There’s a lot of speculation about what Joey Barton will do next, but for this evening I suspect he’s sitting somewhere nursing a whiskey and probably sparing not one minute’s thought to the club he’s left behind. Oh he might have sent the supporters a thank you message on the night he departed, but I suspect that was more to do with playing them off against the club than anything else. If he looks for Sevco’s results in the future it’ll be for a laugh.
The way the situation went with them will have told him – and any player who comes after him; be warned – much about the culture inside Ibrox. It tells us all what it’s like in there. Some of it we already knew, but I think the depth of it is truly astounding, viewed through the prism of the Barton thing and some of the other stuff we’ve seen this season.
It is worth taking a look at.
This club is run by dangerous people. King himself is a criminal, who’s South African plea bargain and subsequent fine is all that kept him from a prison uniform.
The range of charges he would have been facing had that plea deal not been done was staggering, and it didn’t stop with simple tax evasion. It veered into bribery and forgery and perjury and a host of others. At one stage he faced a total of over 200 separate indictments, only a fraction of which were connected to his tax affairs. He accrued the rest of them in the course of the battle, which he didn’t simply wage in the courts but using a wide range of extra-judicial means.
We should not have expected scruples from such a man, and as he sets the tone of the club – and he does, and there’s no denying it – we shouldn’t be surprised that it looks like this, or that he found henchmen in his own image, such as the arrogant Jim Traynor, and slotted them into the power structure over there.
This is what Sevco under King was always going to look like.
But I have to be honest, the malevolence of it, the unhinged nature of their behaviour, the spite and the open contempt for every other club and person not associated with theirs … I never expected that. I never expected anything like it.
Back in the days of David Murray, Rangers talked about behaving with “dignity.” You got so sick of that word that you wanted to choke on it. The word itself didn’t describe them at all, but that was the way they carried themselves, as if they were a cut about. And they acted that way too, haughty and arrogant and full of themselves. When they talked to the media it was like they were talking down to you, to everyone, and Murray could barely get through an interview without preening and boasting and smugness.
And you know what? In the shadow of that club and that man, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people did feel like they were all of those things, and seemingly with good cause. Murray himself once described the club as “Scotland’s second biggest institution after the church.” Which I always believed was more telling that he knew; there he was, putting his club on the same pedestal as God, and above the political class, the media and the law.
Sevco is a different club, with a very different culture. It was born in scandal, slapped together with the junked parts of the defunct Ibrox operation, run aground in no small measure by Murray and his epic hubris. Birthed amidst the twin deceptions of the Victim and Survival Lies, Sevco was always going to have a chip on its shoulder. Green knew it was a way to fleece the Peepul out of millions of pounds, and he duly did. King takes it far more literally.
Which isn’t to say that he cares about them, or that he gives a damn. But he understands them, understands that cultural, ethnic and religious superiority some of them have ingrained. Don’t forget that King grew up inside the Rangers house, and he lived his adult life and built his business in a country where white guys like him ruled over a hundred million people who his society and the political system he certainly must have cozied up to had branded “lesser.”
What do you think that does for your ego, and attitude?
Yet the venom with which this club has attacked its perceived enemies since he took over has been absolutely astonishing, not just for its venom but for the kamikaze nature of it. Few of their outbursts or explosions of anger have done them any favours. They don’t call it the red mist for nothing. When this club is thwarted it lashes out, and they don’t mind collateral damage and they’ve never bothered to think about the potential consequences either.
They blundered headlong into a fight with Ashley. They’ve taken on the SFA over multiple issues, none of which has progressed them one step. They launched broadsides against their fellow clubs and wondered why every door was closed in their faces when their officials sought election to the SPFL board. They picked an un-necessary fight with their kit manufacturers and major sponsors over the Sports Direct deal, a battle that had nothing to do with those companies, until Sevco dragged them in, spoiling working relationships and doing damage that will last for years.
Their rant after the Scottish Cup final brought the game into disrepute, and made them look utterly ridiculous when a host of arrests of their own fans followed, forcing them to ban those supporters from their stadium even as they loudly protested their innocence. It was a ridiculous spectacle which goes on to this day, on the back of the lie that their players were assaulted by fans, not one of whom has ever been charged with that offence.
Their scandalous statement in the aftermath of the match at Celtic Park, on the back of the vile behaviour and singing of their own supporters and whilst our club was still counting the cost of the wreckage to the toilets, forced a schism between the two Glasgow football operations which has never been wider. It allowed Celtic to look professional and reasonable and rational whilst it showed the world their own snarling face, foam dribbling down the chin.
All of this is revealing. All of it should embarrass them.
The transformation in Mark Warburton has been especially pronounced. He now has the sense of entitlement which comes to characterise all Ibrox bosses, and his constant complaining is something to behold. This guy is now a self-styled authority on everything in the game. His intolerance for criticism or questioning of any kind has already become the stuff of legend, and all this before the Barton saga which started, let’s not forget, with the manager’s failure to put a muzzle on his mad dog when all he was doing was mouthing off about Scott Brown and Brendan Rodgers. In this decision lay the seeds of what was to grow.
Having made no effort at all to curb the nastiness and childish ranting of its player, it was a matter of time before Barton felt he could point that mouth of his in the direction of those inside the club itself. Warburton reaped what he sowed here, no doubt about it, but the club’s reaction to that was, and will remain, astonishing and malicious to a bewildering degree. The media campaign they launched was ferocious, but as we now know it was nothing compared to the extent of the humiliation they made the player put up with on the inside.
This culminated, last week, in the leaking of his confidential medical information and a shameful character assassination piece in the club’s favourite downmarket tabloid which was dedicated to subjecting the player to as much public embarrassment as possible.
In the end it cost them. Barton dug in his heels, and took them for over a £1 million. Their position was so poor they didn’t even get a standard non-disclosure clause, so the player will be able to use his flame-thrower mouth on the club the second he gets the final installment.
And you wonder; what kind of football club behaves like this?
The kind that would have a man like King on its board, far less its chairman. The type that would hire as a PR pitbull a discredited joke like Traynor, a man who’s entire career could be summed up beautifully by the spitting, spiteful nature of his own final column. One that would hire as its chief of recruitment a man a court this week said had perjured himself and helped fabricate evidence. The sort that would sign, and indulge, a player like Jailbird Joey in the first place.
For this is Sevco. No dignity or class. Not haughty like Murray’s Rangers, but down and dirty, wrestling in the mud, a club with the whiff of gangsterism about it. From the inside, this clearly looks like strength of some sort. From the outside it’s very different.
They look small minded, vindictive, petty and weak.
For that is clearly all that they are.