Sevco have been making the headlines this week, and of course they are.
They needed to be.
Their entire club needed a lift with season ticket sales to secure and total uncertainty over exactly what those tickets are being bought for.
Except, many of these are entirely the wrong headlines and ask more questions than they answer.
Everything at the club screams “clueless” at you.
When you examine where they are at the moment, you see a club in real trouble.
They might well sell their season tickets; they almost certainly will in fact. But there’s a lot of nonsense in the media concerning them and a lot of stuff that should be nonsense which I suspect will turn out to be true but move the club forward not one pace.
From their divided supporters to a transfer strategy that makes absolutely no sense at all, this is a club stumbling from place to place without any sign of a coherent plan. This article is the examination of their so-called “strategy” which the Scottish press will not give them.
That club is a complete basket case, and these are the reasons why.
No Manager, And A Shambles Trying To Appoint One.
Graeme Murty is a dead man walking and everyone knows it.
But all the indications are that Murty himself doesn’t know it yet.
If he does, he’s hiding it well. Nobody is in such obvious pain at a losing streak if they know it no longer matters … when Murty says he’s hurting it’s because he fears that his chances are over. It’s not because he thinks he’s already beaten.
And if Murty still thinks he has a chance then Sevco’s board is either gruesomely misleading him or they are yet to make a decision on him. That would be truly extraordinary. Don’t forget that this time two years ago we had told Ronny he’d be leaving at the season’s end and, with the pressure off him, he was able to get the team motivated for the run-in.
Whilst all that was going on, we were in advanced talks with Brendan Rodgers about taking over.
We announced it and dropped an atom bomb before Sevco played the Scottish Cup Final against Hibs. That screwed with their whole mentality and it give Liam Henderson and Anthony Stokes every incentive they needed to have the game of their lives … and the rest is history.
But we kept that stuff in-house. It was private. There was no tipping off the press, no open courtship whilst Brendan was getting on with the work.
What we have at Ibrox today is a sight to see; a managerial candidate being touted all over the media whilst the guy who’s in the job right now allegedly waits to be told his fate. And all the while there are pictures and stories about the club chairman meeting with the new favourite to take his job.
Way to prepare for a massive match, and complex end to the season.
Look at the other names being linked with the job; none is a big name. The clamour for Steve Clarke tells you how out of ideas most of those around them are. Frank De Boer? Dream on and he’s nothing to worry about anyway. Some guy in Norway? Didn’t we get slated for going there to look for a manager? Wasn’t it a sign of low ambition?
And Steven Gerrard? Another youth coach? One newspaper got Ray Parlour to go on the record today to say Gerrard will “attract big names.” Without money? Without a vision to sell them on? How’s he going to do that? If wishing made it so Gerrard would be unveiled already. A known Celtic fan, which I’ll be writing about later, he is already out of alibis with the Peepul.
The next boss over there will have to cope with a staggering amount of scrutiny and an expectation level which is wholly unrealistic. And they dare not fail, because King says the board wants “instant success” and will fire the manager who does not deliver.
Imagine asking Steven Gerrard to start his managerial career like that?
Their next appointment has to be significant. There is no chance of them bringing in the kind of name their fans are looking for, although they will do their best to sound excited and animated about whoever it is. What a fall they are setting themselves up for.
Who The Hell Is Running The “Transfer Strategy” Over At Ibrox?
You cannot have read the papers this week without falling over an Ibrox transfer story. All of this is highly unorthodox when you consider that the club has not got a manager confirmed yet. It begs the question; who is really running transfer strategy at Ibrox?
Mark Allen appears to be doing it at the moment, but there is no sign that he is working with scouts unless they are sitting in front of the telly. This guy is literally going through a list of players available on freedom of contract and approaching those with a Scottish connection.
That is not scouting by any stretch of the imagination.
And what if the next manager doesn’t fancy these guys?
They will be on big wages; when you bring an EPL player to Scotland on a free he’s not getting paid in chocolate buttons. These guys will be amongst the highest paid players in the country … and it is lunacy to sign them before a new manager has signed off on them.
This assumes that any incoming manager will be able to choose his signings in the first place, but who but a lunatic would work under those conditions?
It’s either one of these; it is signing a player an incoming boss might not want or it is signing players because the incoming boss has no say whatsoever in who makes up his team. Regardless of which it is, this is the dumbest way to run a football club I have ever heard of.
The need to look as if they are busy whilst those season tickets are being sold … it is an expensive sticking plaster.
It is another example of a policy which will almost certainly dissuade any half decent candidate from wanting the job. You may well get someone like Gerrard, with no experience of management, wanting it but it will end in tears. That’s inevitable.
