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Sevco Continues To Show An Appalling And Dangerous Contempt For The Rules And Reality.

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Tonight, Sevco has appointed a new assistant manager – assistant to a guy who’s contract only lasts until the season ends – and looks on the verge of signing their third player of the window. This one, according to the press, will cost £1 million.

I don’t believe that fee for one second, certainly not as an upfront cost.

But they won’t get him for free.

There are Sevco fans who just aren’t going to get it no matter how many times you set it down and explain it to them; their club is in serious financial trouble. They will point to days like today and tell us how ridiculous that idea is. I point to Rangers January window in 2012 as a sign that nothing could be further from the truth. They gloated in our faces when we said they’d have to sell much of their first team to survive much longer. That window “proved” we were wrong.

It took less than a fortnight before we were proved right.

No-one knows what’s around the corner. If someone had said a week ago they’d buy a player at a reputed fee of £1 million, I’d have laughed in their face. But if someone told me the club itself would be in administration in one month I wouldn’t be remotely surprised.

The Sevco fans don’t seem to get this, and trying to explain it to them seems a lot like trying to teach a six year old kid the intricacies of particle physics. But to the rest of us this is really pretty simple. Their club has existed for five years. The sixth anniversary is coming up soon. In all that time they haven’t been able to find a single financial institution that will give them credit. Think about that. No bank will touch them. A football club with £20 million turnover.

This is because they formed as a NewCo after the OldCo crashed dumping massive debts. It’s because since the hour they were set up they started spending like they were determined to follow it into the grave. Can these people really have forgotten what happens when a club spends more than it earns? It wasn’t exactly a century ago.

Instead they rely on director’s loans just to keep on the lights. Those directors don’t have the financial muscle to keep on paying the bills indefinitely and long before they run out of the money to do it they will run out of the will to.

Which part of this is difficult to comprehend? The longer they continue to ignore reality the more chance that they will follow the OldCo to the boneyard. They refuse to see this, although it is readily apparent to everyone else.

All of this violates Financial Fair Play rules. They have no break even plan to speak of. Their contempt for Scottish football is clear in the way they have behaved since inception and the way they defend the record of the dead Rangers. It is clear in the way they treat other clubs, the bombastic arrogance, the deranged press statements.

The governing bodies know they are out of control but no longer even try to hold them to account. They are a clear and present danger to the wellbeing of our league’s integrity, but that doesn’t seem to matter to those whose job it is to ensure fairness.

And in addition, they have a chairman who is a born criminal and brazen liar who is so openly dismissive of regulations wherever they originate that he has defied court orders and has placed the club in the severest jeopardy with the regulatory bodies who run the City of London … the very people this club needs if it is to raise the external capital it needs to survive.

This is a club in crisis. Third in the league, they are imprisoned in a superiority complex that will not settle for less than being first, as improbable as that is. Not only do they endlessly judge themselves by the standards of our own club – how they boasted about “outspending us” in the summer; lot of good it did them, right? – but more dangerously they judge themselves by the standards of the one that spent its way to the grave and existed for years on money not its own.

This club doesn’t respect the rules, it doesn’t care about the rules … tonight it’s apparent that they don’t even acknowledge that reality exists. To be spending money on signings and assistant managers whilst skint and when the guy in the manager’s office is a place holder … it’s completely insane. And what’s more is that I know we’re part of their insanity.

The agenda at Ibrox is partly being driven by the Celtic bloggers.

Does that sound too crazy to be true? It’s not. We’re the ones who set the terms of the relationship between Sevco fans and their club. Because they read our gleeful articles and they put pressure on their directors and their managers to bust a gut trying to keep up with us. And the more we do this the more irrationally everyone at Ibrox behaves.

They will laugh at this notion, of course. But in order to do that they’ll have to be reading this blog, and I know many of them do. They read all the blogs. They know how we view their pitiful club and its pitiful struggle to be more than it is.

In a more sane environment the sensible folk on their board would have more room to breathe and to take saner decisions. That choice was closed off to them long ago. We make noise and so their fans make noise. We tell them how dreadful they are and their fans scream in their directors faces that they no longer want to be regarded as such.

And that’s how mistakes are made, and they just keep on making them.

Today they are cock-a-hoop over signing what they regard as a quality player. Who they got cheap from the most price crazy league in the world. Who they had no competition for. Who’s club couldn’t wait to push him out the door.

What’s wrong with this picture?

To their eyes, nothing at all.

Where’s the money coming from?

To them, that doesn’t matter.

They never ask questions.

They never look through the fog to what’s on the other side.

This “proves” that their club is not in trouble, that it’s not on the bones of its arse, that actually there’s money in the mattress somewhere.

This is so insane. How can they be so stupid?

How can they take such a narrow view?

Why don’t they see what everyone else does?

Part of it is a media that no longer even pretends to do its job, that heralded the signing of a guy who’s played six games in his career as if he was a world class midfielder, that will talk about the Murphy signing as the club “showing ambition” without ever asking who’s paying for it.

They don’t believe they are in trouble. They don’t believe they are riding the edge of administration, perhaps worse. They don’t believe any of it. They are secure in the bubble.

But bubbles burst, and this one most definitely will.

It’s just a matter of time.

And how do we know that? The same way we knew it before. Because we can count past the fingers on our own hands. Because we live in the real world and we know what happens when you don’t have the money to pay your bills and no-one will loan you a penny or give you a handout. We know because we’ve been here before.

So have they.

Why the Hell don’t they recognise the signs?

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