It was once said that there were three main pillars of Scottish public life: the Church of Scotland, the unique Scottish legal system and Rangers Football Club. All three have had their trials down the years. The Church staggers on, its numbers down. Scottish law has also suffered its controversies and travails. But neither has agonised or been abused or so spectacularly imploded like Rangers FC.

Once the great bastion of Scottish and British football, Rangers are broken, have suffered liquidation and are now limping back from the grave, a phoenix club trying to reclaim its former heights. I’ve been everywhere with Rangers in my time – Barcelona, Milan, Paris, to the great eastern European outposts and beyond – entering some grand arenas to follow the club’s progress. Last weekend the journey took me to Recreation Park in Alloa – capacity 3,100 – for a further forlorn stop in this infamous tragedy.

On a bitingly cold afternoon the Rangers fans, once a vast, victorious tribe, trudged in, faithful and frozen, keeping up their vigil. Not a song was heard and hardly a roar went up among them. Their team won 1-0 thanks to a Nicky Law goal, whereupon the blue-and-white army sloped away, another game gone. It’s a grim kind of faith.

“I keep coming because it’s Rangers, it’s in my blood, it’s a great club,” one older supporter told me. “But if some of us could ever get our hands on these men that have done this club over…” Taking the pulse of this Rangers travelling support was proving a tricky assignment. Another fan told me angrily: “You guys in the media have had a field day with us. But it’s been a crime that’s been committed against this club.”

The story of the demise of Rangers is a painful one, and a warning to any football club which views itself as impregnable. I first watched Rangers as a little kid in the early 1970s and, privately or professionally, have scarcely been away from the club since. Back then, in childhood, Rangers seemed as strong and immovable as the famous red-brick edifice that is known the world over as Ibrox Stadium, the club’s home. Rangers was a sentinel, we assumed, that no one could ever bring down.

Founded in 1872, Rangers became one of the prestige names in world football. As it grew in lustre vast crowds flocked to Ibrox, and continued to do so until very recent times, with the club enjoying upwards of 44,000 season ticket holders. The current Ibrox holds 51,000 but the old stadium, with its great stand and oval terracing prior to its reconstruction, could easily house 80,000 fans.

When the club won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972 it gave Rangers that sheen that all big clubs desire – a European trophy to cement its place among the elite. Rangers, like city rivals Celtic, built upon its huge support. On top of this Rangers boasted a world-record 54 domestic titles.

So how did it ever come to this? Strained finances, dubious tax affairs, administration, liquidation, then reincarnation and re-entry at the bottom level of the Scottish game. The roll call of chancers and charlatans who have ruined Rangers is long. This is a painful story of betrayal.

Winning the 1972 European Cup Winners’ Cup final against Dynamo Moscow. Photograph: Press Association

Sir David Murray, one of Scotland’s greatest self-made businessmen, bought Rangers in 1988 and immediately fuelled the club with money, not to say overreaching ambition. Under Murray a cadre of great footballers arrived – Alexei Mikhailichenko, Brian Laudrup, Paul Gascoigne and others – with the club dreaming of conquering Europe once more, this time in the Champions League. Those years in the 1990s and into the new millennium were intoxicating and high-rolling for Rangers, with only one or two minor voices expressing their disquiet at the road being taken by the club.

Murray was wealthy, and he built his wealth not just on talent and hard work but also on debt. In his own business empire he never worried about bearing hundreds of millions in debt, because he believed this was the necessary fuel to drive him to greater rewards. Success and assets were levers against debts, and Murray, to a degree, applied the same philosophy to Rangers.

For a while it was all marvellous. Under Murray’s stewardship the club racked up domestic trophies while, even better, Celtic were on the ropes. At one point in 2003, Rangers’s net debt reached £82m, but the figure appeared in small print in the club’s accounts and few lost any sleep over it. Rangers in this period made successive annual losses of £19m, £32m and £29m – staggering in the context of Scottish football – but onwards they barged under Murray, signing Tore André Flo for £12m, an astronomical figure in Scotland, in 2000.

But then things changed. Murray decided that he needed to maximise Rangers’ resources in whatever way he could, and in 2000 he steered the club down a path that would eventually lead, between 2001 and 2010, to his top players being remunerated via Employee Benefit Trusts, whereby employees are supposedly “loaned” rather than “paid” money, thus avoiding tax. The very policy now sends a shudder down Rangers’ fans’ spines. The decision to use EBTs would prove – literally for Rangers – fatal.

