Neil Cameron today wrote, and his newspaper published, an article on Brendan Rodgers that strongly suggests that writers for the newspaper group, as well as their editors, frequently dabble in hallucinogenic drugs. Yes, it was that bad.
Entitled “Brendan Rodgers must justify his Celtic wages against Astana tonight” it veers so far into the fantastical at one point that I had to check I wasn’t in Narnia.
Let’s take the irony in the headline first; that a Scottish journalist would lecture someone, anyone, on justifying their wages!
Is Cameron for real? When you consider some of the toilet paper worthy stuff he and his colleagues frequently turn in he’s got a damned cheek. The number of actual journalists in Scotland – as opposed to people who masquerade under the job description – is miniscule. He is not one of them.
The article was a typical blog-standard piece, about some of the decisions the manager has to make. It’s the kind of thing a half decent blogger could have turned out in a coffee break. There’s not much to it, except that it gave him a chance to make a rather sensational claim.
Brendan Rodgers, he says, is “one of a handful of people in Scotland” who earns in the region of a whopping £3.5 million per year.
Oh really? One of a handful of people? Whilst I grant you that those are rare earnings – in fact, that would put our manager in the top 0.5% of people in Scotland ; those are wage structure shattering numbers in all but the banking industry – the trouble with this rather sensationalist claim is the obvious one that so often afflicts Scottish hacks.
It’s that the story is palpably untrue.
The number is absolutely ridiculous. Break that number down. It means that our manager is being paid £67,000 every single week. Did anyone at The Evening Times even bother to fact check that? Did anyone even bother to do the sums?
Even The Daily Record – notorious for its own forays into fantasy – didn’t go as far as Cameron has here. In fact, Keith Jackson was only willing to speculate at a salary around the £45,000 a week mark … which would make Rodgers salary around £2.3 million.
The simple truth is that there’s not a soul outside Celtic Park who knows what Brendan Rodgers actual earnings are; this is speculative nonsense at best and at worst is Cameron trying to stir up trouble in the event the result doesn’t go our way.
But as is typical with these idiots he didn’t just stick to the facts as he knew them and point out that Rodgers is probably the highest paid manager in Scottish football history, no he had to go further, crawling right out on the limb, making up numbers and throwing them into his article for effect.
It has an effect alright.
It makes his paper look ridiculous.
It makes him look lazy at best and at worst someone who wrote this while absolutely out of his face.
This is why the majority of our fans don’t trust these people at all.
You can now follow The CelticBlog on Twitter at @The_Celtic_Blog