What planet is Willie Henderson living on exactly?
What planet where he thinks there’s the remotest possibility of someone, anyone, anywhere, giving Sevco £50 million to spend on players alone? I have heard some honest-to-God nonsense in my time but that is quite simply mind-blowing.
Is this really happening? Because it’s like we all took a sharp left and ended up in Narnia. I love these people who constantly crawl out of the woodwork to demand that someone else puts their hands in their pockets and spends all this money.
£50 million would, indeed, be transformative at Ibrox. It would make them title contenders. It would increase the wage bill and basic running costs tenfold. Even if UEFA looked the other way – they wouldn’t, you can be sure of it – and were willing to ignore that, even Champions League income wouldn’t plug the hole. Ergo, whoever made the “investment” – there’s that word, again – would be kissing the money goodbye.
Miss out on the Champions League pot of gold even once and Sevco would, in the same year, go exactly the way as Rangers … down the plughole, adios, goodbye.
These people aren’t living in the real world. Not even close.
“If (we) are going to compete with Celtic, there has to be a huge investment in this club to purchase players who are going to be of a standard who can play … and compete with Celtic … £50million, solely for players. It might be an idea for another investor, if there is another investor who could be brought into the club who is interested in putting money into football. It is certainly needed …”
What’s needed, what’s really needed, is sanity.
This is not it. This is madness. This is lunacy, dressed up as virtue.
The Craig Whyte trial has laid all this out, but these people just aren’t getting it. They just aren’t grasping the fundamentals. What do they think killed Rangers? It wasn’t the big tax case or Craig Whyte; it was having a wage bill that couldn’t be supported. It was having a cost base that put them one bad season from being dead. Had David Murray not been indulged by the bank they would never have been able to spend the kind of money they did year on year.
The club they think of when they talk about the big spending days … it never existed in the first place. They had a unique relationship with a bank that was out of control. That aside, they would have been just another Scottish club.
Those days are over with. Nobody is going to indulge them in this pipedream. They have two choices, and only two; they can learn to live within their means, and accept the consequences of that in a football sense or they can over-extend again and die.
Henderson would rather they risked it than be second or third best.
This is the voice of the Real Rangers Men.
They just will not face the truth.
No wonder their club died.