Yesterday I got an email from a guy I know in the blogosphere; he writes on the club playing out of Ibrox. He had read my piece on Mark Warburton. During the short email exchange he said that there’s a growing discontent amongst the fans.
I told him I was aware of it, through looking over their forums and some of the blogs.
Reality is dawning on people over there, but it’s a curious kind of reality.
The Sevco fans still believe theirs is the biggest club in the land. A whole generation of them has grown up knowing nothing else. The spell in the 1970’S and 80’s when their stadium was like a ghost town and Rangers went eight years without winning the title doesn’t register on their radar at all.
From 1965 to 1986 that club won the league title a mere three times. The success of the years between 1986 and 2010 was purchased, much of it with cash the club just didn’t have, benefiting from the largesse of banks and a well-publicised tax scam. It has never dawned on these supporters, not for one second, that the club they grew up watching wasn’t really real, that it was a phantom, a shadow on the wall, made to look bigger than it really was.
I have been arguing that for years, that we’d see the measure of the Ibrox operation when it had to be self-sustaining. That in finding that out we’d see the loyalty of the fans. I half suspected the running costs would cripple them before we found out, and so it transpired.
But the NewCo has modelled itself on that club with the same expectations.
I find that bizarre and in many ways it’s tragic for them, because those expectations are wholly unrealistic. The days of big spending are over; they’ve not grasped that and the longer it takes for them to do so the longer the pain will go on.
Don’t let anybody kid you that size equals strength either, that season ticket numbers dictate the relative strengths of a football team. I bring people back, over and over, to Leeds and their plight. They fell down into debt and near death, plummeted the divisions and have never recovered, in spite of being a far bigger club than some of those who have made the EPL a home.
No club has a right to be considered a giant. Clubs are defined by what they achieve, and to a lesser degree by how they do it. Success and status don’t come automatically. I’ve written on here before that a big wage bill and a few “name” players doesn’t make success happen automatically either, and the example I’ve used is the Dundee side that bought people like Cannigia. A lot of people are guilty of looking at Ibrox and seeing Rangers, some at our own club included, as if the name itself meant that certain things would simply slot into place.
None of this has hit them yet. It’s not the reality I was referring to.
No, the reality they are waking up to is that Dave King has conned them. He’s got his hands on the club, he’s got control, and not a single word he said to get it has turned out to be true. There’s been no “overinvestment”, not by him anyway. Instead the club is kept afloat on soft loans and the sort of hand to mouth existence that got Craig Whyte into such trouble in a single year. Crisis swirls around the club like a plague of flies.
Even the promises he kept haven’t turned out as planned.
The manager he appointed has been wrung out in the space of just 18 months and is on the brink of colossal failure. He’s walking around like someone waiting to be shot. The dressing room is in turmoil. What little cash was available has been squandered on second-rate junk.
Their two “marquee signings” have been a disaster; Barton has caused so much trouble he’s not welcome at training (although I hear snippets that suggest he was fully justified in his anger towards Andy Halliday, who’s cultural leanings are much celebrated in the Ibrox stands and who can’t help but express himself in line with them) and Kranjcar looked like a waste of money even before his season was ended by a “freak” injury of a type that has kept him on the side-lines several times before in his career. That’s the two highest earning players at the club, who their fans will be lucky to see pull on the jersey again.
None of these things are directly the fault of Dave King, but he’s the man who picked the manager and let him sign 22 players.
He’s the man who sanctioned a £1 million plus deal for Joe Garner.
The club couldn’t afford it, but this wasn’t the “overinvestment” the fans had in mind when they flocked to buy season tickets, carried on the euphoria of a penalty shoot-out.
It doesn’t matter any longer whether King is simply unable to invest or never intended to in the first place; he had to have known it when he promised these fans the £30 million war-chest. He had to have known that it wasn’t coming out of his pocket. Perhaps he really did believe there were saps out there who would “invest” with him, people so blinded by the lights of Ibrox that they would part with large sums of money and make it easy.
Maybe that’s what his “business plan” was predicated on; if so he’s not just a liar but a failure.
Either way, what are the fans meant to make of it?
I try hard, you know, to look at their supporters as simple football fans the same as you and me, not as rivals or people who, for many, want to wade up to their knees in my blood. They’re not all like that, some of them are just like us, and those people were conned, and King was aided and abetted by a media which has served their supporters appallingly.
We’ve seen how the Sevco press office operates under this guy – this guy who promised transparency don’t forget, before he removed the club from AIM, before he hired Traynor and his PR goons to keep the facts from the fans – with bullying and coercion. That excuse will only stick for so long. Journalists shouldn’t be afraid to write critically or ask hard questions, that’s what the goddamned job is. To continue to fob fans off with pitiful puff pieces from guys like Souness when what they need are real answers is gutless and scandalous.
If you follow the Sevco blogs you’re going to start to see some highly critical stuff on them in the next few weeks, as a groundswell grows against the King regime who many can clearly see is leading the club off the cliff-face. Oh the man has his Praetorian Guard in place at Club 1872 but they’re going to find themselves increasingly isolated if they take a decision to act as human shields for King and his board as they spectacularly fail to deliver.
It’s too late, of course. The club is heading for an administration event as surely as the sun’s going to come up tomorrow morning, but if any version of it is to survive into the future it’s going to fall to the fans to get control eventually, to rely on building something sustainable, to avoid falling for stories of sugar daddies and a swift return to the top.
Dreams of that haven’t done them much good thus far, but with King I think they’re in more trouble than even his harshest critics amongst them realise.
At least now many of them have it clear though. Dave King is trouble for them.
His tenure has been chaotic and is going to end in total disaster.
It’s what they do with that realisation that will determine what kind of future – if any – their football club has.