soviet team that had reached the 1988 European Championship final, with Oleg Blokhin out wide. Rangers lost the first leg 1-0 in Kiev.
Before the return at Ibrox on 30 September, Souness had the pitch made narrower. Ally McCoist told talkSPORT the story with obvious glee: “What a team they had. Bringing them back to Ibrox, they were brilliant in wide areas. Blokhin, what a football player. The night before the game Graeme brought the pitch in five metres either side. Made the pitch really narrow so our full-backs could get a kick at Blokhin. They were absolutely raging… Genius from Souness.” Mark Falco and McCoist scored, and Rangers won 2-0, 2-1 on aggregate. The run took them to the quarter-finals, where Steaua Bucharest knocked them out in March.
That’s the point of it all. That autumn Everton, the champions of England, had nothing but domestic football to play. Butcher, Woods and Roberts were playing against the best team in the Soviet Union, the thing that had been taken away from every English player south of Hadrian’s Wall. The invasion only makes sense if you remember how much those nights mattered to the men who’d crossed the border to keep them.
Wilkins
Ray Wilkins didn’t need Europe. He’d had it: Manchester United, AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain, 84 England caps. When he signed for Rangers from PSG on 27 November 1987, as the Rangers Archives record, he was joining a manager he’d played against in Serie A, Souness at Sampdoria and Wilkins at Milan.
Wilkins was a different kind of import. Butcher and Woods were England internationals at their peak. Wilkins was 31, the passer who had been mocked in England as the “Crab” for playing it sideways, and who had come back from Italy with the patience of Serie A in his feet. In a Scottish midfield that ran on adrenaline he was a metronome. He debuted the next day in a 3-2 win over Hearts and stayed two years, winning two titles and a League Cup. When he left for QPR in November 1989, for family reasons, Ibrox gave him a send-off in a 3-0 win over Dunfermline, with his pass for Mo Johnston’s opener a fitting last word.
Wilkins matters to this story because he was proof of concept. Butcher came because Ipswich needed the money. Woods came because he wanted a first-choice job. Wilkins chose Rangers over going back to London, and his presence told every English player in the wilderness of the post-Heysel First Division that Ibrox wasn’t a step down. It was a sideways step into a brighter room.
Walters
The signing that showed Scotland itself most clearly came on 31 December 1987. Mark Walters, a left winger from Birmingham, joined from Aston Villa for £500,000. He was 23, one of the most exciting wide players in England, and he was black. “Graeme Souness rang me at home, at my mother’s house, and told me what he had in mind for the club,” he told BBC Scotland. “I had seen them play in Europe, and in previous games as well, so I was quite up for it. He showed me the stadium, and I was hooked then.”
His reasons, as he told the Guardian, were the invasion’s reasons word for word. Everton, the English champions, had tried to buy him. “People said Rangers must have blown them out of the water financially but there was very little difference in the money,” he said. “The main reason was that English clubs were still banned from European competition, whereas Rangers had the Champions League. Lots of good English players had already gone there, like Ray Wilkins and Terry Butcher, and I had already become a bit of a fan of the club after watching them play in Europe on TV and loving the atmosphere at Ibrox.”
Souness had warned him he might get some stick. Walters had no idea there were no other black players in the Scottish league. His first game for Rangers was at Celtic Park on 2 January 1988, and the match had to be stopped so bananas could be cleared from the pitch while large parts of the crowd made monkey noises whenever he touched the ball. Two weeks later, on 16 January at Tynecastle, it was worse. On the way to the ground a teammate showed him a newspaper interview with a man posing with a huge pile of fruit he’d bought to throw. “The guy was standing there with his stall, very proud,” Walters said. “So I was aware I had to be on my toes but I was shocked when the match started and I saw it wasn’t just fruit but people were also throwing darts and even a pig’s leg. That made me chuckle, but only when I got off the pitch at the end and knew I was safe.”
This time it couldn’t be ignored. Archie Macpherson condemned it on Sportscene, the Hearts chairman Wallace Mercer apologised, and the SFA president, David Will, issued a statement. Rangers banned one of their own fans for similar behaviour at Walters’ first home game against Morton. One Hearts supporter later wrote to Walters to apologise and tell him he’d banned himself from stadiums for life.
Walters’ response was to play. “My mother brought me up to think, all right, that’s where we are – we obviously can’t do anything about being black, so play even better,” he told the BBC. “I was never going to walk off,” he told the Guardian. “Rangers was such a great club that I didn’t want to let anything mess up my opportunity.” He stayed until 1991, scored 52 goals in more than 130 games and won three titles. Within weeks of Tynecastle he’d scored a celebrated solo goal against Raith Rovers.
It would be wrong to fold this into a heart-warming story about English imports civilising Scottish football. The racism Walters faced had been in Scottish grounds long before he arrived. It took a famous name, at a famous club, under the eyes of the English press that the invasion had brought north, before the game had to look at it. That was an accident of the invasion, not a purpose of it. But it’s part of its legacy, and Walters was its bravest member.
