Well what do you know?
Mark Warburton is unhappy with the Under 20 league setup and wants to add it to the list of things Sevco wants to have banned.
There, it joins plastic pitches, arresting their fans, discussing sectarian singing, writing about their directors, tackling and booking their players, goals against them, Celtic, Celtic fans, other clubs, things with Irish sounding names and anything to do with the Pope.
In all seriousness, it’s getting tiresome listening to this guy tell the rest of Scottish football what parts of it he doesn’t like, and asking for meetings to get rid of them.
In the piece I wrote earlier, Hitler’s Penis & The Sevco Version Of History I said that the club has talked about “re-joining the Scottish football community”, so that it can “re-engage” with other clubs and the rest of the sport.
I said that if you want to know what that means you only have to look at the manufactured controversy over synthetic surfaces that broke out last week.
This is the way they’d “re-engage” with the rest of the clubs; not as an equal partner, but in the way a bitching, moaning, self-serving, arrogant git would address those who he thinks of as beneath him. With demands. With complaints.
The worst of it is that this club doesn’t even bother to do these things through the proper channels, like at SPFL meetings or in private; they simply phone up one of their tame hacks and let loose a stream of consciousness, taking their whinging public instead of keeping it professional and where such discussions belong.
Celtic has worked hard – damned hard – in the last few years to make Scottish football a fairer place, even giving up revenues in order to better distribute income down the leagues. We’ve taken our responsibility as the most powerful club in the land seriously. Not everyone is happy with the way we’ve handled certain things, with a lot of our fans thinking we’ve not done enough to confront vested interests and pursue stuff like LNS and Resolution 12, but neither have we thrown our weight around and tried to elevate ourselves above the rest.
Not so Sevco. You can already see the sort of policies they would pursue if they were given any power.
The We Generation in Scottish football would be swept aside.
The Me Mentality would be back in vogue before you knew it.
More and more, this club behaves like a loudmouth in a bar who won’t wait to be served like everyone else but instead shouts at people until he’s seen to, one way or the other.
Last week it was plastic pitches.
Today it’s the Under 20’s league.
None of Sevco’s issue with that competition has anything to do with the spiralling costs of Murray Park, of course, which the club can no longer afford to run at the current level, or the fact their youth team isn’t terribly effective. Last week they were hosed by Falkirk and already this week they’ve been stuffed by Thistle, in games which leave no doubt that Warburton’s “grassroots revolution” leaves a lot to be desired.
They are currently 8th in the Development League.
This comes hot on the heels of the news that the club is changing its recruitment and retention policy, to put its youth players on short term contracts only.
All in all this appears to be a stunning vote of No Confidence in the current Under 20 management team and the bulk of its players.
If that were all, we could simply let Sevco get on with its “internal restructuring” and wait for the inevitable cuts and closures.
But when Warburton tries to force the rest of Scottish football to acquiesce to his demands and to change to suit his club we are well entitled to comment on it.