In keeping with his promise to introduce transparency at Ibrox, Dave King’s Sevco board has released a minimal set of accounts today.
They are also unaudited, in violation of UEFA Licensing regulations.
The accounts show an operating loss of £500,000 for the final six months of last year, on a six month turnover of a meagre £11 million, which includes season ticket revenues.
There’s a lot missing from these figures; the club has not provided any detailed breakdown of them, and the actual, audited, number – if we ever see it – is certain to be higher as there are clearly a lot of exclusions and some financial jiggery-pokery going on with these.
In spite of his usual, preening arrogance and an assurance that the club’s finances are the envy of world football as they have “no third party debt” (good job his hand isn’t on a Bible when he says that, and that additionally they don’t need to clear such a claim with the Stock Exchange), both the statement and the accounts themselves make one thing clear;
This club is absolutely skint, and depending on charity to survive. They could even do with a code for new customer on StanJames!
Their behaviour is so suspect I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out that their “cost reductions” were because they have all their electrical equipment hooked to the next door neighbour’s juice, like a junkie flat with a hole in the ceiling and a cable snaked up to the socket in the upstairs wall.
To that end, King has made the fans this promise; he and the board will continue to look for fresh “investment” wherever they can get it, whether that’s Russian mob bosses, Ulster loyalists or Far East fraudsters charging Wonga style interest rates.
Additionally, they will continue to rattle the tin cup here at home, whether that’s asking fan organisations to pay basic bills, asking supporters to do stadium maintenance work or relying on the SFA to provide home cup matches for them, even if that means embarrassing the nation during a live draw and having to do it all over again.
They will also continue to fleece supporters where they can; look out for the Martyn Waghorn’s Top Ten Penalty Kicks DVD becoming a big seller on Amazon during the summer, which is to say nothing of season ticket prices going up by 50% in order to pay off the external debts they don’t have to the “Far East investors” who the Scottish media has yet to scrutinise.
The media won’t scrutinise any of this, of course; instead they’re running headlines about how well the Sevco board is doing.
They won’t, for example, look into King’s claim that one of the reasons for the reduction in costs was the elimination of “legal challenges” which the club had to contest; in point of fact, there have been more court cases involving Sevco since he took over than there were before he arrived.
And those which preceded him?
Well, they involved him, forcing the club to spend money it didn’t have opposing his moves.
These numbers will be the subject of much speculation over the next few days, but one thing is clear; with loans the only things keeping on the Ibrox lights the potential for another full scale meltdown remains high.
Financial fair play regulations are more required than ever, but the people running Scottish football seem oddly reluctant to take that step.
We can only speculate as to why.