Murray’s money, Everton’s men
In 1988 David Murray bought the club, and Souness helped him do it. The spending didn’t stop. It moved to Merseyside.
In the summer of 1988 Rangers signed Gary Stevens, Everton’s England right-back. Sources differ on the fee, from £1m to £1.25m, and either was a lot of money for a full-back in 1988. A year later his Everton teammate Trevor Steven followed, and this is the transfer that sums up the invasion’s economics better than any other. Steven was out of contract, the clubs couldn’t agree a price, and a tribunal set it at £1.5 million, according to the Everton Encyclopedia “£1million less than Everton’s valuation”. Two years later Rangers sold him to Marseille for three times that. Souness had said the English market was liquid. Here was the proof, and the profit.
In the same summer of 1989 came the biggest shock of all, the signing of Mo Johnston, a Catholic and a former Celtic striker, which broke Rangers’ long-standing unwritten policy. It belongs to a different story, but it came out of the same mindset: Souness bought the best player available for the job and dared everybody else to object.
By then the invasion had a strange international side-effect. When Bobby Robson named England’s squad for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, four of its players, according to the squad list, played their club football in Scotland: Butcher, Woods, Gary Stevens and Trevor Steven, all at Ibrox. England reached the semi-final in Turin. In the most celebrated England tournament for a generation, four of the squad spent their Saturdays in the Scottish Premier Division. The FBH archive has looked at the England job that followed Italia 90. The Rangers connection was baked into the team that started it all.
The door opens again
Here’s the twist. The ban that had created the market ended in 1990. English clubs were readmitted to Europe for the 1990-91 season, Manchester United and Aston Villa going first, with Liverpool kept out longer. Almost immediately the logic of the invasion began to fall apart.
The first sign was Butcher. He came back from Italia 90 with a knee injury and couldn’t find form. In September 1990 Rangers lost 2-1 at Tannadice, with Butcher scoring a spectacular own goal. Four days later, the Archives record, Souness dropped him for the League Cup semi-final against Aberdeen. That was effectively the end. On 15 November 1990 Butcher became player-manager of Coventry City. The cornerstone had been removed.
Souness had already started replacing his Englishmen with other Englishmen, signing Mark Hateley from Monaco for £1m on 21 June 1990. Hateley would become one of Ibrox’s greatest strikers, but by then he was coming from France, not England, and the reasons were different. In April 1991, with the title race still running, Souness himself left for Liverpool. He’d won three league titles and four League Cups in five years. FourFourTwo’s Lindsay Herron, looking back, called leaving the worst mistake he could have made.
The final blow came from UEFA. From 1991-92, as the Archives put it, clubs in European competition were “only permitted to three foreign players to be listed in a matchday squad. That included players from England.” For the purposes of European football, England and Scotland were different countries, and the Englishmen at Ibrox were foreigners. Walter Smith, now in charge, had to rebuild with Scots: Andy Goram came from Hibernian, David Robertson from Aberdeen, Stuart McCall from Everton. The invasion was over. The rule that ended it was the mirror image of the ban that had started it: an accident of European regulation, applied to two countries that had shared a border, a language and a transfer market for a century.
What the invasion was
It’s tempting to tell the English invasion as a story about Souness’s charisma, Murray’s money or Rangers’ ambition, and it was all of those. But the players’ own words keep pointing at something simpler. Butcher came for Europe. Walters came for Europe, and said the money was much the same. Steven left English football because of the ban. Souness bought English because the market was liquid and the stadium sold itself.
It was an arbitrage. Heysel created a pricing error in the British football market. For five years an English international could keep his place in the England team, play in the European Cup, earn among the best wages in Britain and live within driving distance of home, and only one club was offering all four. When the ban lifted in 1990 and UEFA’s foreigner rule arrived in 1991, the error corrected, and the English went home or moved on.
What they left behind wasn’t an English club in Glasgow. It was a Scottish club that had remembered how big it was. Three titles under Souness became the nine in a row FBH has written about, and the European pull Souness had used on Butcher was used again, on a grander scale, to bring Gascoigne and Laudrup. It also left a court case, a broken leg, a goalkeeping record ended by a part-timer, and a winger who wouldn’t walk off.
Back to Easter Road
Go back to that bus in August 1986, crawling through the streets of Leith. Butcher, behind the glass, thought it felt like a rough away day in England, only more so. He was right, and he was wrong. Scottish football turned out to be harder, angrier and more political than he’d been warned. It was also, for five years, the only place in Britain where the England captain could still hear the European Cup music.
Ask any of them what it was for and they’ll tell you about a noise. Butcher in the foyer after the Durrant goal, grinning at the English journalists. Walters, hooked the moment he saw the stadium. McCoist, laughing at a manager who moved the touchlines to get a kick at Blokhin. They came for Europe, and for a while Ibrox was where English football kept it.
