As a seasoned businessman, Murray did not need the happenings at HBOS, Lehman Brothers and AIG to convince him of football's vulnerability to economic adversity. Personal experience will have been a much more forceful persuader than any examples provided by the global markets.

Until comparatively recently, Murray enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for sourcing funding from all manner of willing participants in his plan to make Rangers one of the giants of the European game. Graeme Souness once confided that his friend and former employer's greatest gift was to sweet-talk investors into supporting his dream with significant amounts of cash.

That reputation took something of a nosedive when the £20million of the South African-based Dave King became worthless and the £40 million of the venture capitalists, ENIC – headed at the time by the present Tottenham Hotspur chairman, Daniel Levy – lost three-quarters of its value.

Murray's subsequent failure to fulfil his publicly-stated intention to bring other heavyweight entrepreneurs on board – including Sir Tom Hunter – seemed to signal the waning of his persuasive powers and to necessitate his other companies' £50million underwriting of a rights issue three years ago that would otherwise not have come within a long-haul flight of reaching its target.

Having been forced by financial imperatives to issue warnings in recent times of the need for belt-tightening, however, Murray hardly deserves some of the hostility aimed in his direction by "supporters" who seem to have a one-eyed view of income and expenditure, the rocks on which a business stands.

Only the revenue appears to count among those whose reaction to this week's half-yearly returns showing an increase in the club's debt has been "What happened to the Alan Hutton money and the money from the European run last season?" This squint clearly takes no account of essential outgoings – nor the fact that the Hutton money, for example, is to be paid over a period of 29 months.

Whatever excesses Rangers may have indulged in the past, however, they are made to look paltry by the scale on which clubs in the Premier League in England conduct business. In a week of turmoil on the world's stock exchanges, it was also learned that, as long as 12 months ago, the Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, met with the then chief secretary to the Treasury, Andy Burnham (now culture secretary), to express concerns over the government's inability to carry out background checks on prospective club owners.

The worry is that, as companies registered in overseas tax havens are not obliged to reveal the identity of their owners, Premier League clubs could be vulnerable to takeovers by some who would not stand up to the scrutiny of the "fit and proper person" test that could prevent undesirables from seizing control.

No such anxieties are likely to arise in Scottish football, which has its very own, built-in, foolproof, fit-and-proper person test. It is both blindingly simple and, even more helpfully, self-operational, requiring no potentially expensive background checks.

It involves merely exposing would-be club owners to practical experience of a business that is utterly merciless in the matter of plundering the resources of the unwary and the deluded. Ask Dominic Keane, John McGuinness, John Boyle, or any of the other arrivistes of the past few years about the chances of improving their personal wealth through ownership of a football club.

Even seriously rich and famously astute businessmen, such as Stewart Milne at Aberdeen, Sir Tom Farmer at Hibernian and Eddie Thompson at Dundee United, have taken hits as a result of "investing" in ventures that have offered little or no hope of a return.

In England, one of the primary concerns over possibly shady owners is the opportunity for money laundering offered by a game whose turnover is measured in billions. North of the border, no such problem exists. At Scottish clubs, money doesn't get laundered, it gets burned.

Four nations tournament a declaration of independence

"WE MUST indeed all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately," Benjamin Franklin told the Founding Fathers of the United States at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The old polymath's words resonated through the announcement the other day of the Four Associations Tournament that is to be played between Scotland, Wales and the two Irelands.

Promoted by its architects as a revival of the old Home International Championship that was abandoned in 1984, the competition will inevitably have an ersatz look about it without the presence of the British Isles' biggest and most powerful footballing country, England. That, however, would appear to be precisely the point.

The most striking line in the official announcement is the one revealing that the inaugural tournament will take place in 2011. That is, precisely one year before the staging of the Olympic Games in London. This is surely no mere coincidence.

To a veteran columnist whose cynicism may indeed be hardening with each passing year, this projected jamboree seems to be not so much a crowd-pulling football tournament as a declaration of independence that will put more distance between the Celtic members of the United Kingdom and the England-driven notion of a British team at the Games.