If you’ve been checking out the Sevco fan sites, you’ll find that today most of them are pretty jolly places.
It’s amazing what an announcement from a corrupt organisation and a couple of good performances in pre-season friendlies can do for morale, isn’t it?
And I’m moved to wonder; did something major happen at Ibrox about which none of us is aware?
Did something fundamental change over there in the last week, which has erased all their own troubles and concerns?
You’d be forgiven for thinking so, as the jocularity reaches crescendo.
The newspapers are always full of it whenever something positive takes place in the Ibrox hinterland. If they’re not covering it then it didn’t happen. They would put it on the front pages if the club got a new delivery of shirts from Sports Direct.
So I think it’s time to remind them of a few things they appear to have forgotten in the last week or so.
The kind of stuff the people on here know only too well.
So here goes.
The Bampots Haven’t Gone Away.
First things first, their celebrations over title stripping are premature at best.
You’d think the people who’ve been campaigning for change in Scottish football slipped away in the last 24 hours?
Read the blogs.
Check out the forums.
Those people haven’t gone anywhere.
We’re as vocal as we’ve ever been, perhaps even more so.
Plans are being laid.
Fans are even talking about putting their own money into a judicial review … their own money.
Does that sound like people have chucked it?
On top of that, there’s raging talk of away match boycotts; even if they aren’t officially endorsed and supported a lot of clubs are going to see a heavy drop in income this coming year. Fans don’t need to be sold on the idea that they are being pissed on, not when it’s as obvious as it is right now.
They won’t tolerate it indefinitely.
Those who have bought season tickets will attend matches at home, but getting them to part with another penny … not so easy.
And when fans would rather spend money challenging the corrupt football authorities than actually attend games … there’s something happening which the clubs can in no way contain or ignore. This issue isn’t nearly finished with.
Sevco fans, as per usual, are celebrating way too early.
Their Club Is Skint, And Still Spending Money. We Know How That Ends.
Here’s a brief refresher course in basic economics; you can only spend what you earn.
When no bank will front you a loan, when you have no overdraft, when you have no major source of income (season ticket money is already banked; what happens when it runs out?) you are in trouble. When there are bills coming in week after week, when you have an ever expanding cost base (Steven Naismith? How the Hell can they afford that?) and a shrinking pot the simple fact of fiscal gravity is that it’ll end badly.
Sevco fans would rather not be confronted with this, but this is because they possess all the collective memory of a shoal of tadpole.
The ruination of their former club should still be fresh in the mind, yet here they are going down the same road all over again and apparently without the slightest concern.
Let’s be clear; if and when directors stop paying for all this, the show’s over.
Sevco is already trading whilst insolvent.
Last year they needed upwards of £5 million in loans to keep the lights on; that’s based on the figures we know of.
This season … much, much higher.
If their directors turned round tomorrow and said “No more of this” they’d be faced with one of two things; drastic cutbacks or administration … and that choice would need to be made the same day and I couldn’t guarantee that even if they took the first option that it wouldn’t lead to the second anyway, depending on the size of the hole.
They are already living well beyond their means, and that situation has only been exacerbated by the calamitous European defeat against Progres.
That is such a catastrophe that if we’d been in their exact position I would be petrified.
In contrast, Celtic’s result last night was bad but not disastrous.
Even a Champions League knockout would not be a disaster.
Qualification for the Europa League Groups would still give us a significant financial advantage over their club in terms of annual turnover and profit … and even if we went out of Europe altogether, a truly horrendous result, the impact on our ability to compete at the Scottish level would be negligible.
We’d sell one player to offset the potential damage, and the show would roll on.
A European exit would not put our club in jeopardy.
They based their entire business plan on Europe, for reasons I can’t even begin to understand.
Their club is now in serious trouble, and only the blindest and most stupid support on the planet could fail to see it.
Craig Whyte’s Not Guilty Verdict Puts The Assets Back Into Play.
Craig Whyte’s Not Guilty verdict had them screaming blue murder.
Isn’t it something that the same people saying that proceedings on the Tax Case and EBT issues have run their course are also those most in favour of finding a series of fresh charges to indict Whyte and others on?
They really don’t do irony these people, do they?
But what’s worse is what Whyte’s acquittal means for their club.
He has always maintained that he has a legitimate claim on the assets of Sevco.
The Sevco Scotland Ltd – Sevco 5088 switcheroony have been begging to see the inside of a court-room for years now. Not only was the fraud apparent to everyone who saw it – and the SFA are up to their knackers in that one as well – but Charles Green freely admitted to in a newspaper interview.
The dominos don‘t stop falling on this one.
