Wow. Another day, another wow.
The media really is desperate to find a good Sevco story, but this one is a beauty. Trust The Daily Record and Sunday Mail to run this, with no evidence whatsoever, plucking a blue-sky number out of nowhere and trying to pass this off as legit.
Here’s the story; Ashley apparently is ready to launch a takeover of his “long term target” if he can oust the current board. He is said to be “preparing a £30 million takeover” and is ready to invest because he can’t stomach seeing the club so far behind Celtic.
Jesus. Where even to start with this garbage?
Okay. Let’s start with the obvious bit.
The £30 million price tag.
That is just nonsense, utter fantasy.
He could have Sevco for a third of that; it’s not ridiculous to surmise that a lot of their current board are sick and tired carrying this shambles. They wouldn’t be hard to deal with; some of them know King is a busted flush and wouldn’t be terribly unhappy to see him go.
Mike Ashley is a serious guy. There is no way on Earth that he is ready to spend £30 million on this floating turd of a football club. That’s five times what Charles Green paid for it back when the assets were available. It’s ten times what the so-called Three Bears paid for their controlling stake.
What, exactly, would Ashley be paying for, in terms of shares? The most he is allowed to acquire before he has to make a controlling offer for all the clubs shares is 30%. He already owns 9%. The Three Bears own 16% between them.
So who’s he getting the rest from? King himself?
Who really believes Mike Ashley is going to put millions of pounds in King’s pocket? For a start, he and the club are heading for a court case which could put Sevco into administration and give him a chance to pick the lot up for free, if he wanted it at all.
Which brings me to point number two; why the Hell would he?
There are a lot of theories about that, but none stacks up to the slightest examination.
Some think he wants a “Champions League club.”
He could easily buy one.
He can afford it.
It would be cheaper than trying to turn Sevco into one. Just challenging for the Scottish title could cost £40 million. To make a dent in European football? Unsurpassed riches couldn’t guarantee it, and there’s the small matter of Financial Fair Play to contend with anyway.
And what exactly would be the upside of spending all that money, even if his gamble paid off and they reached the Champion s League groups? The concept of turning Ibrox into the world’s most expensive advertising board is a non-starter; only Champions League commercial sponsorship is allowed in the ground on those nights. Sports Direct would get no more exposure than they do at Ibrox right now, and what do they need it for anyway?
Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to sponsor the shirts of sides already in the tournament or buy themselves into the ad pool?
The simple fact is, there’s no exposure he could get owning Sevco that he won’t already have the second Newcastle are back in the Premier League, and everyone who has given this matter the slightest study, as opposed to the Scottish media’s “back of a fag packet” calculations, is fully aware of that simple fact.
This is where this idea has always fallen, and died, on its arse; there’s no money to be made at Ibrox save for the merchandising deal, no financial benefit to this guy of involving himself further in their business. Any money he sinks into there ain’t coming back, and this guy doesn’t do charity and he doesn’t work for free.
He didn’t amass that fortune being an idiot.
What people forget is that Ashley had a controlling interest in Sevco and he could have extended his influence any time he wanted and he never bothered to. He controlled the board, he put his own people on it. He gave the club the soft loans that allowed him to grab the parts of it that mattered, and he might even have got his hands on Ibrox.
He didn’t do any of that.
Mike Ashley does not have the slightest interest in owning that club.
The idea that he is waiting in the wings as some kind of benefactor is ludicrous and it always was.
He wanted one thing; the retail arm. He’s got that. Any influence he wants to wield at Ibrox starts and finishes there, and if the media wants to know what he’s up to they only have to look at King’s decision to start the ball rolling on winding up the seven year rolling contract for strips.
Ashley wants that contract to run and run and run.
He’s said to be “shocked” at the state of the club.
Why should he be?
He knew King was a joke, he and his people told everyone that before the South African charlatan took over. What’s shocking about it? This is exactly what many people predicted would happen, just nobody in the Scottish press.
“The current situation is unacceptable – Mike knows that,” this un-named source, who could be Keith Jackson for all we know, is said to have told the reporter. “They are set to finish behind Aberdeen and are more than 30 points behind Celtic. He is prepared to invest but he will not work with the current owner, who he feels has done little for the club in the past two years.”
