Mark Hateley has told the media he thinks this is the most important summer in Sevco’s history. He actually said “Rangers” history, but we know what he means. And he’s almost right anyway. Save for the summer of 2011, this is the most important in the history of the Ibrox operations. Get it right and the club has a shot at survival.
Fail and it’ll be circling the drain before next season ends.
Hey, I am not going to tell Sevco fans that everything will be alright if Pedro makes the right choices in the transfer market. The chances are they won’t. Before next season even starts it’s odds-on that we’re going to see their boardroom riven by Dave King’s mounting legal problems. I expect that either he’ll be gone before the campaign gets underway or the club will have run into such difficulty that Caixinha will be begging to be released from his contract.
For one thing, one potential consequence of King’s behaviour is that the club might be barred from collecting season ticket payments. It seems unlikely, but don’t think for a minute that it couldn’t happen. The City of London “cold shoulder” is a terrifying prospect. If their bankers refuse to allow them that facility whilst he’s on the board there then he pretty much has to go, or the chaos will threaten the existence of the club itself.
It’s only but one area where a single mis-step could bring down everything.
But other problems loom.
Let’s take the stadium issues. We know they are there. We know they exist.
We’ve heard things in open court which confirm that problems there were ignored for years. Glasgow City Council has confirmed that the concerns are real. They aren’t satisfied with all the information they’ve received from the club. I’ve said on this site that Glasgow City Council would never have voluntarily closed Ibrox or made demands which could cause that … but that was a political problem, and last week that was erased. The council has changed hands.
It presents the new leadership with a nice opportunity. They can force the club to play ball, even as they blame the outgoing leadership for letting the matter drag on. This is a band aid that has to be ripped off eventually; they’ll not want to play the odds that something goes wrong on their watch, when it’s literally just started. So better to do it now. To do it early. To do it when there are four long years in which the public will move on to other things. By the time the next council elections come around who knows where the country will be?
This council hopes that it’ll be several steps closer to independence. Which few of the more dramatic elements amongst the Ibrox support will vote for anyway.
So the club has to play it straight with these people; they won’t get away with the naked political calculation to stall for time, and hope their unionist buddies would go along to get along. There’s a new broom about to sweep through the place and my guess is they will want a lot of leftover business transacted pretty damn quickly.
A mis-step there and they might as well shut the doors.
Which brings us to Pedro himself. There’s so much that can go wrong there it’s difficult to know where to start. He wants over a half dozen signings, from a list of twelve. It’s ludicrous, but if he believes he’s been made promises I wonder what he’d do it he felt they weren’t being followed through or respected.
But it’s inherently dangerous to let this guy spend too much. He’s still an unknown quality but there are already serious questions about him. If they give him more than they can afford – which, really, is anything at all – and he screws it up they’re in an even bigger hole than right now, and it’s a pretty big, deep, hole as it stands.
We know the media is indulging in fantasy to think that Sevco can buy all these players without a huge clear-out, and we know they are kidding themselves to believe that unwanted footballers will simply walk away from their contracts. This club could fill a concert venue with its first team squad as it is, a direct consequence of the McCoist years followed by the Warburton years. They’ve left them almost destitute, but with a cast of thousands.
Now Caixinha wants to add more?
But he needs to. A lot of Sevco fans are already holding off on buying season tickets until they see what’s what; the trouble is, as I said in yesterday’s piece, they’ve been conned by what’s on offer. The £3 million kitty won’t come close to changing the game. They’ll need ten times that to even make a dent in their problems, and even if that money was available they couldn’t spend it without increasing the debt to disastrous proportions.
His first target doesn’t hold out hope or promise of better to come; a central defender from Qatar who was on-loan from a club in Kuwait. Exciting stuff. If that’s the answer you dread to think of what the question is.
Without a scouting team, this is what they’ve got though; Pedro Caixinha’s own knowledge of players, gleaned in the lower reaches of Portugal, the league of Mexico and his time in the desert. Why do I not think this has a good ending for him, or for anyone else involved?
All of this is to say nothing of what questions UEFA will ask, what the consequences will be if there are further revelations in the Whyte case, what could happen with Sports Direct, whether their sponsors and kit manufacturers will respond well to events … there are so many ways this could result in Epic Fail that their fans must be terrified of what might come next.
These have been tough years to be a Sevco fan … and you know what? It ain’t getting any easier. Their club is in a perilous place right now. Their club is in real trouble.
One false move, and it’s all over.