Spiers on Sport: Charlie Telfer and more bad blood between Rangers, Dundee Utd

United originally offered in the region of £50,000 and never in their wildest dreams believed that £170,000 plus VAT would be their final bill, even at arbitration.

Meanwhile, Rangers and their supporters have reacted as if Christmas has come early. They are cock-a-hoop at the judgment, with some Ibrox fans rounding on the United chairman, Stephen Thompson, whom they view as the perennial pantomime villain.

It says something about the Rangers of here and now. Not for the first time recently you are reminded of the stricken state of Ibrox, and of Scottish football in general.

Could anyone have imagined, even five years ago, Rangers getting the bunting out over a £170,000 prize?

The compensation sum does seem a tad steep, but United should crack on and stump up. If you go to such a tribunal - an independent trio of minds who assess all the evidence - then you know the risks you are taking.

I'm not sure shedding any tears for Dundee United over this is appropriate. More than any other club in Scotland right now, their tills are jangling to the rush of incoming funds.

The club is raking in circa £5.75m over the recent sales of Andrew Robertson and Ryan Gauld. Can United not take its medicine and write out, in this context, a relatively minor cheque to Rangers?

Intriguingly, the tribunal decision is the outcome of a prolonged, cat-and-mouse game played out between Thompson and the recently departed Rangers CEO, Graham Wallace.

The two men actually got on well and, on more than one occasion, were intent on reaching an agreed sum for Telfer. But Wallace was forever waylaid by other Ibrox matters, and the situation drifted on for months before the SPFL were forced to intervene.

A sum of £200,000 for Telfer is contentious but it is not outrageous. Rangers nursed this kid for six years and produced a player of decent talent. They are surely entitled to a whack of compensation.

That said, Telfer had scarcely made an inroad on Ally McCoist's first-team, and you wonder at the Ibrox club's blindness to the situation. If Dundee United have been stung by this event, McCoist and Rangers have also been a mite embarrassed.

The Telfer dispute has now taken on a wider context of stone-throwing, with the status of the post-liquidation Rangers FC, to the annoyance of the club, once more coming up for debate.

Stephen Thompson has never been publicly quoted as saying as much but, like many, he appears to believe, in terms of liquidation, that the Ibrox club is a new entity and is just two years old.

Rangers somewhat jumped the gun on this, and complained about this Dundee United stance on their website on Tuesday evening, before hurriedly withdrawing their remarks. United, in fact, had never applied such thinking in their arguments over Telfer's compensation.

Now everyone is joining in: Rangers fans, Dundee United fans, Celtic fans and more. Calls are being made for BDO, the 'oldco Rangers' liquidator, to claim some of the imminent Telfer money for its creditors, a list which runs into hundreds.

It is all a sorry - sometimes poisonous - mess and it is worth re-iterating again: the demise of Rangers FC in 2012 has left an angry, bitter, feuding society right across Scottish football. The venom out there sometimes has to be seen to be believed.

Conspiracies abound: that the football authorities have aided Rangers, or that they have conducted "witch-hunts" against Rangers, with every point of view in between being vehemently held. This Telfer tribunal decision has only unleashed another load of it.

We've reached a poor state of affairs, with many a potential sponsor turning its back on the Scottish game. Who wants to be a part of such an unhappy, disfunctional household?

Charlie Telfer, meanwhile, I hope blossoms into a fine footballer. He has a very decent chance.