There’s an amusing story in the papers today, one of those teeny-tiny ones that ordinarily wouldn’t matter much to me or to anyone else, but it might be important nonetheless. It’s the story about how a Sevco fan had to go to the Celtic Store to get letters for the back of a couple of shirts he was having made for a friend, because the Sevco Store had run out of I’s.
The Celtic Store was able, and happy, to help. And they charged him £30 for it too.
Which makes me all smiley and happy.
Think of a football club as a machine.
To all outward purposes the Ibrox machine is rolling along and working as it’s supposed to.
But get a little closer and you can hear and see that all’s not well. There’s a vibration where there shouldn’t be. There’s a bolt that continually needs to be tightened. One part is forever wearing out and needs constant replacement. And if you stand next to it you can hear a noise, deep inside it, a ronk-ronk-ronk, where something has come loose in the gears and is working out of sync. These are little things.
But it’s always the little things that wreck the engine. Ask any mechanic.
So the Sevco Store ran out of letters? No big deal, right? In and of itself, no it’s not. But when it sends people to the Celtic Store instead then it takes on a larger shape. That’s money their own club is desperate for, and it’s gone to us and we don’t need it.
But by God, we’ll bloody well take it.
There will be much wailing from Sevconia about how this is partly a Sports Direct screw-up – turns out neither they nor Greaves could help, they were both missing their own letters; you know what? It might well be.
But these things only happen because the relationship between the organisations has been allowed to become such a toxic mess.
There’s no communication. There’s no sense of team-work.
Things are getting missed because the organisation which oversees issues with their merchandise – Sevco Retail Limited – is a disorganised shambles.
The response on the Sevco forums is, bizarrely, to blame the guy for this; he was getting the strips made as a wedding present and took the only option open to him. He’s not a bigot, and wasn’t going to dump the idea overboard just because the Celtic shops were his only viable option. The muppets on the forums thinks his mates should disown him or worse; they never quite get it, that the whole world doesn’t see things through their jaundiced eyes.
This is just another symptom of dysfunction, and its roots can be traced to the moment Dodgy Dave King walked through the Ibrox doors to take his place as chairman.
It won’t get any better whilst he’s there.
How can clubs expect to survive when they can’t even get the little things right? When your little mistakes are actually funding the opposition … well that’s a bad day.
It makes you wonder how many huge mistakes are being made, doesn’t it?
It makes you wonder what the consequences of them might be.