After tonight, Chris Jack might as well take up a permanent PR role at ibrox. He is doing the job already, and being paid by The Evening Times, which means he’s doing it for free right now, albeit someone is paying him a salary. Maybe they should consider their own position relative to him; who is this guy really writing for? He’s not even in the service of two masters; he is in the service of one and it is not the one which is paying his wages.
Stewart Robertson spoke to Club 1872 recently, and he laid out the path for the future. The news was not good, but thank God for Jack because it has been spun nicely into a positive news story. It’s unclear if the Sevco fans will see it the way Jack wants them to, but give him his due; he was given a task to complete and he’s done it.
The upshot of the article is that Sevco has a plan to close the gap. Unfortunately, when you look at it dispassionately the plan is not dissimilar to one where an average guy walks into a casino with the money he’s just got from re-mortgaging his house, determined to roll his way to an early retirement. An early grave is much more likely, as is the case here.
The strategy will depend on three central planks, and all of them sound shakier than a house built by Frank Spencer.
The first depends on European football. I’ll cover all these one at a time, in some detail, but I’ll save this one for last because it contains a number of brazen assumptions which are wholly ridiculous.
The second depends on them successfully realising a favourable “player trading” policy; this is the Holy Grail of every club in Europe. None but a handful have made it work without spending tens of millions on hit and miss options first.
The third plank is them getting a positive retail deal and major increases in sponsorship. You wonder how dumb their fans can be not to see the obvious holes in this one.
Let’s start with that; no club I’ve ever heard of has so thoroughly poisoned its relationship with sponsors, kit manufacturers and even their distributors. The best they can hope for – if nothing else goes wrong that toxifies the brand further – would be that their current partners in those areas stick with them on something like the current terms.
They will not beat their current offers, not when the kit people and the sponsors got such a thoroughly lousy return on their investment this time around. Puma are still fuming at the way they were denied a kit launch and the shirt sponsors are no happier.
Sevco continues to hid behind the veil of “commercial confidentiality” when asked about their arrangement with Sports Direct; we can assume there’s much more to find buried in the agreement. When King was spinning the narrative – partly through Jack – that he had secured a major “triumph” over Ashley the truth was that the club had paid the sportswear magnate £3 million to drop legal proceedings against them.
A deal was done on the merchandising, but I’ve never thought it sounded like Sevco got much out of it. Ashley’s people still hold all the cards; the deal, which we’re told runs out at the end of the season, still obliges the club to pay for unsold stock, it includes warehouse rental costs, distribution costs and a host of other similar complications. And anyone who believes it will expire when this campaign closes out is a mug.
Sevco has no retail outlets of its own. It has no infrastructure. The costs of setting that stuff up would run into the tens of millions and any shirt sponsor or manufacturer would want to know definitively how the sales and marketing would be handled before parting with a bean, especially in light of this season’s fiasco.
Sports Direct are the only show in town, and Sevco will have to work with them if it means they go crawling on bended knees. If the deal hasn’t already been negotiated the club might be in for an even bigger shock; what’s to stop Sports Direct from dragging the matter out until the other commercial deals need to be signed and then springing an offer on the club which binds them more tightly than before? Sevco has no choice but to go with Ashley; the only question is whether they are lying to their fans about “wait and see” or if they are stupid enough to actually be waiting to see … that would be bound to end in tears.
I think the deal is already done. The documents are probably signed and the whole thing sealed already. Sevco is counting on their fans never finding that out, but I’d bet against it remaining the secret they hope for. Everything outs, and that place leaks like a sieve.
This idea of them turning the trick with “player trading” is nonsense, as the last few years have ably proved. Celtic had a very specific plan when it came to going out and getting good players and the scouting networks which were required are significant. Sevco is trying to shoulder its way onto a very crowded field. If you’re not already scouting some of these markets already your chances of successfully finding a Van Dijk or Wanyama are pretty slim.
The costs associated with the scouting networks are, in the first place, enormous. But we paid big bucks for Van Dijk and the likes of Ki when we purchased them. Our January window signing from last season – and he’s barely kicked a ball – was a £3 million purchase. Our young French midfielder Ntcham cost us £4.5 million. We may well have a view to selling them on for big money at a later date, but until that’s realised there’s £7.5 million there often on the bench.
Sevco fans seem to think this stuff is easy. To get players to a place where top clubs want to buy them they have to be showcased to a wider audience in the first place; anyone could tell that Dembele was going to be a big player – except their fans haha who’s shock at the impact he made in the Massacre of Celtic Park last season has to be read to be believed – but it took the storming display against City to send his value soaring.
These guys also have to be good, and for every hit there is a miss. We could tell stories of the Pukki’s and Balde’s and Derk Boerrigter’s, but that would go in one ear and out the other with these Peepul. They don’t want to hear anything that distracts them from their bubble. They ought to know this by the way; their forays into a similar strategy have been disastrous.
Look at the assorted garbage they’ve bought in recent years. Not one of those signings was the sort who is likely to go on to bigger things. The media talked up guys like Waghorn because he had a number of England Under 21 caps, but the number of times that guy had been allowed out on loan, and the number of clubs he’d been at, didn’t suggest that there was a major talent just waiting to be discovered. It doesn’t work like that. If it was there one of those other clubs would have found it long before Sevco lumbered onto the scene.
The only way their club gets the platform needed for this stuff is, as I said, by playing in Europe. I do not expect them to do as badly next time around as they did when Progres knocked them out this year, but nor do I see them reaching the Groups of the Europa League, which is vital to their five year projections, as I pointed out in an earlier piece.
Robertson isn’t shooting for that though; he has pinned his, and the club’s hopes, on the utterly unrealistic goal of reaching the Champions League. No other CEO in Scotland would talk like this, as if there were no obstacles in their way, and especially not eleven other clubs. They talk as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll hit that mark.
“The majority of the deficit is accounted for through qualification for the Champions’ League group stages,” he said; the deficit in question being the financial gulf that exists between us and them. The trouble is, it’s absolute nonsense as I’m sure he knows.
Their turnover hit “record” heights of £29.2 million last year. Ours was £90 million.
Even if we had bagged half of it from the Champions League our turnover would still dwarf theirs. On top of that, we are not dependent on Champions League income for our survival; they are betting everything on that target and reaching it isn’t simply a matter of overhauling us, of course. If they were somehow able to pull off the one-shot miracle of winning the title, they would have to navigate a perilous series of qualifiers and a slip in any one would be fatal.
This is nothing less than a banquet of bullshit, with Chris Jack playing the role of server and waiter. Their fans may or may not swallow it, but the Scottish media continues to disgrace itself in the way it simply prints this nonsense without asking series questions of the people dishing it up.
Long may it continue as far as I’m concerned.