The club flushed tens of millions of pounds through its EBTs scheme in order to avoid tax and pay its players top dollar. It triggered a dire chain of events which led to HMRC pursuing Rangers for alleged unpaid taxes, the club’s ambition being squeezed, and Murray ultimately wanting out. In fact, Rangers have twice won their tax dispute with the authorities, with the club being found to have stayed within the law, though EBTs have subsequently been clamped down on, with the government abolishing them in 2011.

When Murray felt induced to sell Rangers there was one main problem: few, if any, wanted to buy the club. The EBTs controversy did not help: potential buyers were certainly put off by the possibility of an unpaid tax bill running to tens of millions. Many companies across Britain had used EBTs for tax-avoidance purposes but, in Rangers’ case, it proved ruinous, with HMRC remorselessly pursuing the club. In the end, after Murray’s for sale sign had been up for three years above Ibrox, Craig Whyte stepped forth to buy the club off him for a princely £1. Disaster for Rangers loomed and Murray left the scene, soon to be disgraced by events.

Allegations about Whyte’s business career would soon emerge. But not before he plunged Rangers into administration, exacerbating HMRC’s grievance with the club by ceasing to pay PAYE and VAT in 2011, thus building up an inarguable, unpaid tax bill to the taxman. It left Rangers facing an actual tax bill of £20m and a potential tax bill of £50m- plus. A creditors agreement duly failed and when Rangers FC plc was finally consigned to liquidation in June 2012 it was HMRC which dealt the fatal blow. The Scottish newspapers ran headlines such as: “RIP Rangers… 140 Years of History Comes to an End.”

For many Rangers fans it was the most painful day of their lives. Weeks of struggle and uncertainty ensued, involving the club’s administrators and the football authorities, before a new Rangers FC was created out of the mess and ordered by the other Scottish clubs to start life again in the bottom tier of Scottish football. Spiritually it was the same Rangers, but the damage had been done.

Fans at Alloa this month. Photograph: Martin Hunter

I chat with Davie Bell from Wigtown, now nearly 60 years old, and a classic Rangers fan, a diehard. Traditional Rangers fans embrace the Union Jack, not just for its colours but for its British/Union significance as well: it has become part of the culture of the club. Everything in Bell’s house is Union Jack themed: “My chairs, my mugs, my telly, my mirrors, my coffee tables, my duvets, the lot. I’m Rangers through and through.” Those who know Davie say he would bleed red, white and blue, which makes all the more remarkable and dispiriting what he has to tell me.

“I’m totally fed up with it… totally,” he says of the decline of Rangers, the unsightly clambering through the lower leagues and the boardroom power struggles currently playing out at Ibrox. “I’ve sat in the same seat for decades at Ibrox – the Copland front – but sometimes now I get up and leave just before half-time, or maybe a little after it. The standard of football is awful. The club is a mess.”

This really is footballing heartache. Bell leaves Wigtown in Scotland’s southwest with his fellow fans for the two-and-a-half hour bus ride up to Glasgow… which becomes four hours once a lunchtime stop for food and a pint or two is included. And yet, so scunnered is he, once he gets to Ibrox he scarcely takes in the game.

“At the recent Dumbarton match I left my seat after about 55 minutes and went out and just sat in the supporters bus with the driver and listened to the radio. I couldn’t take it any longer. With the crowds now so low, you hear every comment, and there’s no enjoyment any more. I’ve seen teams like Annan Athletic and Stranraer play us – Rangers – off the park. It’s terrible.”

Further up Scotland’s west coast, Gus Oakley is a retired policeman – a very youthful one at 51 – who is Rangers born and bred and runs a supporters bus from Ayr up to Ibrox. He was first taken to see Rangers at the age of eight and has never looked back. But over the past two years, since Rangers’ liquidation and subsequent re-admittance to the Scottish leagues at third division level, he has witnessed the pain of this fallen giant at supporter level.

“Rangers fans feel very down and badly betrayed,” Oakley told me. “Many fans absolutely blame David Murray 100% – I don’t, by the way – and then Craig Whyte arrived, and look what he did to us. There were people who warned against Whyte getting his hands on Rangers, but they were ignored.

“The fans are now very wary of any type of ‘saviour’. There was Whyte, and then came Charles Green [who bought the Rangers assets post-liquidation] and all his nonsense. That’s why I think the fans will be happier when an owner – or owners – come in who have the club at heart, or at least have that type of background.”

Winning ways: Peter Lovenkrands scores against Celtic in the 2002 Cup Final. Photograph: Gary M. Prior/Getty

Throughout the whole saga the attendances at Ibrox had remained buoyant at 40,000-plus – a real testament to Rangers fans’ enduring love for their club. But in recent times crowds have plummeted as supporters have waged war with the Rangers board, and a power struggle for control of the reborn club has waged among various factions.

