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.