For the last week, in the run-up to the Sevco AGM, I have heard press man after press man after press man say that Dave King “saved” Sevco. He did not such thing. Sevco was in no imminent danger when he and others launched their boardroom coup.
It was an act of theft, not rescue. He used illicit means, including the strategic leaking of blackmail information, to destabilise the club. He interfered with the share price. He took shots at any target he could. Many of the problems that club had prior to his takeover were a direct consequence of his own unending acts of sabotage.
And two and a half years later, what do we find? Another ineffective CEO, a Director of Football who arrived from a major club on a good salary who can’t find a manager, a riven boardroom, commercial contracts in bits … and a criminal chairman on top.
Two managerial catastrophes later, who is going to argue, who is going to tell us, that the club is better off now than it was then? Back then they had a billionaire investor with a very real need to keep the train on the tracks. If Sevco went into admin tomorrow the current directors would be the secured creditors, they’d walk away with their pockets full and not another living soul would have the slightest incentive to save the club.
Last night, one of the guys who posted on the last article corrected me on a few points in it and I’m grateful to him for doing so.
When I said that their financial projections were flaky I meant it and he got right to the root of why. They are all based on current figures which we can’t see yet. He pointed out that as long as directors at the club are willing to put in their cash to subsidise losses that business plan – which he accepts they will probably “blow through this season” – doesn’t matter because they can keep the lights on indefinitely.
But that, see, is the point. Those guys have no intention of doing that into the future. Many of them are said to want out. A share issue which nets them their money back, or something close to it, is the outcome they want because they know otherwise they’ll never seen any of it again. Those guys will not continue to do this, over and over.
At some point, Sevco needs to break even. They cannot post losses year on year, and this little “debt for equity” swap might – it might – buy off UEFA FFP regulations for a year but what happens when the next set of accounts shows more losses? And the one after that? Sooner or later the people running that club have to get real and get a grip.
King snatched control at Ibrox by deceitful means and he has run the club the same way. Nothing of note has improved at Ibrox, even the “changes” to the Sports Direct deal are all smoke and mirrors. Sports Direct will remain Sevco’s “retail partner” far into the future. King didn’t secure a victory, he bought off court action. The club has nowhere else to go.
Keith Jackson has written a column today which starts out repeating every single one of King’s PR lies; it is sycophantic bollocks, painting King as some kind of hero instead of the predatory toe-rag he was. Quite how any journalist can, with a straight face, write about the “loathsome characters” inside Ibrox at the time whilst lauding a congenital liar and convicted tax crook is something only he can answer to. “The good of Rangers” still covers a multitude of sins.
And you have to love this paragraph, this blinding insight.
“We’ll also examine why it took King and his wise men so long to realise that Caixinha was little more than a confidence trickster, who may have packed a punch in a power point presentation but who was hopelessly out of his depth and unqualified for the position.”
What a rewrite of history that is. There were some, including all of us, who knew that appointment was ludicrous right from the start and said so right from the start. To call Caixinha a confidence trickster in the same piece as he pours all that early honey on King … please. If the media was half as good at calling that man what he actually is instead of pretending wisdom spectacularly far after the fact about everything else the club would be in better nick.
Laugh aloud at this bit.
“The ticket of openness and transparency on which King campaigned has been long since ripped up. It’s pieces gusting around in the cold draft behind those roller shutters.”
Jackson and other are amazed that the guy a judge called a “glib and shameless liar” has glibly and shamelessly lied, to everyone, about everything and played fast and loose with the promises he made. Please. The second they came off the stock exchange some of us said they would not voluntarily go back, because it allowed them to do everything in secret. I’m still not convinced that there will ever be an SE sanctioned share issue because of the legal requirements for transparency which would be required of the club in that event.
His section on the Sports Direct deal, that sleight of hand which the blogs called absolutely on the nose at the time, is also hilariously late in the day. Yes questions, serious questions, remain about that. Yes it’s turned out that Sevco paid them off instead of the other way around, and yes that means you have to wonder what other secrets lie buried on that issue … we’ll not see answers to those questions as long as people like Jackson are on the case.
King lies about everything. About matters great and matters small. He lies when he thinks he has to, he lies when he doesn’t have to at all. He lies out of habit, because King is a mercenary, a huckster, a con-man, a cheat, a psychopath who runs that board like a bad mafia don.
Everything he touches goes to Hell. The club has not “improved” in any meaningful way since the day and hour of his arrival.
In the glorious two and a half years since he “rescued” them from bad management he has fallen out with sponsors and kit manufacturers, insulted nearly all of Scottish football with foaming press releases, he’s sacked numerous managers and coaches, presided over disastrous reversals on the park, been forced to sack the first ever “fan on the board” within hours of his appointment, presided over two more years of losses and some of the most embarrassing results Scottish football has ever seen. Which is to say nothing of the Takeover Panel situation.
If King had been one of his managers, he’d have been sacked already. Time the press wised up and starting giving Sevco fans the cold hard truth; Dave King is not the solution to their problems, he’s a big part of what’s wrong over there.