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When Sevco Swirls Down The Plughole It Will Be Because The Big House Stayed Open

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One of the most iconic images in the time of the downfall of Rangers was a handsome looking fan standing outside their stadium pleading for the continuation of his club. “The big house must stay open,” he said, making the line famous and immortal. “That’s the bottom line.”

And it was the bottom line, because no-one could imagine the ground being closed or the club being gone.

One without the other can barely be imagined.

That’s why the ultimate irony of the Sevco era will be that when the doors finally close on it that the reason will be because the big house did stay open. It will be because nothing else sucks money out of the coffers of the club than the white elephant of Ibrox. It will be because keeping the big house open will have become impossible.

Ibrox is what’s going to kill them.

Way back when Sevco was being formed, Ibrox was the cornerstone. Paul67 was one of a number of bloggers who expressed disbelief at the idea that a club playing in the lower leagues of Scottish football, with no prospect of European money, with no prospect of top flight exposure, without a shred of marketing potential, could maintain the infrastructure of a major club, one that was geared towards playing regularly in the Champions League.

There were rumours that the owners of the club had tried to buy St Mirren; there can be little doubt that those stories were true. The purpose of it has never been properly established, but it has always been speculated that Green and his people realised costs would have to be slashed to the bone, that the entire operation would have to be scaled down.

The media was never going to allow that. Their fans were never going to accept it. Had Green been able to launch the club in the manner he’d initially wanted – accepting their NewCo status and cutting the cloth accordingly – I wholeheartedly believe that Ibrox would have been mothballed until the club was playing top flight football.

Back when Green was in the early days I wrote a flighty article about him and his mind-set over on Fields. (If you’re interested in it, you can read it clicking here.) In that piece I argued that he was a guy interested in money and nothing else. He wanted the club run as a business. But he realised quickly that he would be able to make a chunk of change for himself much more quickly if he pandered to their worst elements.

And so it was that Charles Green, with the help of the media, birthed the Survival Myth. He quickly realised it sold season tickets and replica shirts. He knew he could use that to see him through the share issue he had planned. The idea of running the club sustainably went by the boards, in favour of his plan to make as much as he could as fast as he could.

In that decision he sowed the seeds of the crisis that is about to engulf Sevco and which has the potential to sweep it away.

Every available revenue stream has been leeched off and bled white. The club is dying right before our eyes, and the unsustainability of Ibrox is becoming clear to even the most bewitched advocate for what was once Scotland’s best stadium.

One of the earliest articles I wrote about Sevco used the analogy of a guy who’s in a car showroom looking for a new car.

He sees a lot he likes, but one he loves; a classic, something he’s always wanted but which has always been spectacularly out of his price range. But this time it’s listed and almost affordable. He asks the salesman about it, and he gets a story. The car was owned by a man who’s business went bust, who’s life collapsed, who wants a quick sale and no fuss and is willing to take a knock-down price as a consequence.

So the buyer rushes to the bank and takes out a loan. He uses his money to buy the new car, because even with the borrowed money this is a bargain like none he’s ever had. But on the first day he has it one of the wheels falls off. He fixes that with a smile, because it’s only a wheel. But on the second day the windows fall out of their frames. He forces a grin, because this is still the deal of the decade, and he takes it to a repair shop. He tells the mechanic “fix the windows.”

He comes back to pick the car up and tries to ignore the obvious glee of the mechanic, who clearly knows he’ll be seeing this guy again soon, and drives away. As he’s going down the road all the doors fall off the car. He loads them in the back and drives to the mechanics again. “Fix the car,” he says. “Whatever’s wrong, just fix it.”

A day later he gets the call he’s been dreading; it’s the mechanic, with a To Do list longer than a Shakespeare play, laying out the full picture for the first time. The repair costs will be so great that the guy would have been cheaper buying the same model, brand new.

And that’s what Charles Green bought when he took on Sevco, but he didn’t care because after he made his decision about how to run things there he never intended to be around when the doors fell off and the engine blew up.

The wheels came loose a while ago. The glass in the window crashed into the door frames quite a ways back. The engine is already smoking.

Between problems with the roof, the long-standing asbestos issue in some of the walls (which makes major repairs both expensive and dangerous) and now rumours about problems with Scottish Water it’s pretty apparent that the Ibrox vehicle is on its last legs.

Oh I’m sure it could be repaired, fixed up and made road-worthy again but that will take more money than they’ve got or are likely to get anywhere, and this would all be cash going on simply maintaining what’s there right now, and not towards improving the team or the infrastructure as a whole.

We know there are issues with their roof. The asbestos thing has been discussed to death; these are facts and aren’t really in dispute. The issues with Scottish Water are new; I said in a blog during the week (you can read it here) that I thought that story sounded hokey and that there were a few holes in it, but I got an update last night that alleges there were contractors inside Ibrox fitting new water meters over the last few weeks, because – so people were saying – there were issues with unpaid bills. This is a piece of info that was already known to some before the larger water story broke, and last night the two were finally linked.

I think there’s probably something going on there, and although I still doubt the church angle there’s a lot of smoke here which I don’t think is merely the result of an internet rumour.

Ibrox is like a black hole, sucking in money.

Keeping the operation running out of there is going to be impossible in the short to medium term.

I’m sure the SFA would offer the use of Hampden, but a lot of us are going to be watching very carefully if that happens to see what rate the club is being charged and whether they are also paying the match-day costs on top of it. There ought to be no question of our national stadium being rented out cheap, or for the rest of Scottish football to end up losing out because another club based at Edmiston Drive can’t pay its bills.

Every club in this land has to live within its means.

If Sevco can’t afford its stadium then that’s their problem and not one the rest of Scottish football should be lumbered with. Nothing would spark fury more than seeing the SFA give what amounted to a subsidy to the club with the second biggest earnings and the second highest wage bill in the whole country.

Crisis swirls around Sevco right now. The press doesn’t write about it, their fans don’t want to accept it and the SFA would rather ignore it but it’s happening and that will impact on every other club in the land, because our governing bodies haven’t learned anything from what happened to Rangers and have not put into place the regulations to negate the effects of another Ibrox crash.

But this one is going to be different, because part of the problem is Ibrox itself.

The full implications of that have yet to sink in.

If the bloggers are right about how bad it is over there – and we’ve been right on every major crisis to sweep through that place in the last five years – and Sevco falls down into deep black waters the biggest and most valuable asset in an administration or liquidation fire sale will not just be rendered worthless but will be made far worse; it will be turned into the millstone which drags them all the way to the bottom.

And in those circumstances it’s hard to see any version of them emerge at all.

This isn’t just another drama, one of many.

This is the End of Sevco.

The End of Rangers.

Even the name may not survive this.

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