Their PR Strategy Is Like Something From A Bad Gangster Film.
This week’s statement about Hibs and their fans was deranged.
It was absolutely off-the-charts nuts. It reeked of paranoia and was laced with the spite we’ve come to expect. It is the latest in a long line of statements which make you wonder if those writing them are even sane. We know the author, of course; it bears all the hallmarks of a High Level release.
No other club in the country would handle its public affairs and its relations with other clubs in such a perverse fashion.
Apart from looking staggeringly unprofessional and sounding like they are on the ragged edge of a complete breakdown, it is pandering to an element of their support which they should badly want rid of but indulge instead.
I really don’t know who they think they’ve impressed with their aggressive response to what Hibs did with their ticket allocation.
Clubs have done this to Celtic on repeated occasions; Kilmarnock allowed two stands to go unfilled for a league decider at their ground when Celtic supporters would have taken every seat. What Hibs has done here is not exceptional, but Sevco sees things through its own bubble.
Yet all they’ve done with this policy – and the threat to cut Hibs allocation at Ibrox – is draw attention to what their fans perceive as a failure to act on Celtic’s 7000 tickets for their ground.
As a result of that, the release didn’t impress the people it was supposed to. It’s another example of the club acting tough in a pitifully small way whilst rolling over on issues of greater importance. People this stupid shouldn’t be working in PR.
Only in Scotland could they have clients.
No Major Funds, Debts Piling Up And An Early Season Cash Short-Fall.
Sevco has one major source of income; season ticket money.
Their new shirt deal is worth buttons compared to ours and even in comparison to their own from last year. They still have no official sales partner but when Sports Direct are announced as the one for the next campaign that will take a chunk of their alleged £3 million a year pay-day.
Sevco is running on empty, and everyone knows it. They want to clear out their dressing room; Ibrox Noise thinks as many as a dozen players will be “shipped out” but to where? Bids for their players will be minimal because other sides know they are desperate for money and so even if this proves to be the case they are unlikely to benefit and high earners like Pena and Herrara are going nowhere at all and they are stuck with them.
Close Brothers loans needs to be repaid. They need to put together the debt-for-equity switch which will allow them to pass Financial Fair Play and then they have to secure shareholder agreement for a brand new share issue which is miles from being realised.
King’s ability to actually invest in the company is limited by three things; first, he does not want to spend his own money on this rabble, secondly he doesn’t have the funds to carry the club and third, even if he did the South African government would not allow him to without exacting a heavy toll as Steper their exchange control rules. It is a mess over there and no mistake.
The club operates its business model on a not-so-subtle form of emotional blackmail which is quite unbelievable. Their fans know they have to keep on spending or any hope of catching Celtic is gone. The directors know they have to keep on funding shortfalls or they will be blamed for the lights going out over there. The players and the management are told they represent more than a football club and are forced to try and hit unrealistic goal to survive.
The suspension of disbelief it all takes must be exhausting but none of this ever lasts … their club is going to run out of wiggle room sooner or later.
The well will be dry and then they are in all sorts of trouble and this time there’s no Stewart Regan to save them.
The Fans Are Delusional And Even Dangerous.
Sevco fans are one of the biggest reasons why their club is stuck in the mud and going round in circles with a failed strategy. They are deeply delusional, paranoid, vicious and prone to lashing out at anyone they think stands in the way of their club. And it doesn’t even matter if the people in question are inside the club itself.
I don’t believe sanity will ever dawn at Ibrox until there is a wholescale change in the makeup of their support.
These Peepul will never allow any dilution of the supremacist guff that surrounds the place and that means nobody is ever going to be able to go in there and tell them the pure and unvarnished truth and prepare them for reality.
Alastair Johnston tried it last week and I wrote on this blog about the results of that; he was the subject of some of the worst abuse I’ve ever read, even on their forums which are notorious for it. And what did he say that was so controversial? That a club in the SPL two years and with a whole infrastructure to rebuild was probably “ahead of the curve” to be challenging for second place for the second year in a row. Of course, he’s quite right.
But not for one moment was that a welcome message on their forums. They refuse, point blank, to allow anyone the time and space to do a proper rebuilding job. The demand for instant results – echoed by King recently – encapsulates the view in the stands perfectly and it’s why anyone who sits in the manager’s office faces an impossible situation.
These fans do not want to be told they will have to foot the bill for rebuilding the club or that it’s a job that’s going to take time. They don’t want to be told that they have a responsibility to protect the reputation of the club either, not that their board has ever bothered to try.
