A retired defence lawyer Gordon Ritchie made a good living from being contrarian in nature. By his own admission, challenging behaviour came naturally.
“I am a difficult person to work with,” acknowledges the former Morton director. “I can be a complete pain in the backside at times.
“I've run a number of companies and I don't think I'd win a popularity contest with any of them.”
A founding member of Morton Club Together, Ritchie spent three years of his working life taking the Cappielow outfit on a journey from private to community ownership.
The goal was to create a sustainable, transparent, fan-controlled football club and, when the financial decisions made by his fellow directors began to ring alarm bells, he said so. Ousted from the board in March 2024, he fired a stark warning to his former boardroom colleagues.
“I told them ‘You're spending more money than you are making, I can't agree with the direction the club is travelling in.’
“My resignation email to the Morton board actually finished by saying, ‘I expect the club will be on the verge of administration and up for sale within a couple of years.’
“I was wrong in that because it was actually two years and three months before we reached the verge of administration and not two years. My prediction was out by three months...”
Morton are now a football club in financial peril. Main sponsors Dalrada have failed to make promised payments, creating a £335,000 shortfall in the budget. Rooted to the bottom of the Championship, winless in six games, projections predict that the club could run out of cash before the end of the year.
While a fans’ fighting fund has raised over £70,000 the future is unclear. Dutch multi-club ownership group Estrella have pulled the plug on a proposed £650,000 investment while a consortium of ten Inverclyde businessmen are awaiting a response to their written offer of financial investment.
Details have yet to be communicated to the 1150 members of MCT and, if the condition of a rescue package is a return from community to private ownership, some will inevitably think twice.
“I think this ends with the fans panicking and being left in a situation where they feel they've got no option, but to sell the club,” predicts Ritchie, during a break from mowing the lawn.
“And Cappielow will, in due course, be turned into a commercial enterprise. Whether it's an extension of Cappielow Industrial Estate, or something else, Morton will be homeless.”
A grim, unthinkable scenario some supporters regard Ritchie and others warning of trouble steaming down the tracks as unhelpful troublemakers. A man who spent his professional life convincing juries to view complex issues in a different light, he sees things differently.
“People say I have a vendetta against the club and that’s untrue. I actually have a vendetta against the individuals who are destroying the club.”
In a quest to get rid of the people he regards as the architects of Morton’s demise the 60-year-old recently rounded up a group of wealthy, like-minded supporters willing to donate a sum in the region of £150,000, with just one condition attached. To secure the money the directors who created the current mess would need to stand down with immediate effect.
“When I left the club I started to contact a couple of people that I knew who were Morton supporters and members of MCT and who I knew had a bit of cash.
“I expressed my concern over the way the club was running and told them my prediction that the club was going to go out of business.
“I told them I was not asking for money then, but if push came to shove would they be prepared to put their hands in their pockets to bale Morton out when the inevitable happened?
“The club then issued their YouTube update effectively admitting that they had no cash I then contacted those people again and said, ‘I told you this was going to happen, are you ready to put your money where your mouth was?’
“Most of them said, ‘yes absolutely.’
“But, without exception they all said, ‘we are not putting a penny in until those people running the club into the ground are gone.”
All the benefactors requested in return for the offer of help was a season ticket each for life in order to navigate money laundering regulations. A mid-August deadline was imposed to leave enough time to strengthen a threadbare, relegation threatened squad.
“They came back and said ‘you need to tell us who the donors are.’
“I said, ‘well I don’t and I’m not going to tell you that.’
“Most of the guys wanted to remain anonymous and I have not told anyone who they are.
“They then asked for proof of funds and I thought they were taking the p***.
“We are talking about guys who are multi millionaires and they are asking if they have £10k to put into Morton?!
“These were donations and we wanted nothing in return. I don’t know if they were stalling for time or just stupid and didn’t know what they were doing.
“But the deadline passed and there was no suggestion of resignations. So I fired off an email saying, ‘time is up, the deal is off the table.”
The matter was not entirely closed yet. Days later Ritchie says he received an email from Morton acknowledging that they had missed the deadline and asking if the donation could be resurrected in return for directors David Whitton, Dean McKinnon and Graham Barr stepping down. Would that be enough?
“I spoke to the others and there was an agreement that the answer was no. They all had to go.”
He now harbours the suspicion that some of the people overseeing the club’s current plight are engaged in an act of self preservation.
