Just when you thought it was safe to start singing The Billy Boys again, eah Sevconuts? What must life be like for you right now, where it never rains but it pours? How must it be for trouble to be looming around every corner, like a mugger in an alley?
When the January window shut, your club hadn’t moved out all the names it wanted to, but at least one of the big earners was at least part of the ways off the wage bill. Carlos Pena was, it seemed, yesterday’s news. Except he never really was, and the prospect of him being yesterday’s problem was never a terribly realistic one.
I am amused that the press has kept current with his story, and that of Pedro in Mexico. The former Sevco boss is said to be a “flop upon his return” to him homeland; actually, he never was all that great a manager there in the first place, despite what desperate massaging of his record might have led some people to believe. And he sure can’t spot a player.
Pena is probably pound for pound (in every sense of the word) the worst signing in the history of Scottish football. I know all about Rafael Scheidt and how that came about; believe me, watching a couple of videos worth of highlights was fine-tooth comb due diligence compared to the research people at Sevco did into this guy.
I have always wondered if the deal was wholly legit. Somebody, somewhere, did Sevco up like a kipper over it. Was it an agent? A scout? Did they just take Caixinha’s word for it that he knew what he was talking about? He rates the guy, he has to. Otherwise he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself taking him back home with him.
But Pena’s problems were so commonly known that Scottish editors were shocked at the negative feedback they got whenever their journalists asked informed persons over in Mexico to talk about him. They came back with literal horror stories, which somehow failed to make the kind of big headlines they would have had he pulled on the Hoops.
Moving to Glasgow, a city with more pubs per square mile than any in Europe save for Dublin, was clearly not the right move for a guy with more baggage than Terminal One at Heathrow. It was a bad thing for the club and the player himself; common decency precludes me from finding it funny. The club’s failure to find any of this out in time to put the brakes on the move, well that is definitely funny and I do find it hilarious.
Believing, as they obviously did, that the player would never set foot in this city again and that eventually he’d come off the wage bill before that lucrative contract was up … it was always a fools hope. The Mexican’s don’t have the money for a deal like that, and no club in Europe is going to touch this guy. Today Pedro has told him that he has to shape up or head back to Glasgow; I’m not sure that the threat is levelled so much at him as it is at the club that fired him. He is the last person Dave King and his people want to see at the ground.
But there’s simply no choice in the matter. If Pena was a nutcase or a menace to wider society there might be grounds for terminating his contract and sending him on his way … but the PFA will fight tooth and nail for a guy who’s only crime is that he has made some bad lifestyle choices and gotten a little fond of certain substances including alcohol.
And so they should too; Pena is not a bad guy. He’s fallen into a hole that has swallowed up people from every walk of life and social background. The club should have known that before they paid millions for him. They only have themselves to blame for it, and now have moral and ethical responsibility to the guy which transcends the sport.
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