Confirming what’s already been written on this site and across Celtic cyberspace, Cruz Azul’s sporting director Eduardo de la Torre has slammed reports that their club will be paying Carlos Pena’s wages in full whilst he is at their club on loan.
The reports to the contrary, which appeared in The Daily Record this week, were widely criticised across social media and with good reason.
Whether they came from Sevco PR or were simply a product of journalistic wishful thinking, it was not exactly a secret that the facts were very different from what Scotland’s best brand of novelty bog roll had published.
How many more times is our media going to get caught telling blatant lies on behalf of that club? And these were easily disproved lies.
The Cruz Azul chairman had already briefed the media in Mexico about the deal and was said to be very satisfied with the terms, which involve him taking a player he sees as a Mexican international on loan with a nominal transfer fee agreed should the loan deal go well.
He had already told the media they were paying less than half the wages.
A few other juicy details have been in the Mexican press, exposing Pena’s lifestyle issues whilst here and accusing Sevco of failing to deal with the problem.
Amazingly, none of that has made it into the Scottish media either, which maintained a wall of silence on the player’s habits the whole time he was here, in spite of those problems being common knowledge.
Pena himself showed what he thought of the club when he blew his nose on a pair of Sevco shorts when he landed in his homeland.
But nothing about his predicament here was a secret.
How else was I able to predict, months ago, that he would be heading out of Scotland in this window? What did I know that the Scottish hacks didn’t?
Easy answer; nothing.
I just chose to write about it, whereas they did not. Talk about hiding the truth from the fans who paid for season tickets. Not that it was very well hidden.
It is an embarrassment that our press ignores such an obvious story. It is far worse that they allowed themselves to be used as conduits for utter lies and printed them knowing that’s exactly what they were. This is more than contempt for the readers … it’s contempt for the job itself.