Anyone who was tuning in for the Scottish Cup Final will have noticed that in spite of the sponsors being William Hill the half time break featured the Ladbrokes ad “starring” failed football manager and unemployed gardener Ally McCoist.
In case you’ve forgotten who he is, he’s the guy whose dire skills in the dugout let to the twin European knockouts that killed Rangers and drove Sevco fans to the brink of an insanity so deep it makes the Marianas Trench look like a crack in the pavement.
You ever wondered how a sneering halfwit like him ends up back on the telly?
Of all the people Ladbrokes could have put in their ad, why him?
Well for the answer to that you have to look at the company and their relationship with Scottish football, where they are SPFL sponsors and a growing influence in the sport.
During the last 12 months, their conduct has become deeply suspect.
For a while they gave blogs to the likes of Murdo McLeod and Pat Bonner.
I don’t know how much these guys wrote on those blogs, because I wasn’t remotely interested in anything in them. But every now and again one of them would wind up in the national press, most notably The Daily Record, who’s own relationship with Ladbrokes is strong.
It ought to be, because shortly after Ladbrokes got the contract for sponsoring the league they hired a Glasgow based “public relations” organisation to make sure their articles were picked up by certain media outlets and their “editorial line” given the strongest push.
The organisation in question?
Level 5 PR.
Perhaps it was not unusual when the unholy trinity of Level 5, Ladbrokes and The Daily Record began attacking Celtic in co-ordinated attacks, starting with John Collins after he made his comments about Celtic and the lack of genuine competition during the season. I understood what Collins meant. Almost every rational person did. But Level 5 PR publicised two articles from Ladbrokes’ site slating him, one of those written by Murdo McLeod.
It wasn’t the first time McLeod’s “articles” wound up in the press.
McLeod has been a Level 5 “creature” since the company was formed. He was one of its earliest patrons.
This, curiously enough, coincided with him becoming a bitter critics of Celtic’s with frequent forays into the national press.
Pat Bonner’s columns sometimes found their way to the press via Level 5 too, but only when they joined the chorus of criticism mounting against Ronny Deila.
What Level 5 has been engaged in, for months, was nothing less than a campaign against Celtic, and the league’s official sponsor went right along for the ride.
Ladbrokes Online has become a repository for anti-Celtic propaganda.
Indeed, it’s become a fertile ground for pro-Sevco stuff, which means that the league’s official sponsor is hopelessly compromised.
Level 5 is not an ordinary PR company.
It was set up in the wake of the Whyte shambles and its earliest client, and most prominent one, remains the Dave King camp at Sevco, which is why they were able to get such good press as they mounted their campaign to overthrow the previous board.
Level 5 could be said to be a creature of Dave King himself.
Today they’ve had a go at Brendan Rodgers, in one of the most astonishingly bitter, twisted and biased articles I’ve read thus far.
I know it won’t be the last, but it’s a piece of hackery so blatant no-one has even put their name to it.
It bears all the hallmarks of a piece by Traynor himself; in other words, it’s poorly written tosh.
At a time when you’d think the league’s official sponsor would be delighted to have Scottish football in all the headlines with an appointment like this, their official website now carries an article of the most snide, bitchy sort, which gives Celtic no credit whatsoever and the game no positive publicity at all.
It is astonishing, and a sure sign that their “PR firm” has a different agenda than they were hired for.
Celtic fans, indeed the fans of all Scottish clubs, who have accounts with this company might want to seriously question these developments and the relationship between the sponsor and the PR company owned by a former hack who’s organ of choice is the main pusher of the Survival and Victim Myths and frequently denigrates the rest of the game in order to position themselves firmly on the side of the Sevconites.
You are harming yourself and the national sport; it’s as simple as that.
You’re putting money in the pockets of the company whose poisonous PR is designed to contaminate the whole game and benefit one team and one team only.
A lot of people are having trouble reading the writing on the wall, but for the benefit of those who’ve missed it I’ll say just this; if you are a commercial organisations which depends on the goodwill of Scottish football supporters, if they are your target audience, your key customers, you can no longer get away with taking a great big piss on the majority of us.
Ladbrokes has already irked Aberdeen, with their manager refusing to attend one of their events earlier in the season after they did a hatchet job on him which left him baffled and furious, a hatchet job that was probably born of frustration at the way Aberdeen consistently failed when it came to putting pressure on Celtic.
The thing is, it’s not Ladbrokes job to have a pop at managers and players … they are an official sponsor.
Their “opinions” on the game and those in it are the very last thing fans or clubs need to hear.
This will only continue unless the fans put a stop to it, or the clubs start to question it.
Celtic should be doing so, privately or otherwise.
The fans can take more direct action.
This company has made its bed, and picked who it wants to share it with and it’s not like there aren’t dozens of alternatives if you like a bet.
They don’t deserve one more penny of your cash.
So cancel today, and tell their people why you did.
They’ll understand that alright.