“A company director has a legally binding obligation to act in the best interest of the company.
“So how can you justify refusing to resign when offered what is life saving money for the company?
“How can you justify that if it's not about self preservation?
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“The club is going to hit the skids. The club is in serious financial trouble and the people that are running it - short of going cap in hand to the fans and asking for money - have no other ideas for generating revenue.”
The main source of income was Dalrada, the US-based technology firm headed up by Greenock-born Morton supporter Brian Bonar. The partnership began with a three year agreement in 2022. Dalrada representative Ross Gourdie joined the board and, over time, the company began putting more money into the coffers.
“Dalrada appeared on the scene and gave us £100,000,’ Ritchie recalls. “We were never supposed to take more than that.
“When they started saying, ‘we will pay more’ I was the one on the board saying ‘I not comfortable with this.”
“We were supposed to be self sufficient. We were going from being reliant on Golden Casket, the company run by the Rae family, to being reliant on Dalrada and it was not going to end well.
“I was shouted down again by people saying, ‘why would you object to people giving us free money?’
“The reality is that there is no such thing as free money. Something always comes back to bite you on the backside later on.”
Over the first three years Bonar’s support for the club came close to £2million and in June 2025, a new agreement worth £540,000 was voted through by MCT members. In September last year a further £240,000 was committed, with £109,000 of that cash paid out so far.
In January Dalrada advised the club that the partnership would be coming to an end and, by June of this year payments had slowed to a trickle - a Morton update citing ‘business pressures on their end.’ While Bonar has told club representatives that he intends to honour outstanding payments worth £195,000, it’s not clear that he can.
While many now regard Bonar and Dalrada as the villains of the Morton story Ritchie regards that narrative as ‘b*******’
“The board have a history of identifying scapegoats for their own mistakes.
“That’s what they do. They never accept responsibility for things they have done wrong.
“They say Dalrada owes them over £300,000 or will by the end of the season.
“Well, what happened the rest of the money that has come in over recent years?
“Over the last two or three years in addition to its normal budget the club has made £3million
“The board have always been very wary of how much Dalrada put in, but based on various figures at various times I reckon at a conservative estimate that Dalrada have put in £1.5million over the last three years.
“MCT member contributions have been in excess of £500,000. We made £600k from the Rangers and Celtic cup games and had big crowds for the Hearts and Motherwell cup games a couple of years back.
“Then you have the TV money for those games and TV money for the Rangers and Celtic games that would not be in the budget.
“Add the prize money for getting to the quarter-final of the cup - where the club always budgets to get knocked out in the third round - and under Dougie Imrie the club finished fifth when they always budget to finish eighth.
“Add all that up and it’s over £3million of extra revenue over the above the budgeted figures.
“What has happened to that money? I have no idea.
“Had we built a shiny new stand I could understand where the money had gone. But anyone who has been at Cappielow recently will know that’s not the case.”
Ritchie still believes in the principle of community ownership and believes it can still work at a club like Morton if the people running the show move to one side. During covid he endured a crash course on how to run a football club, acting as de factor CEO, club secretary, kit man and part-time groundsman; he even sold pitch side advertising. Taking a football club losing £400,000 a year he turned a profit of £90,000 in year one and, by year two, the books were in the black to the tune of £250,000. Remarkably, he did all this while fighting a life-threatening illness.
“I was diagnosed three years ago with cancer,’ he says, almost as a casual aside. “I was told it was terminal.
“I've been through six surgeries in the last few years to try and cure my cancer.
“I was lying in a hospital bed, less than 24 hours after life saving surgery, doing the club's admin on my laptop, because none of the other board members would step up and do any work to help the club out.
“I was still under the influence of the anaesthetic. Not fit to drive a car and god knows how many painkillers were being pumped through my system.
“And I'm doing letters to the SPFL and I'm doing the club licensing applications.
“I'm doing player registrations - one of which, I believe, might have been the Jack Bearne one that we screwed up the before a FIFA transfer embargo. And I'm doing that, while I am supposedly terminally ill, in a hospitality bed in Glasgow.
“I put in the hours to keep the club going and I was recently willing to put £75k of my own money into the club.
“If anyone else wants to put that money in then they can criticise me and accuse me of not having the best interests of Morton at heart.
“Until someone else does that they can shut up…”
