I love good books, good movies and good TV. I love it when someone can create a fictional world that you can jump right into, and believe in whilst you are there.
I also enjoy writing fiction, and one of the most important things to remember as a fiction writer is that even in that Godlike poise you have rules to follow.
Every story must have an underlying structure, order, and it must take place in a physical universe which follows certain laws.
In order to establish your world these rules have to be established early on.
If you’re creating a world of superheroes, for example, the limitations of their powers must be apparent to the audience, and must be respected as iron laws of the universe, like gravity. No surprises, people. There are few things worse than the movie where the hero, at the end, suddenly displays a hitherto unknown talent that “saves the day.”
Literary critics call that deux ex machina … the God from the machine.
It was a frequent staple of the stage plays they used to put on in Ancient Greece; its most blatant physical manifestation was a chair that would come down from the sky and pick the hero up and take them away to safety at a crucial moment. In other words, it’s cheating.
We saw one of those this week, with the Sports Direct announcement.
It came just in time to muddy the waters as Sevco prepares for its first game in Europe. I know for a fact that UEFA have been asking for more clarity on their financial returns. So much of what goes on over there is shrouded in the dark. Now along comes this “sky chariot” carrying them to unknown millions. The media has done its bit. At Ibrox they expect the SFA to do theirs, assuring UEFA that this puts the club on track for FFP and the chance to turn all those directors loans into shares.
No wonder Ashley got out of town.
Ashley had started out wanting to take the club forward, to modernise it, to give it a kick-start.
He had plans, perhaps even big ones. We’ll never know. But it all soured under King and his people. It all went by the boards. He’s wanted to cut those shares loose for a long time; he knew hanging onto them was becoming increasingly dangerous to their value.
Last season, Sevco came within a few percentage points of passing a new shares resolution at the AGM.
McCoist got blamed for that, if you recall.
One of King’s ridiculous claims this weekend was that the club now had the ability to get that issue through … in fact, anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of math knows that 9% of the shares isn’t an effective blocking mechanism against a requirement for something to be passed with a 75% vote share.
A board which was open and transparent and set out a plan could already have passed that threshold with room to spare … it has been made easier for King’s board to secure that number, but it was never impossible.
Ashley can do the math.
He probably expected the board to pass that measure last year. He probably couldn’t believe his luck here. The Puma intervention was like a deux ex machina for him too. He even got King to find him the mugs to take his £2 million in shares, a valuation that will absolutely, positively, fall through the floor when that share measure passes. The dilution in valuation of every share already out there is inevitable. Club 1872 have already been royally grafted; they just don’t know it yet. But it’s coming.
They celebrated this, in spite of sinking £1 million into it.
And that money went to Ashley, of course. Not a penny of it went to the club, not one cent. Their shareholding nudged up a notch. If and when the share issue is launched either the value of those shares will collapse or their voting power will. And they’ll be expected, of course, to buy more.
My favourite fantasy moment was when King made a bunch of our titles, and every other club in Scotland, disappear as if by magic.
Talk about a god from the machine; they have no real plan to stop ten in a row, but he’s bought himself four extra years in which to do it. How about that for a piece of work? Even I have to give the swine credit for that one.
Fantasy money is being spent too, of course. It, too, has been conjured out of thin air. King claims it’s coming from the other directors, in the shape of soft loans. By my reckoning that puts the total value of these loans at over £20 million. If converted to shares it might – just might – satisfy FFP requirements for a year, but it is an idea fraught with danger on its own. Because there can’t be any magic trick here; a share issue is heavily regulated and scrutinised.
None of those current board members can afford to take their stake to where they’d be required to make an offer for the rest.
To get value for their money, those shares must be preference shares.
There are legal limits on the number of those a company can have, as it would confer a major disadvantage on all other shareholders.
I personally don’t see how it can be done, that these people get value for those loans without pushing them over a threshold. The only way it works is if their loans are converted to shares first and those shares are then sold to the fans and others.
And of course the issue with that is that these guys get their money back, but not one penny of the cash goes back to the club itself.
The press is content to ignore all of this.
The numbers don’t add up. King’s comments about our “two in a row “ and his assertion that we should be further ahead aren’t so much a deux ex machina as they are the “dead cat” made famous by the political strategist Lynton Crosby; something you throw onto the table to distract everyone in the room.
Because those ridiculous comments are what made the headlines, and that’s important because otherwise even our jaded hacks, guys like Jackson, banned from Ibrox, with no love for King, might be asking questions to which this joker has no answers whatsoever.
The retail story, on its own, has more holes in it than Swiss Cheese; no-one believes Puma were happy with the last two years. Nobody is convinced that Ashley has suddenly discovered altruism or that King scared him off. No-one accepts the story about how they were too late to register strips when that deadline hasn’t expired yet. No-one realistically thinks the new deal will last just one year; Sports Direct has made Sevco dependent on them long term and there is probably a contract somewhere which bears that out.
I could go on.
There are plenty of questions to answer.
No-one is asking them.
Instead there’s the fantasy; that Sevco have, in a week, solved all their problems. That they are now on the level of a healthy Rangers. Forget that Rangers was no more able to sustain long term losses than they are; we’re supposed to believe this garbage.
This was a week that would have stretched credibility in a George RR Martin book. Magic, which we did not realise existed in the world, has transformed the picture at Sevco, making King into a conqueror and genius and putting the club on a stable foundation.
And we’re supposed to believe in it.
Who are they trying to fool?
Us or themselves?
Cause we ain’t buying any of it.