If Whyte’s claim goes as far as a courtroom that’s all she wrote. The club will be in dire, dire trouble with the share price suspended, total paralysis over any efforts at all at fundraising and their very future will hang by a thread.
This is an existential threat here.
It could decide if there’s a club calling itself Rangers at all.
And most of Scottish football, and certainly all Sevco fans, seem largely oblivious to the enormity of it.
This one really could wipe them away never to return.
What the Hell would Whyte, who is banned from Scottish football and despised by their fans, want with a stadium he can’t use and a training ground he doesn’t care about?
The full implications of the SFA’s ludicrous “club-company” separate concept would hit them all like a hammer if Whyte decided to sell those assets to Asda or someone like that. You’d have a club with a license, shirts, a name and all that other stuff the SFA and SPFL pretends accrues to that ephemeral institution, but no home, no training ground, nothing …
It’s a Year Zero event.
And it’s more than just possible we’ll see it.
There’s Civil War In The Ibrox Dressing Room.
The Sevco fans know this one, but they’ve airbrushed it out of their thinking in the hope that it’ll be resolved.
And it will be. The way all civil wars are.
Civil war is a lovely metaphor because it’s so flatly contradictory. There’s nothing civil about war at the best of times, but these are the worst conflicts on the planet, the most brutal, the most starkly vicious. And there’s nothing that destabilises an organisation more.
The dressing room at Ibrox was fractious before Pedro arrived.
Now it’s got more sub-sects than The Moonies.
Think a market square at a European Championships or World Cup where the English have qualified and whose fans have had a skin-full of beer and you’ll have a sense of how combustible it is in there right now.
And matters are not made better by Pedro’s suggestion that Alves will be his “voice on the pitch” over the captain … who gets the armband but not the authority. In fact, Caixinha said the other day he has five potential captains, only one of whom actually gets the title.
At Ibrox titles aren’t what they appear to be it seems … this, too, is a tainted one.
There’s also a WhatsApp group dedicated to conspiring against the manager, his tactics and his new signings, run by a senior pro who wants his job.
Not good.
Yes, Pedro Caixinha Really Is Still Their Manager …
If I were a Sevco fan (yes, I will shower thoroughly after this) and Celtic crashed out of Europe, the EBT case was put to bed indefinitely, my club found oil beneath the carpark and the civil war in the dressing room was smoothed over with a few guitar songs around a campfire and a group hug I would still be unable to sleep at night whilst Pedro Caixinha was in the dugout, because this has all the hallmarks of comedy (for rivals) and disaster rolled into one.
This guy might well be the craziest managerial appointment in the history of Scottish football.
There is nothing to suggest it will end remotely well for the club; indeed all the evidence points towards one of those closing acts that has someone standing on a roof overlooking the town and shrinking back as fireballs erupt in the distance. (I’m watching First Blood right now.)
Tactically, this guy is all over the place. His disciplinary ideas could have come right out of the manual you get when you buy the complete collection of Atrocious Torture Instruments. His record in the games where it matters is appalling. His signings have convinced The Daily Record, who’s journalists think anyone with a name that ends in an O or an A has to be a class act, but those who’ve watched them aren’t seeing it at all.
And most of all, he doesn’t even seem particularly convinced by his own rhetoric.
Does a good manager have to constantly re-iterate that he’s in charge? Does a good manager tell his team before a match of part-timers to play like they’re in a cup final? Does he have to talk about football as war? Does he undermine his captain? Does he reverse himself so frequently, like when he said he inherited the best squad in the league and then spent this summer pulling it apart? Does he have to transfer players out of the club because they don’t see eye to eye with him?
All of it, it’s incredible.
He would be the biggest liability over there if it wasn’t for the other one.
David Cunningham King – The Glib And Shameless Liar – Is Still Their Chairman.
As long as Dave King is chairman of Sevco that club will remain stuck in the mud.
He is a lunatic.
He is a criminal.
He is a charlatan.
He is a liar.
And he is positively toxic to any form of outside investment.
This guy is a millstone around their necks.
Always quick to take the credit when things appear to be going well, he also has a formidable spin machine in a Scottish media which hangs on his every word like a prominent haemorrhoid out of a taxi drivers arse.
The guy feeds them nothing but garbage, time and time again, and they swallow it like it was ice cream.
He still faces legal sanction for The Takeover Panel thing, and thinks it can be fended off by talk of a non-existent appeal.
As long as that issue persists it is yet another obstacle to the fresh share issue they need if they are to come close to FFP credibility.
On top of that, King’s every press statement seems to be focused on one club.
And to think their supporters say that we’re obsessed?
Wow.
And In Case They’ve Forgotten, There’s This To Remember …
GIRFUY, lurking SevcoNuts.
If you thought the mood around here was going to be dismal … guess again.