Oakley says that the recent poor attendances at Ibrox of 20,000 or below are the result of supporters being worn down – first by the demise of the club itself, and now with a board of directors who are detested, and who cannot get the club back on its feet.

The once-bulging Ibrox has been a ghost stadium at some recent games. Season ticket sales – the cornerstone of any big club’s income stream – are down significantly as Rangers fans either revolt or feel sickened by events. The Rangers chairman, David Somers, is a loathed figure, while Mike Ashley, a 9% stakeholder in Rangers (who also owns Newcastle United), is derided.

Ashley, the South Africa-based Dave King, plus others are all currently fighting for control of the club. Essentially Rangers, a listed company, is owned by the market, but with some large majority stakeholders now jostling for power. King, a Rangers supporter and the fans’ favourite to wrest control, is supremely wealthy but has a 2013 high court conviction in South Africa for 41 contraventions of the Income Tax Act. In the context of Rangers, you almost couldn’t make that bit up. Having originally been chased for 3.2bn South African rand (equivalent today of £184m), King and the court finally agreed on a 700m rand (£40m) payback settlement.

The upshot of all this Ibrox warring has been a dysfunctional and paralysed football club with boycotting fans and no money in the coffers. Ally McCoist, a club legend, and manager until four weeks ago, has walked away in disgust. In recent days he has been spotted out and about in Glasgow suddenly looking 10 years younger.

Ally McCoist out recently, having quit as Rangers’ manager. Photograph: Andy Nicol

Rangers fans are fed up with it all. “On my own supporters bus,” says Gus Oakley, “maybe five or six years ago, we’d be turning people away in a 55-seater bus each week. I’d say: ‘Sorry, there’s no spare seats.’ Rangers have always had a great support. But now we’re down to about 20 fans and we’re sharing transport with another supporters club from nearby. Fans are no longer going, and it’s the same all over Scotland with the Rangers buses. We’re all sharing now to keep it going. You don’t want to see supporters clubs dying.

“One of the last guys I expected to do this – a guy who loves Rangers – has just told me that the game against Hearts this week will be the last one he goes to. He says he’s not going back. More and more fans are saying they’re not going back.”

Some have wondered, given the club’s benighted past and current boardroom wars, if a generation of Rangers fans might be lost to the whole debacle. When asked, Oakley thought carefully about this. “I don’t think we are talking of a whole generation of Rangers fans lost to the club, but I think there will be a number, yes, who won’t be back,” he said. “Significantly, there was a younger group of fans aged about 15 or 16 – quite a group of them – who had started coming on our bus two or three years ago. But they’ve all died away – none of them are going at the moment. So in terms of the ‘lost generation’ thing, well, there’s guys who were just getting into going who have now stopped. Their fathers are still going, but not the young lads themselves.”

Rangers is currently embroiled in a power struggle involving various factions who want to control the club, and the fans are finally showing their teeth in it all as well. Various campaigns, such as Rangers First and Buy Rangers, are aimed at fans buying up shares so that they might eventually own the club themselves. So far, though, these two groups own just 2% between them.

The whole saga has deposited a poisonous atmosphere in Scottish football. For one thing, Rangers fans severely object to any notion of a “new club” emerging after the 2012 liquidation – they argue it was the company, not the club itself, that was liquidated. The subject has proved just as painful for the Scottish FA, which has done its damndest to tiptoe around the subject. Despite all newspapers having emphatically reported the death of Rangers in 2012, reporters and commentators now get it in the neck if they so much as broach this subject at all.

On top of this, fans of other clubs, such as Celtic for obvious reasons, crow aloud about the fate of Rangers and delight in distinguishing the current from the former. The Ibrox club for decades practiced a sectarian signing policy, which just about everyone concedes today was embarrassing, and some in Scotland who have detested Rangers have long memories in this particular context.

There is no other way of putting it: many view the recent fate of Rangers as the ultimate comeuppance for the great, ugly beast. A ribald, black humour has emerged about Rangers, but it has also led to deep social divisions, online enmity, and an unpleasant atmosphere in Scottish football.

“There’s been an awful lot of people who have enjoyed what happened to Rangers, I’ve no doubts about that,” says Gus Oakley. “Let’s say fans of Celtic, Dundee United and Aberdeen in particular. But that would happen in any walk of life. If anyone has been at the top and they are suddenly struggling, you’ll always get people laughing at it. I just turn a blind eye. There but for the grace of God go them. What happened to Rangers could happen to anyone.”