Drum roll please …. Sevco has a new shirt sponsor!
Actually, Sevco has an old shirt sponsor.
The same old shirt sponsor.
The one that has adorned their run of the mill blue shirt for the past few years. The one that they signed up when they were in the lower reaches of the game. The one who’s contract with them expired at the end of the last campaign.
32Red were, this very week, romanced into renewing it.
I use the term “romanced” the way a drunk trailer park lothario would; all pawing and stinky beer breath, trying to get his oats.
Sevco’s website hails this as the continuation of a beautiful partnership.
Yeah, it was so beautiful that no extension was announced whilst the previous deal was still running. It was so beautiful that Sevco’s own press release makes it plain that they were out there trying to do better, that they examined other offers.
Ha! I’ll just bet they did.
I happen to know not a one of those offers met what they believe to be “their level.”
Not a single sponsor they approached, or who approached them, wanted to pay what the club believed to be it’s worth. It’s no use pitching yourself as a global institution when you are, in fact, a “provincial West of Scotland football club” and nothing more.
I’ve heard their advertising team was busy trying to sell the front of the jerseys to just about every company in Scotland and beyond who were willing to take their call.
Some simply said “not interested” the minute they realised who was on the line. I cannot comment on reports that a few phoned trusted friends at Celtic Park to have a right good laugh. They might well be apocryphal, but at Ibrox you always wonder, right?
I said in a previous piece on this that I would have been surprised, very surprised, had Sevco not found a sponsor for the coming campaign. No-one is that unprofessional and even lower league teams with no TV coverage can usually find one.
I had expected something like this, a shameless piece of backtracking, and I’m sure it will be spun as a deal that’s worth more than the old one. Unlikely at best.
According to Phil, 32Red has had an offer on the table for a while, at the same rate as before.
When a deal lapses and then is signed off on again somebody got screwed.
Somebody overplayed their hand and had to settle for less.
I guess regular readers won’t be surprised at who that’s most likely to have been. I await confirmation of my own suspicions; it won’t be long coming.
All the parties are said to be “delighted”.
Of course they are. There’s always a lot of mutual back-slapping after these deals are done, but it’s pretty clear that the failure to sign it before now meant that the sponsors were holding their ground. Let’s not forget that when the initial contract was signed – by Ashley’s people; they deserve the credit for getting it to begin with – the club itself was pushing the new shirts, in the face of the King inspired “boycott.”
That the old board was able to get it was a minor miracle; I was told at the time that it was worth a fraction of the deal we had signed with Magners.
32Red themselves were less than impressed at the way their deal changed after King came in.
They believed it had been devalued, and were perfectly happy to let it expire on the terms it had been signed for, with those terms and only those terms on offer for an extension. It would be interesting to find out if they actually revised that figure down for the renewal talks.
Sevco were also happy to let it lapse; they thought they could do better, in their arrogance, in their belief in the “global brand.”
Sevco thought the expiration of the deal might bring with it opportunities. They truly did believe that once they were in the SPL they’d be able to go to sponsors and basically name their price. They thought minor matters like the shirt manufacturers fiasco would be ignored by the money men who write cheques for these organisations.
What fools. What simple, simple fools.
And in the end, with criticism mounting, with their fans wondering what the Hell was going on, with Celtic completing one massive strip launch and gearing up for another, with a third kid in the bag and on the way, miles ahead commercially, and with them trailing in our slipstream and, as you’ll have gathered, desperate for money they went crawling back.
And they got a deal, if not the one they wanted.
I should offer my congratulations to all involved.
If their board deserves credit, they should get it here.
They kept the humiliation private, not public, but a kicking still hurts whether it’s administered behind closed doors or out in the street where people can see it.