Sectarian signing, the bile on the forums, the deranged nature of much of their conduct with fascistic fans and a fascination with subjects like Ulster Loyalism and child abuse …. The world must look at that stuff and think them out of their minds.
On top of that, new divisions emerge in their fan-base every single day which makes it impossible to imagine them coming together in a way that challenges the current board and the way their club is run. Not that they would … because the club is run in their image anyway and that’s part of the problem.
The World Has Changed. Their Club Remains Rooted In Days Gone By.
One of the reasons the club cannot formulate a coherent plan for the modern age of football is that they are not a modern club and that’s something people often overlook when talking about them. They have allowed themselves to be defined by “history and culture” instead of becoming forward thinking and outward looking.
I called them Scottish footballs’ most conservative club in an article earlier in the week and I didn’t mean Tory, although there are elements of that too. I mean that that they are a club that is fiercely protective of the past and a set of values rooted there. And those values have toxified but they insist on hanging on to them anyway.
They proudly boast about still having a picture of the monarch in the boardroom and even, it is said, the dressing room, clinging on to one of the most backward relics on this island, the idea of a hereditary power that rules the realm.
But even that institution is changing, and I wonder if they would be so ready to embrace it if it did.
Let’s say William decided he and his family didn’t fancy being the ruling class and decided to chuck it and the throne passed to Harry. Now, if that guy and his good lady had kids they would be a direct break from current traditions; a mixed race American mother who had a Catholic education as mother to the heir to the throne? I am betting their son would be the first monarch never to have his face on any of those Ibrox walls.
Because modernity scares the bejesus out of that club, because so many of its followers and adherents are backward sectarian yahoos. They worship certain icons and ideas more than they do the actual flesh and blood reality of those things.
They believe that because Britain is actually a religious state, a theocracy, and that many of them pledge allegiance to it that they should be protected and made special by it … without realising that the ruling class has never given a toss about working class folk marching in garish Halloween costumes every July.
We Are The Peepul is steeped in that old school nonsense; it is an absurd thing to think of yourself and those around you; that you are special, that you are different from everyone else, that you are better somehow and thus entitled to things.
When they talk about their “rightful place” in the game here everyone in earshot rolls their eyes at how ridiculous the idea is. This is a results driven business, and I cannot believe they are the last people to realise that. You are entitled only to what you earn through your own endeavour and anything else is charity and that’s not how it works.
Scotland is a modern forward thinking country and these Peepul are quite open about their enmity to its intellectual, political and media classes who they all think are lined up against them. Their entirely unsophisticated, rabidly paranoid, view of an arching conspiracy arrayed in opposition to their pursuit of glory … it is like something from another century.
But actually, the way it’s expressed is the only modern thing about that.
And it is debilitating and soul sucking and entirely destructive.
Their Biggest Problem: Celtic, Of Course.
Their biggest problem is that they have defined themselves entirely in opposition to our club, and our club is everything theirs is not. We are wealthy, influential, socially responsible, forward thinking and engaged with the world around us in a way they are not.
Even the good things their club does carry a taint; their charitable fund, for instance, which gives a percentage of its cash to the Youth Foundation over there, and which trickles through, via “donations” to the club itself. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth, whereas Celtic’s business is entirely above board and out in public view.
Our fans make friends wherever they go, which is something Sevco fans have mocked over the years but which gives us a grounding in countries, and with fans of other clubs, all over the world. Our alliances are not marriages of convenience or peons to 16th century attitudes, they are grounded in the struggles and challenges of the modern world. Widely derided on the Sevco fan sites, the Palestinian connection plugs us into places they couldn’t hope to reach … we actually have a sizeable reputation (and growing) amongst important people and some of those people are folk with serious means at their disposal. I have written about this before.
What we do is usually slick and proficient. Whilst Sevco was announcing details of the planned relationship with Hummel and trying to spin it as a better deal than it actually is, Celtic put on a full and public and well attended launch of our own strip. Forget some of the online critics; they are fully entitled to their opinion on the shirt, but the club expects to sell a bundle of them and it will. The whole way the thing was done was exceptionally professional.
Everything Celtic do is like that; it is impossible to imagine that we would ever have sanctioned a ranting, demented screed like that which Sevco did just this week. Our club might have had issues with other sides down through the years but we’ve always tried to handle matters like that in a private, sensible, way.
We are now the club Murray believed he was building at Ibrox … and that is what gals them most of all and makes it impossible for them to keep up with us. And if you think things over there are chaotic right now wait a while. The closer we get to ten the more fragmented all this will become, until the club literally pulls itself apart.
And we will simply carry on as before, and all the stronger for it.
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