If you’ve seen the newspapers at all today you will not – you cannot – have missed Dave King. He chose his hand-picked band of hacks well yesterday; they accepted every word that came out of his lying mouth without subjecting most of it to the slightest scrutiny.
For openers, his comments on the Takeover Panel case were absolutely beneath contempt; he claims he is being bullied by them when he knew the law, knew what the regulations were, and explicitly acted in a way that violated them. Since then he has played games with these people, stalled, refused to comply and even now seems to think he can bluff and bullshit his way out of punishment. But his claims yesterday went further.
Dave King claims he asked them for an extension because he needed to open a UK bank account. Something the average person can do in a couple of hours. Transferring the money from South Africa to such an account would, then, be a task as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. Yes, there are exchange controls, but that wasn’t the point he made. He explicitly said he asked for an extension because he needed a UK account.
We all know how simple it is open one, as we’ve all done it a hundred times.
King has just spent days in the UK. Couldn’t he have nipped into Nat West whilst he was here? That a single person in that room was able to refrain from laughing at those comments is amazing, frankly. That they all swallowed it whole is astounding.
Even if the request were at all reasonable, which it wasn’t, these people are in no mood to do him any more favours and why should they? The Scottish media is wholly aware that his affidavit in the recent court case made the claim that he has no personal wealth, but they are equally aware that he has promised to spend millions on the club.
I don’t know how they sustain belief in both those claims. Do they think of King as some sort of Fagin figure? Some kind of romantic rogue? He’s a criminal, pure and simple, a notorious liar who will tell the audience sitting in front of him anything he thinks they want to hear.
And he served up a real whopper to these fools.
I intend to cover the full implications of Sevco’s “business plan” later in the week. I always did; it’s an article that demands to be written as a result of some of the nonsense we’ve read in the papers this past week, but I want to tip my hat to a few people and especially BarcaBhoy over on TSFM for covering some of this already and giving my article a grounding in facts and figures. Sevco’s financial position is murky. So much of their club and how it’s organised remains shrouded in secrecy and doubt. I will work through it as best I can but I already know what I’m going to find; a club with a third of our turnover cannot run on a sustainable basis … if they had to break even, in football terms we wouldn’t even know they were there.
Unable to get his own house in order, and without a plan for taking them forward – and do not listen to the media or anyone else on this; Sevco has no plan – King decided it would be a good time to talk about ours. And his comments were pure ignorance, either of the wilful kind or a complete failure to do the maths. He asserted that “one title” was all Sevco had to win and Celtic would collapse “like a house of cards.”
I’m sure it’s a nice thing to feed to compliant hacks and gullible fans, but sadly for King and for them it is an assertion that contains not one morsel of truth.
Let’s deal with the obvious point first; the financial gap is enormous at the current time and that has given us a decisive advantage on the pitch. That advantage is what stands in his way at the moment; it’s all very well dreaming of hypothetical scenarios but the reality is what he has to deal with in the here and now and his £6 million fund-raising exercise will do as much good in bridging that gap as rattling a tin cup would.
But say Sevco manages to win their single league title; it is a piece of nonsense, sheer and unadulterated nonsense, to suggest that our advantages would collapse as a consequence. Remove our Champions League income – European income in fact – entirely and it’s true that our club would not earn three times as much as Sevco any longer … it would only earn twice what Sevco does. A gap that is still impossible for them to bridge.
“Aaah,” some will say, “but give them the Champions League income and ….”
And what? That’s where the argument falls on its arse, I’m afraid, the notion that Sevco would suddenly inherit the £30 million and change. To do that a club with no seeding to speak of would need to navigate four Champions League qualifiers, a task that some at Celtic Park currently views as daunting, and we have the advantage of our co-efficient.
Sevco’s current five year business plan is predicated on qualifying for the Group Stages of the Europa League three times over the course; I’ll tell you right now, I can say with total confidence that there is next to no chance of them achieving that goal. If they do it once they are to be congratulated for bucking the odds, because I doubt even that will happen.
No club from Ibrox has been in the Group Stages of a major European competition for nearly a decade. People who still haven’t grasped this ought to ponder what it means; even with UEFA awarding Sevco Rangers old co-efficient points, six years away from European football has had predictably disastrous consequences for their score. Last year’s defeat at the hands of Progres will be haunting them for at least another four to five years.
Without a decent seeding, they will come across a team who will beat them long before getting near the Group stages and it will not take a massive side to do it. In the Champions League they would have the narrow advantage of playing in the Champions Group, but they would be rock bottom of that in terms of seeding as well … and the task would still be an uphill one.
It could be more than ten years before Sevco fans see their team in the Groups of any continental competition; it will only happen in that time if Peter Lawwell is correct and the Europa League is going to be massively expanded to give more clubs a chance to appear. If Sevco is ever again to see Champions League Group football they need to hope for an enormous expansion of that tournament and Scotland getting a second slot … and even then I have doubts.
Remove from the equation any notion that Sevco will catch us with Group Stage money; King and his club are stuck with what will, at best, be a 2-1 earnings ratio in our favour. But the bad news does not stop even there for him.
He seems to think our cost base is too high to support things as they stand, without the Champions League. First, there are people at Celtic Park who do this number crunching stuff for a living and they will know what King apparently is too stupid to realise; that although a blow to our club it would be more a prestige one than an apocalyptic financial one.
Under Ronny we played Europa League Group Stage football on a wages ratio not a million miles from where it is at the current time. Did we collapse like a house of cards? No, and we had enough in the kitty to employ Brendan Rodgers in the first place.
Yet to the simpleton in the chairman’s office at Ibrox, this all looks pretty straightforward; remove £30 million from Celtic’s monster income and we’re posting losses instead of profits ever year. And yet it’s not true in the way he thinks it is. In fact, it’s not remotely true. Our cost base looks high but actually the only part of that you need to focus on is our wages to income ratio and it is well below the point where we ought to be concerned about it.
Glance at our running costs, as King has done, and you might see something that alarms you but remove Champions League income and you’re also forced to remove all the running costs associated with putting on a minimum of nine games in that competition … you’re removing the running costs associated with the same number of trips aboard. You’re talking also about appearance money for players. For player bonuses. Not small numbers.
Europa League football just about pays for itself, with a small amount leftover to declare as profit but if you do well in that tournament and sell out your stadium then there’s a decent chance you can do a turn and make some good money. Not great money … but we’d still be in good financial health. And this is before we even talk about saleable assets.
One season’s absence from the Champions League could be completely offset with the sale of just Moussa Dembele; we would probably post a major profit at the end of the campaign from that single transfer deal. We could get for Dembele close to what Sevco could get in total earnings, and he is not the only bankable footballer at the club.
King’s comments might be swallowed up by a gullible Sevco support and by the idiots of the Scottish press but I’ve spent a long time looking into this previously; even when Rangers was at its highest earning power we made more money than they did – they just spent more – eighteen years of twenty, regardless of who was in the Champions League and who wasn’t. It was their cost base that was out of control for that time, and it still is.
Their advantage was the largesse of a bank that was later nationalised because of its own huge debts. That was the only card they held … and it’s gone.
We run on a sustainable basis … I cannot say that enough times.
There’s a reason I chose Pennywise as the article image.
Dave King’s comments are so ridiculous he ought to have made them in a clown costume.
They were a joke, and so is he.
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