I’ve spent the last couple of days in bed with a particularly hardy strain of the flu, and I’m still not feeling my best so please forgive me if this seems less detailed than usual. But wasn’t the weekend just past fun? And I mean, from Friday onwards?
Let’s take Friday on its own for a moment, because Friday was the day that Sevco’s pretensions self-detonated. It was a day celebrated by their deluded fans as if it was all their Christmases come early. In fact, Friday was a series of defeats. It was a nice prelude to the hammering they took in the first half at Fir Park the following day.
Friday is a day that Sevco fans have been attempting to lacerate myself and others over; but take a gander at what happened on Friday to see why I’m pretty unconcerned.
First, we said it was the deadline for the publication of half-yearly accounts. The club duly published them on that day, but at a time when media scrutiny would be virtually non-existent. And those numbers, as predicted, were horrendous and reveal the club to be in dire violation of FFP. They were also unaudited; as expected, a violation of their full disclosure requirement. Quite how the SFA can pass those off as legitimate I do not know.
But that moves the issue on to the SFA, and further scrutiny of them is something we’ll be giving over to in the next few days. This issue goes to the heart of what’s wrong over there, and why one club seems to be exempt from the rules everyone else has to obey.
Of course, that wasn’t Friday’s only announcement.
Dave King crawled out from under his South African rock to announce his intention to comply with the City of London takeover panel. His intention to comply. Not actually comply. But to say that he will. One day. When it suits him. And again, Sevco fans are overjoyed that we’ve been “proved wrong” when actually King has bowed to pressure that was inevitable and overwhelming. “But you said he didn’t have the money,” some of them shriek. And we were right, because only the colossally thick would say that without reading the press release, which states that part of the cash is coming from his daughter’s personal funds.
The City of London will decide whether this constitutes compliance or not, but either way, King has admitted that he broke the rules and is willing to accept certain consequences for doing so. That issue, too, now moves on to the SFA and what they intend to do about it.
Finally was the story which they made sure was splattered all over the media, to paint a rosy picture. That of the club’s new sponsorship deal with a company called Vaporized. They make electronic cigarettes, apparently. They have 100 shops. Wow. But nobody really knows what the company is worth so you have to wonder what their “investment” in Sevco actually amounts to. I’m told low five figures.
When a business deal this small is being trumpeted as something worth wall-to-wall media coverage that in itself is pretty telling about the overall outlook in La La Land.
Which is to say nothing of the abject state of the club on the park, which goes from bad to worse. They must feel whiplashed from events in the last three or four weeks, from the utterly ridiculous high they were on to the low point of Saturday night and the realisation that their whole club is an unfolding disaster of epic proportions.
And some of them still haven’t grasped the totality of the trouble they are in.
Sevco’s entire summer project was predicated on Murty making a strong fist of it and securing an easy second spot and a place in the cup final. For all the cheering in the dressing room, a semi-final draw against us was not what the Ibrox head honchos had been counting on. Months after Caixinha was sacked because second spot was in jeopardy Murty now has them in a dogfight for third place. And that, my friends, is where the fun really starts.
For all the joy and rapture from their permanently dumb Twitterati, the business plan at Ibrox has been exposed for something that’s been made up as people go along. That club will end up Vaporized if they continue racking up debt like this.
They are in deep trouble, and there’s no end in sight.
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