What does he care about any of that?
He has his own club to worry about; why does he give a monkeys what happens at Ibrox?
Newcastle were relegated last season, and he did very little to prevent that slide other than sacking a manager, and let’s face it, even King has managed to do that much.
And there’s that word again; “invest.”
You hear it so often in relation to Sevco, but as there’s no money whatsoever to be made “investing” in that club what they really mean is “peeing it up against a wall.”
And I repeat; Ashley did not make his millions doing that.
The reporter thinks he can run both Sevco and Newcastle, and would be perfectly willing to;
“This will not, however, affect his running of Newcastle — set to win promotion back to the Premier League at the first time of asking — as there are no regulations to prohibit the ownership of two clubs operating under different national associations ….”
Really? Is that so?
Well, when Ashley was rumoured to be ready to up his shareholding last time the SFA ruled on this matter, and said they would block any such attempt. When Ashley tried to take them to court over it his legal team were quite the shambles, and he lost.
Between that, giving King millions to do walking away, having to pay off the current board, drop all his litigation, get on side a support which hates his guts and which he has no reason to love, rebuilding the team and battling the media (hahahaha … just watching them orgasm over this possibility in the next week when they’ve spent the last two years calling this guy all the scumbags under the sun, well that is going to be just hilarious, I can tell you, but not half as much as watching Club 1872 trying to squirm their way into his bed ) … I have to ask just why the Hell he would bother.
It’s a lot of hassle just to throw money away.
In case nobody ever told these muppets, Mike Ashley does not have Sevcoitus or any related condition.
He doesn’t care one way or another.
There are people who will believe it though, because they already labour under a strange notion, that Ashley would have been prepared to do all this had King not forced him off the board.
To use the local vernacular, it is an absolute riddy to give credence to such obvious bollocks.
It’s good for a laugh, this idea that Sevco fans and their crooked chairman scared away an honest to God billionaire who would have splashed the cash on them. What he would have done, as Phil has pointed out again and again, was saw to it that they were run like a proper business, on a break even basis. There would have been no transfer war-chests, no grandiose promises, no obsession with “catching Celtic” risking the future of the club itself.
It would have been a plodding existence, with no glory attached to it.
Yet someone has been leaking this stuff to all and sundry over the past wee while, and when Derek Llambias came forward to talk to the media a few weeks ago that really did send the rumour factory onto double shifts, so I have little doubt that someone is playing games here and an agenda is being pursued. It’s not one that ends in the restoration of the Grand Old Days of Yore however; it’s one that ends with Ashley’s foot on someone’s throat.
Isn’t it funny how this story has only come about now some of the media has turned on King?
And imagine a source close to Ashley giving such an explosive story to a sister publication of The Daily Record and The Sunday Mail? These are the people he accused, in court, of leading a campaign against him and leaking, on King’s behalf, details of a confidential merchandising deal. If sources are talking to those papers they are leading them a merry dance, using them to destabilise the Ibrox regime as King once used them to stablise theirs.
Joe of VideoCelt’s knew exactly what this was, and called it right; mockery.
Sevco is poleaxed at the moment.
What better time to give King and his board a right kick in the ribs?
All of this is fascinating and amusing, up to a point, but nobody should be distracted by it. It’s the smokescreen to rival them all. When the dust settles things are going to look pretty much the way they do right now; Sevco is a club entirely dependent on charity, on loans, on the rattling of the old tin cup and as long as they persist on “chasing Celtic” and clinging to the idea that this will change in some fashion that doesn’t involve pain that pain will go on and on.
Let me say again what I’ve said many times before; nobody is coming to save them.
Nobody is going to appear on the horizon with bags full of cash and transform this club overnight.
This is Scotland, with a small TV market, in the shadow of the EPL, and where our club is so dominant that even starting the job of changing that will necessitate somebody writing an eight figure cheque, in the full knowledge that the money isn’t coming back and nobody is going to do that to pander to the supremacist sentiments of the Peepul.
King is one of them, for God’s sakes, and he doesn’t care … why in the world would you think another living soul of means ever would?
A club out of Ibrox died once because nobody gave a toss enough to save them from their fate.
If there were no saviours then, why the Hell would anyone expect one to appear now?
It’s never going to happen.