The seeds were sown on the most famous transfer in Scottish football history the night the heavens opened over Hampden and Mo Johnston scored the two Scotland goals that downed his adopted homeland in a World Cup qualifier.
March 8, 1989. Scotland 2 France 0 and former Celtic icon Johnston, then at Nantes, ripped Michel Platini’s team to ribbons en route to qualification for Italia 90. A few seats along from Johnston’s agent Bill McMurdo in the national stadium directors’ box sat Rangers manager Graeme Souness and his assistant Walter Smith. Watching and wondering what if...
Four months later, Souness ushered Johnston into the Blue Room at Ibrox as a Rangers player and almost 34 years on, there is not a day goes by without McMurdo being asked about it. Football’s first super agent - the man who brought George Best to Scottish football but is still best remembered for the MoJo deal - lifted the lid on the transfer that shook Scottish football to its core in the latest episode of Record Sport's new Off The Record podcast.
“I knew Graeme had always liked him,” McMurdo, now 78, said. “I met him and Walter that night at Hampden when Maurice scored the two goals against France. He was doing great with Nantes and had become a much better player alongside the likes of Marcel Desailly and Didier Deschamps.
“He signed on July 10, 1989, and every day since then somebody mentions Maurice Johnston. I just had a feeling that Rangers were buzzing about. They had gone out of their way to tell me how good he was that night at Hampden.
“I asked Maurice, who was back in Glasgow at his mother’s house a few weeks later, ‘Would you go to Rangers?’ He said, ‘Yes, that wouldn’t be a problem for me. I’d love to play for Graeme Souness’.
"There’s no doubt that it would have had an impact on Celtic, even if he had signed for Rangers and never kicked a ball for them. Celtic were flying just before that and the fact Maurice signed for Rangers had a terrible effect on them.”
The realisation Celtic had lost Johnston to their greatest rival was made worse by a photograph the striker had taken posing in a Hoops shirt a few weeks earlier, stirring a belief that a homecoming was imminent. It was - but to the house across the road.
McMurdo added: “Maurice came back from Nantes for a weekend. I had a letter from the Celtic chairman Jack McGinn saying that I was persona non grata at Celtic Park after doing the deal that had taken Maurice to France. I wrote back to him saying that in future would he please use the Queen’s English, so I don’t think that went down too well.
“Maurice told me big Billy McNeill had asked him to go to Parkhead for some event that weekend, but I was banned, so I couldn’t go with him. I suspected they wanted to sign him again, so I gave him a letter to show them, saying he was under contract to Nantes and not in a position to sign for them.
“When he got to Parkhead, they asked him to sign and he showed them the letter. But they still claimed Maurice had agreed to sign. Maurice went back to Nantes on the Monday and I phoned Jack McGinn from Paris Airport to tell him it wasn’t happening.
“He had a three-year contract at Nantes but at that time, you never got a free transfer at the end of it. But I’d done a deal with Nantes that at the end of his third year he could go on a free. It was basically a Bosman before Bosman and it was the first time it had ever been done.
“He’d played two years with Nantes and if they wanted to make money on him, they had to sell him now or lose him for nothing the following year. We had cast iron offers from Torino, Stuttgart and Spurs and he wanted to stay abroad. Montpelier came in for him, but backed out of paying the agreed fee of £750,000 and signed Eric Cantona for buttons instead!
“But Rangers came in and got the deal done. Alasdair Hood, the Rangers security guy, drove us to Ibrox that day. Maurice had a blanket over his head in the car. Right after, Maurice, Graeme and I got a private jet from Edinburgh to Italy, via Jersey to see David Murray. We landed in Bari and had to get a helicopter to Il Ciocco, where Rangers were training.
“I looked across at Souness, who was sitting with his eyes shut. He hated flying and especially in a helicopter. I told him he’d just shattered his image.”
If the Celtic fans were outraged, they can perhaps take some comfort from the fact that another of their heroes, Frank McAvennie, didn’t end up at Ibrox with Johnston. McMurdo smiled: “I was the only agent Frank had from when he was 16 to when he retired. He could have ended up at Ibrox as well because I know Graeme rated him.
“I was coming out of Ibrox one day after a game and Graeme was signing autographs. He told me, ‘I got a phone call from Terry Venables about one of your charges, McAvennie’. I told him he’s the best striker in Scotland, but more than that, he’s the best player in Scotland. I think he was having a wee dig at me, because his own striker was Maurice at the time!”
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