It’s not often I wonder if I’ve spelled a word in the headline correctly, but when the word is a made-up one which has gained huge prominence lately on Sevco fan sites I figure it doesn’t really matter one way or another.
The Crazies can barely write their own names, and they won’t care whether I’ve got it right.
The rest of you might never even have heard of Espanyolification and so your own guess is probably as good as mine.
This is the Sevco fans new buzz-word. And of course it’s barmy. It’s more than just a mouthful to say; it requires an incredible bending of reality to even properly comprehend it. The word comes from the Catalonia region, and in particular the City of Barcelona. It’s a reference to RCD Espanyol, that city’s second club and how they’ve been not so much overshadowed by the super-club at the Nou Camp as much as rendered irrelevant.
Sevco fans believe they have some affinity with Espanyol and that it goes beyond a ridiculous press story of last year where we found out that a small corner of the Espanyol support has adopted the Ibrox NewCo as a brother organisation.
Yet that press story was actually more illuminating than I had at first thought; it was born, in part, from a profound inferiority complex. Part of the reason they adopted Sevco was that Celtic fans, by and large, have an affinity with Barcelona.
Sevco fans appear completely oblivious to the obvious unintended insult there; Barcelona’s key rivals aren’t Espanyol but Real Madrid. Espanyol may be from the same city as the Catalan giants, but their rivalry with Barca is more akin to ours with Partick Thistle; that’s the first idiotic thing about this crazy idea, that it actually unreservedly downgrades them to the level of the other Glasgow club. And that’s something I actually won’t argue with.
This ties in to a growing feeling amongst the barmier sections of their support that there is some kind of cultural war being waged against them; it isn’t true, of course.
Orange walks are still prevalent. Sectarian singing still booms out of their stands unpunished. Even their political situation is immeasurably better than it was some years ago; independence has been stowed for the immediate future and the Conservative and Unionist Party has returned MP’s. The country has voted to leave the EU, on the basis that it will cut net immigration. Their “culture” hasn’t looked this secure in years.
All of this is a hysterical reaction to the weaknesses of their football club; it has uncoupled them from the real world.
They see conspiracy around every corner. Amongst their crazier beliefs is that HMRC persecuted them when all they did was follow policy; that the other clubs wanted to kill them, even though they were already dead; that they were relegated, instead of being made to start at the bottom; that Celtic was built on State Aid; that the SFA is in thrall to Peter Lawwell; that we financially doped and used EBT’s … I could go on and on.
None of this emerged in a vacuum. It’s been spoon-fed to them by a media with its own agenda, by guys who wanted to (and still want to) milk their fans for every penny and even by elements in their own support who have risen to prominence on the back of all this.
They are happy to stoke this lunacy as it gives them exactly what they want.
Espanyolification is a word that first crept into their consciousness in 2006; I recently read the post where it was first mentioned and I’ve barely read such utter drivel. The writer clearly had some screws loose. Sevco fans recently labelled him some kind of Casandra figure as if he saw the future. At the time he was accusing Scottish society of marginalising them on the back of Hugh Keevins saying Paul Le Guen would go to Real Madrid rather than Ibrox … had Le Guen actually been offered the Madrid job there’s little doubt that’s where he’d have gone – and, if you can believe this, on how Rangers name would frequently be mentioned after Celtic’s in news reports.
An entire conspiracy theory, which has grown legs like never before, on the back of such superficial garbage … you could not make this stuff up.
Society is changing, and their club is being left behind. That’s the simple truth of it. It’s being left behind because too many in its ranks cling to outdated concepts and backward, even repellent, social ideals. It’s being left behind because it has deliberately narrowed its appeal by focusing on a core audience that’s shrinking. And yes, I know they feel that … but that’s no-one’s fault but their own. This is not a conspiracy. It’s just change.
Change happens whether we like it or not.
Espanyolification was not a deliberate policy in Catalonia.
It was a symptom of change.
One club embraced change and rode the wave of it. The same happened here. Celtic rose as a consequence of what we built, and the foundations we laid. Rangers fell because it was built on sand. Sevco is dying because it was built over the black hole that swallowed Rangers.
They feel like victims. They genuinely believe that’s what they are. It is nonsense, and we know it’s nonsense, but they do honestly feel it, and as with others that has turned to hate … but the hate was always there anyway and that’s long been part of the problem.