Today I got a lengthy email from a friend of mine – someone with a good claim to knowing what’s going inside Ibrox – laying out the stunning truth that confronts the directors of Sevco.
Discussions have already been had about replacing Mark Warburton, but the mood in those meetings wasn’t good because they have no money to sack him.
And Mark Warburton has told them pretty bluntly that he will not do walking away.
So things are a little tense at Ibrox right now.
Warburton has thought this all through, and he knows that to quit would be career suicide.
If he’s fired all bets are off and he can tell the media down south about a level of expectation that was far outside of reality, and that his hands were tied from the start. If he quits, if he chucks it, there’ll be no such narrative. He’ll be the guy who admitted failure, that he wasn’t good enough to get second spot far less challenge us.
Warburton has known for a while that he was going to be made the patsy for failures above his head.
He almost chucked it in the summer, when the truth of the club’s financial position could no longer be denied, with the Scottish Cup Final defeat – and the chances of Europe with it – erasing any possibility of being furnished with a big budget.
He ought not to have come back, and I think that’ll have dawned on him far in advance of recent events. The writing is now on the wall in letters so big you can see them from the Gorbals without binoculars on a clear day. The media pressure is ramping up. Leaks about his relationship with the board are now in every paper. His signings are being questioned, his tactical decisions examined, his career thus far now being given a proper look.
He knows what that means. The fans are already on his case, and now much of the media is on board with the “sack him” movement. With some elements in the boardroom already converts to the cause this is a moment of genuine crisis for him.
But he will not go quietly.
The one thing he did right in the summer was to cover himself against such a moment as this. He got the contract he wanted, for him and Weir, and it is cast iron. He feels genuine anger at some inside the club and is not disposed towards making things easy for them.
If he goes – and everyone involved now acknowledges there’s virtually no chance of him being at the club next season – he will do it on his own terms, and my guy tells me that means with every penny he’s due, as per that contract the media was so delighted about.
Remember, McCoist was a guy with the club in his blood, a guy who felt he owed them some loyalty and he pointedly refused to walk away on the cheap. How do you think this guy feels about the idea? A guy who has no commitment to them whatsoever, and who actually believes – and he genuinely does – that he’s been done up like a kipper?
One can only guess at how much it will cost to pay Warburton and Weir off, but it will not be under £1 million, which as you might guess presents them with a rather large problem and one that will only get more acute the less money is in the coffers. If they do it before the season ends they have time to find a new boss before the season ticket forms go out. They dare not send those with this guy in place, and to do so with no-one there would be insane.
Warburton would be amendable to a payoff, in the summer, because that gives him the opportunity to leave on a high note if the club has finished second.
It’s not his problem if they fail to get a license to play in Europe; he’ll have accomplished his goal and can go back to England claiming a modest success.
In those circumstances he may be prepared to accept less than the full value of his current deal, but equally he will feel that pressure to push him out is unjustified and may just hang in there in a gigantic act of spite.
That would be surprising though, as it’s pretty clear that all the relationships within the club are starting to break down, including those between board members. He probably can’t wait to be done with the place and all in it, but even in that scenario, he will want a substantial lump sum before he’ll entertain the idea.
Sevco fans will howl at this and basically call him all the names under the sun; one forum was asking if he had any personal pride at all at the weekend.
They forget that this guy’s from the City where they drill into you the idea that it’s a numbers game and you shouldn’t get emotional about that stuff. Pride doesn’t come into this; he’s got to make a decision on what’s in his own best interests and the likelihood that his time here has damaged his career prospects shouldn’t be overlooked.
He only has to look at McCoist – who’ll never have a job at a top flight club again, if he returns to football at all – to realise Ibrox doesn’t have a managerial hot-seat as much as an electric chair.
A year ago I would have felt a gleam of sympathy for this guy; seeing him on the pitch at Linfield with the flute band this summer did for that idea, that and the way his arrogance started to creep into his press conferences. It’s also impossible to feel for someone who, in many, many ways, is the ultimate architect of his own destruction. Because he clearly isn’t the genius people said he was. His signings and general decision making have been ridiculous.
The bind this all puts the club in is obvious.
The signs are there that keeping him on for the rest of the season would be unpardonable folly. If the money was there to get shot of him – and Phil reports that two board members had an argument about that after the Hearts game, with the upshot being that no-one wants to pick up the tab for it, although most agree it has to be done – he wouldn’t have survived the Massacre of Tynecastle, which was about as clear-cut a Tony Mowbray moment as you’ll ever see.
They also know that no reputable manager is going to touch the job without promises – written in blood on a contract even Matlock himself couldn’t unpick – of significant sums to spend, which not even the glib and shameless one would dare commit to. That leaves one of the Usual Suspects – AKA the Real Rangers Men – who will do it on a shoe-string just for thrill of siting in the dugout and hearing the Broomloan Road Stand chant his name.
Things aren’t going to get better for their club.
They need to start facing that, fast.
