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A Sevco Website Thinks Sectarianism In Their Stands Can Be Airbrushed Away With Better PR

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A Sevco website – Gersnet – has published an article laying into the unprofessional public relations at their club. It targets Level 5, run by Jim Traynor. On the face of it, the article isn’t bad at all. It tells some home-truths that a lot of people at Ibrox would do well to consider.

Because Level 5 are a joke, and Traynor is perhaps the worst person in the industry here in Scotland.

I’ve long said that he and his “company” are brilliant only at making matters worse.

Their conduct in the last two years – when they were brought in to work for the King regime – has been astonishingly counter-productive. Be it the unhinged rants or the way they’ve treated sponsors, or the sight of Traynor himself ordering Warburton about like a schoolboy … it’s amateur hour stuff and there isn’t a single Celtic fan who follows the media who isn’t glad Traynor and his people are there, drawing major money out of a club that can’t afford it.

The article describes them as “embarrassingly negligent” in their duty of “protecting the club’s image” and in “positive image enhancement.” All of this is stuff I broadly agree with. Level 5 doesn’t have the first clue how to do the more sophisticated and professional public relations stuff, which is but one reason Sevco’s PR image is woefully short of ours.

But there’s another reason, one that has nothing to do with Level 5 and which the article writer appears to want to completely ignore; there is a section of their support whose conduct is so beyond the pale that Saatchi and Saatchi couldn’t make them look good.

And that’s the aim of the article; they think better PR could give the club the right image.

It’s not that the conduct of these fans is bad or wrong … which it certainly is. No, it’s that it doesn’t make the club look good.

And instead of dealing with it, they want a PR firm to somehow dress it up, and make it look … softer, more gentle.

Springtime for Hitler, anyone?

Indeed, much of the article itself is sheer whatabouttery, lobbing various accusations (some of them actionable) at Celtic and others. The writer accuses Celtic of being more “pro-active” on these issues than their club is; it’s simply not true. It’s that our fans don’t routinely engage in sectarian chanting or racist behaviour. The suggestion that we “used the media” to put pressure on referees before the cup semi final is telling of the mentality of the author.

But what’s inexcusable about the piece is that although it condemns the handful of fans who made racist gestures to Scott Sinclair it ignores, completely, the tens of thousands who spent the Ibrox game – indeed every Ibrox game – up to their knees in the blood of Catholics and Irishmen. It’s the elephant in the room which their sites never want to tackle; instead they throw mud at everyone else in a deflection tactic which does no good whatsoever.

If their supporters cared about brand enhancement and making themselves look better to the world their websites wouldn’t produce such half-assed garbage which ignores the real problem and blames everyone else for the rest. It would come to grips with what has to be done; calling out the goons and assorted bigots in their own stands. Getting their house properly in order.

Because believe me, on the day these people stop singing sectarian songs I’ll personally stop writing about it. On the day there’s no longer a hail of missiles to greet any Celtic player who gets too near to the by-line I will stop talking about it.

That club has problems, and they are big problems. Perception is one of them, because the writer is correct; the world does see their club as tainted, as being poisonous, as being steeped in backward attitudes and sectarian affiliations. But that isn’t the fault of the media or the Celtic bloggers or anybody else; it’s their own fault.

And rather than face it and try to deal with it, with the actual issue, the writer has retreated into the old strategy of casting about for someone else to blame all the while ignoring the real issue. He thinks that the problem is bad public relations.

The problem is that too many of his fellow supporters indulge in this sort of nonsense, and many, many, many more are doing stuff that’s even worse.

And as long as they continue to embarrass the decent supporters and toxify the image of Sevco itself their larger issues are not going to go away. It’s time these people faced up to this and dealt with the ugly reality of it. In the end that usually means a confrontation with a mirror.

It’s the last thing some of them want to have to do.

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