Cheeky Monkey Destroys Sevco Same Club Myth

A Celtic blogger calling himself Hostile Monkey obliterated the Sevco Survival Myth over the weekend, with a stunning, forensic dissection of the arguments in its favour, trashing each one with aplomb, in a manner which leaves little doubt about the conclusion.

Rangers are dead. Gone. Buried. No more.

This is known to all of us, of course, but large numbers of their fans continue to persist in the fantasy nonetheless, banging on about the continuation of history as if the concept of a bankrupt company selling that in its liquidation sale was not plainly ridiculous.

Of all the fantasies Sevco fans cling to, the Survival Myth is easily the daftest, but you have to fully explore it and the implications of it to truly see how mad it is.

Taken to its logical conclusion what Sevco fans believe is that the club and company are two separate things and that what happens to one does not affect the other at all.

It is the “club” that carries the history, is what they’d have us believe …. but what about the rest?

Well, the registration is held by the company.

We know that because Sevco had to be granted a “transfer of membership” from the old Rangers.

The player contracts are held by the company.

We know that because otherwise the TUPE regulations would not have allowed the whole of the Rangers first team squad to opt in or out of moving to the newco.

The property and commercial infrastructure is owned by the company.

We know this because this is traded on the stock market (when they are allowed there!) and can be used as collateral for loans and other things.

And, of course, any debts are held by the company.

This is the basis on which this fiction was first being spun.

Everything of consequence – everything that allows a football club to actually do what it’s set up for – is under the aegis of “the company.”

Only that ephemeral concept of history remains the province of the club … this is their argument, boiled down.

Yet as Hostile Monkey points out, the history itself doesn’t even come complete.

Take their first season in existence for example.

If Sevco and Rangers are, in fact, one in the same, if the club itself never went anywhere, why did they have to play qualifying rounds in the Scottish Cup? If the history is intact, they ought to have started in the Third Round, as Scottish Cup seeding is based on the previous year’s league position … when they’d have been second in the SPL.

Everyone involved in this knows, on some level, that this idea is ludicrous. They cling to it for dear life anyway, because not to would hurt too much.

Hostile Monkey takes apart those pretences one at a time, starting with the Lord Nimmo Smith verdict and what it actually says about the Sevco – Rangers link. It goes on to examine the ASA verdict, the BBC Trust decision, the European Club Association statement on the matter and a few other things besides.

Aside from being a total demolition job on the whole idea, what Hostile Monkey has demonstrated, in crystal clear terms, is just how little their club actually means to them except as a vehicle for their supremacist notions.

I have long argued that whether those trophies are represented in the history books as belonging to Rangers or Sevco or indeed both is irrelevant to the vast majority of us.

Days like Black Sunday happened regardless. The club that won those honours might be dead and gone but the fact of them remains, and those supporters who want to maintain the fiction that Sevco carries the flag are perfectly entitled to do so inside their own heads … because the history of a football club is in more than the bricks and mortar of the ground and the record in those books.

It is carried in the hearts and the minds of the fans themselves, and there it really can be passed on from generation to generation.

Take Seville, for example. It will remain part of the Celtic consciousness forever … although we left that magical city with nothing but warm memories. The “history” of it lies in what we tell others about those experiences. It is a collection of feelings, emotions, things of the heart.

To the Sevco fans though, history isn’t like that.

They’ve at once elevated it above what their club actually ought to be – an ideal, something truly immortal – and yet something less than that at the same time.

On the one hand, they have made the history more important than any other aspect of their existence, without which their club is nothing. Yet at the same time, they’ve demeaned that history by making it about nothing more than lines on a page, dry statistics written down somewhere.

They fail to see this, to understand that the history of a football club resides in something above and beyond that.

In making those things into the soul of Sevco they are saying simply that it has has no soul.

They’ve devalued what the history represents, turning it into nothing more than a plaque on the wall, something that can be “purchased” in an asset sale, like a piece of office furniture. That makes it worthless except in terms of what someone is willing to pay for it.

Could our European Cup triumph in 1967 be represented in such a way?

As something that can be bought and sold, and stuck on a shelf?

Why doesn’t the very idea of that sound loathsome to them?

Simple really; without the totem pole of the “history” to dance around, they’ve got nothing else.

With all this in mind, the article by Hostile Monkey is one of the most important to be written and published on this particular subject.

It should be used as a reference point whenever Sevco fans try to maintain the Survival Myth.

Check it out at the link below.

You won’t be disappointed.

To read the article itself, click here.