There is a wonderfully written moment in the fabulous comedy Yes Prime Minister (they are all wonderfully written moments) when the PM’s nemesis’ in the civil service are discussing the “four phase strategy” of British foreign policy in time of a crisis.
Hearing it, for the first time, the other night I couldn’t help think about Sevco fans and how their representatives had dealt with every crisis that has come along since their former club started to circle the drain in 2012.
This beautifully sums up their mind-set and in particular at this moment in time.
I don’t think they are at the “nothing is going to happen” stage.
Even the dumbest of them realises that their club has trouble swirling all around it. I think most would place themselves at phase two. They think something might happen but they don’t want to do anything about it. It’s someone else’s problem. A sugar daddy, or someone else, will come along to help.
Fatalism comes into this too, of course.
The third stage sounds awfully fatalistic, and it should.
King will soon be sending out letters in relation to the Takeover Panel verdict, in which he’ll urge the fans who hold shares to refuse the 20p offer he’s legally obliged to make for each one. He will try to convince them that it makes no financial sense.
But since when did fans buy shares in their clubs for financial motives?
Those shares represent many things to many people, but no-one I know ever actually bought them as an investment.
To some they signify a commitment to the club. To others they are proof that they have a permanent stake in it. To others they are about the ability to attend an AGM and scrutinise what the board gets up to. For others, they are the raw materials of power.
If the fans had any sense they would be coming together and urge one another to accept King’s offer. If they did that, he would certainly not be able to produce the money necessary to pay for them, and he would have to go. It is a mechanism for removing him from the board, cleanly, and probably forcing him to put his own shares on the market, where, of course, fans could buy more of them and assume even greater control.
His revolution is over. His reign has been a chaotic mess. He wants to be an absentee landlord who nevertheless holds the power of veto. They have to know that this guy is a liability and that the longer he’s in charge the worse things will be.
This might be their one chance to get shot of him without it ending in a blood-bath, but of course it will pass them by because the main supporters’ organisation – and which commands a large tranche of shares itself – will back him up and not agree to the sale.
James Blair isn’t sitting on that board for nothing; the “conflict of interest” which stops Paul Murray and others sitting on both Sevco board – TRFC and RIFC – doesn’t seem to apply to him. He sits on both and he sits on the Club 1872 one as well.
They aren’t at stage two or three; they are at stage four. They are done for.
Way back in 1994, Celtic fans acted. We believed we could. There were money men waiting in the wings, but they had made it clear that the matter was in our hands. They told us they would be there when the moment came, but that the pressure would have to come from the fans themselves. It would be the ordinary supporters who would push the directors towards the exit. We knew what had to be done. We understood there would be pain.
Pain is necessary to get you from one point to another.
We realised that.
We were willing to take it. For them, they always believe pain is un-necessary, that eventually they will be on top and dish it out to someone else. They save it up like the grievances, and want nothing more than to share the wealth. They lack direction. They lack initiative. They also lack leadership.
Those are things that give a support power.
It’s one of the problems with being “the Peepul”, and having lived off sugar-daddy wealth for so long. Your direction comes from someone else. You don’t create leaders, you follow them and initiative is for people who have to work for what they get, it’s not for those who have it handed to them.
Celtic fans fought, because our club has always had to fight. Our fans were the ones who couldn’t get jobs in certain industries because of the old “what school did you go to?” questions, and our links with Irishness, and so clawing our way to any achievement was what it was all about. When the time came to exercise our power, furthermore, we knew how from years of organising and marching and demonstrating and struggling.
We knew nobody was going to give it all to us.
Sevco fans have always said we were lucky that Fergus was there but they ignore the fact that Fergus needed us to do our bit before he did his. He wasn’t the only person waiting in the wings either; Gerard Weisfeld, the founder of What Everyone Wants, who had £50 million to spend and wanted to turn Celtic into a top club. Willie Haughey and Brian Dempsey were waiting too, and both men had their own fortunes ready to invest.
We had our pick of various money men and interested consortia, but none was willing to simply give the money to the board and get them to walk away. If not for us, the fans, doing our bit there would have been nothing left for these guys to run.
King has all the support he needs to keep on running things whether he’s on the board or not.
I think he will “walk away” from the club before this month ends, but quite what that means we don’t know.
He could sever official ties and continue running things from afar without seeming to be involved.
Not that it matters.
Recent events have tainted the club beyond hope of easy recovery. UEFA is watching. Regulators from the City are watching. The South African government is watching. Numerous legal bodies are watching. Ashley is watching, and waiting.
There are vultures circling too, no doubt, just above the level where we can see them.
If King has to leave the board the whole alleged “financial underpinning” of the club goes with him whether he’s still running things or not. The directors who’ve already sunk a fortune in will know none of it is coming back. Their choice will be to walk or to keep on throwing good money after bad, and knowing he has the influence.
I think in those cirumstances others will walk away.
The fans are helpless whatever happens.
Their club is being propelled down a road they no longer recognise and whose destination is dark and uncertain. They’ve stopped even trying to influence events; with the resignation of the three members of the Club 1872 board who were actually there to keep an eye on things, the organisation itself has become a kind of de-facto rubber stamp for the decisions made by King and others, much as the new “football board” will be.
I understand why those three went. They realise what Club 1872 has become, and they’ve given up trying to influence it.
Because they know they can’t.
Back in 1994, we realised we had power and we used it.
Today the Sevco fans, by and large, have none and wouldn’t know how to use if they did. Their entire club is like a ship drifting without a captain. If they stay in the open seas they’ll be alright for a while, but the merest shift in the wind will send them heading for the rocks, with no escape.
The kind of co-ordinated effort it would take to set this right is apparently beyond them.
King will submit his legal offer for their shares and they will vote No and spare him the dilemma of having to find the money to buy them up, and thus he’ll probably ride out the storm.
Part of it anyway.
But others are coming and the boardroom switcheroo of yesterday only adds to the intrigue. That’s another issue the fans had to watch from the outside, taking their lead from The Daily Record, being told what to believe rather than having the facts to hand.
If you were being generous you could feel sorry for them.
But they did this to themselves, because we warned them before King took over, before they cheered him up the Marble Staircase, we warned them back when “there was something (they) could have done but it’s too late now.”