“I’ll make a prediction; whatever the shambles over at Ibrox, before too long Sevco will be second in Scotland with Aberdeen’s current manager at the helm and where their club goes from there, with fans who will understand quite well that the seeds of that were sown with this craven surrender … well, that’s something Milne will have to answer to.” – Stewart “Move On” Milne Has Betrayed His Fans And The Whole Of Scottish Football Today, 22 July 2017.
It’s not always fun to be right.
Last night, I wrote an article on Graeme Murty and those on the Sevco board who would love to see him become manager at the club, because it would be cheap and easy to sell to the fans, at least as far as getting them through the current campaign goes.
Another board faction wants McInnes though; this looks like a two horse race between Sevco’s current youth coach and Scottish football’s serial failure.
Regular readers will know that I think Aberdeen can do better than McInnes; I also think he’s at the best club he’ll ever get. Aberdeen are potentially a bigger club than Sevco. They are comfortably ahead of them in second place even though the club from Ibrox is basically overspending and existing on loans. That can’t continue, and the Pittodrie club should be well placed to cement that position for the long stretch if all their plans come to fruition.
But although McInnes isn’t the best they could get, he has, right now, constructed something stable, something that works. And if he goes to Ibrox there’s a very good chance that they will suffer for it in the short to medium term, as they look for someone else, bed him in, get his ideas across … replacing a manager who has given you stability is a perilous job.
Yet Aberdeen have been utterly silent on the outpouring of media speculation about this, some of it verging on outright tapping. We all know what the game is here. That Aberdeen are meekly allowing it shows the spinelessness of their current board of directors.
In some ways, this is to be expected. Some would argue that the Dons are too long in the shadow of Glasgow to break out now. There are some on their board who will see any move by McInnes to Ibrox as simply part of the natural order.
And that might explain why they have yet to make a definitive statement on this matter, although the media is basically now acting as a PR arm for the Ibrox club.
Sevco and its media toadies are not only materially trying to unsettle McInnes but are laying out the “package” before talks have even opened. This is the level you expect them to operate at … but Aberdeen’s passive response must be driving their supporters up the wall.
This, Stewart Milne, is what “moving on” looks like; a financially doped club calling itself Rangers using the media to unsettle your manager and your players so it can take them on the cheap. This is what Scottish football’s new era looks like … an awful lot like where we were before, and you deserve everything you get, even if your fans don’t. The SFA can throw you a couple of friendly matches as a sop, but your club pays a high price elsewhere. Under you, Aberdeen is a club just begging to be returned to ignominy, and some in the media will say that’s exactly where they are headed if Derek McInnes ends up walking to join Sevco.
McInnes won’t last two years at Ibrox; the move would be career suicide for him. He has never impressed me and I don’t expect that to change. He might get through this campaign with relatively little flak if he secures second place – a big if – but their fans won’t tolerate him for much longer than that. Aberdeen has a better squad than Sevco – few sensible people would even attempt to argue that point – and he hasn’t overhauled us.
If he thinks he’ll have a huge “transfer war chest” with which to do battle I suggest he gets hold of the club’s accounts, which I’ll be reviewing later on. Because there are things in there he ought to read before even considering such an idiotic move.
But yes, there will be funds available … enough, at least, to make Aberdeen fans sweat.
Aberdeen might not find someone better than McInnes for a while. Those who are talking about Tommy Wright should be sent homeward to think again. In the meantime, they could slip down the table. If McInnes staying is dependent on their new stadium getting the green light, then I could argue that their new stadium depends on consistency on the park and aiming high. If they get the managerial appointment wrong they could be a mid-table team before you know it, especially as I strongly suspect McInnes will want some of his former players.
And Aberdeen won’t even bother to complain about where the money for that is coming from; Hell mend that club for the position they find themselves in. All that stuff in their accounts about how they strictly adhere to FFP even if it’s not in force in Scotland … it’s lovely, I applaud it, it’s the way a club should be run, but it only works if everyone plays by the same rules and their board has shown a disdain for those rules and for historical acts which perverted them.
If they lose their manager and then part of that team and drop down the league they might as well stay put at their current ground because they won’t fill that let alone a new one.
Aberdeen fans already think they’ve suffered under all this speculation; on Twitter they reckon the performance yesterday was disjointed because the manager has not made his intentions clear to the board or to the rest of the players. That, too, is because of weakness at the top.
If they really did give Derek McInnes a contract extension with an £800,000 break clause they were asking for trouble, this kind of trouble specifically, because if you were watching Caixinha’s start at Ibrox you knew he wasn’t long for this world … the media might have been late to the party but the rest of us saw it clearly.
So the Ibrox job was always going to be available before long … and if they offered up such a ridiculous and un-necessary hostage to fortune they deserve all they get. It also seems pretty clear that McInnes had ideas beyond their club, and they’ve basically granted him permission to go on the cheap. The stupidity of it is manifest.
I harbour a nagging suspicion that Ibrox isn’t where McInnes wants to be. As I said on Friday he’s looked at the situation there and knows it’s a shambles with serious issues all around. He would be well advised to stay clear of the place.
But that’s not the issue here; the issue is his current club and their gutless response to media pressure and the Ibrox MO. A club with more backbone would release a press statement telling Sevco to make an offer or shut it. It would have the directors sit McInnes down with a brand new deal waiving the £800,000 fee and asking him where his loyalties lie.
But this is a club with Stewart Milne at the helm.
That’s why this continues to fester. It’s why they face two weeks of a cold sweat on the stability of their club.
But hey, they got a Scotland international friendly … so everything’s just fine.