So today’s news is interesting; Sevco got its European license, at least as far as the SFA is concerned. Sevconuts and others will be creaming themselves over this; I strongly advise them not to. Because this isn’t really terribly surprising and nor does it make mugs out of the bloggers and Bampots as the media would have you believe.
None of us expected the SFA to refuse the license. They granted it last year in similarly dodgy circumstances, and a year after they did Sevco still hasn’t done the debt-for-equity swap that was necessary to get them through FFP regulations.
A couple of months ago I raised the issue of non-disclosure. The SFA at least seems satisfied that Sevco has met that criteria or they would never have been able to grant the license without the heavy hand at Nyon coming down on them.
Let’s talk about the media before we get back to that.
One outlet – The Daily Record – is already sneering at the bloggers over this.
“So-called experts cast this in doubt due to the finances of the Ibrox club,” their article says.
So called experts?
Oh you mean people who’ve actually read the rules and understand them?
People who do real work on this stuff, rather than regurgitate press releases and try to crawl as far up Dave King’s arse as possible?
People who don’t simply sit all day making up flagrant nonsense like “Wayne Rooney could sign for Sevco”?
Yeah we did “cast this in doubt” because the rules are quite plain on the issue and Sevco is in gross violation of FFP.
I never cease to be amazed at the joy the hacks take in moments such as this … a moment, by the way, they only half understand.
What is it about these people that they get so wound up because others care about the sport and want to see that the rules are properly applied? And it’s not like there’s not a long history of rule breaking for us to be concerned with. When people ask me why I have such contempt for our media, well days like this are all the justification that I require; our views on them are more than matched by their opinion of us.
But if I were in their shoes, having dropped the ball more times than someone granted a crucifixion reprieve trying to hold a Malteaser, I would make sure I had my facts 100% correct before I started crowing like a pea-turkey with his first stiffy.
Yesterday, Phil MacGiollabhain posted that Sevco’s license request had been passed to UEFA with a note laying out some problems. My read on that article is that Phil is saying the SFA granted the license along with the others but fudged it. In short, his article says that the SFA gilded the lily a wee bit in granting a license they had doubts about, but they’ve tried to slither past that by telling UEFA that the issue wasn’t completely to their satisfaction …
In short, they bottled out of taking a tough decision and passed the buck.
And Phil says UEFA declared their own dissatisfaction and passed it straight back.
Not one word of that has been refuted by the SFA’s strategic release of information today and the hacks who are gleefully spinning this as some kind of victory over the bloggers better take note that the issue isn’t dead, not nearly.
The way Sevco is funded at the moment is reckless beyond belief. King’s Q&A the other day was a masterclass in bullshitting which could only have succeeded in front of the most gullible audience. But there were kernels of truth in there and one of them was this; if Sevco manages its debt for equity switcheroo and thus meets FFP, they intend to pull that same stroke over and over and over and over again. Shares in Sevco are worthless as it is … this locks the club into a cycle of debt into perpetuity and the media here accepts this as if it’s normal.
It’s not normal.
It’s decidedly abnormal as two of Scotland’s leading financial journalists posted out just this week; funny that none of the newspapers bothered to run their take on it.
Our media is spineless, and that’s not something that will come as any great shock to anyone who follows these events closely.
They are never going to fulfil even their most basic function in providing us with facts and information … that job falls on the guys in the blogosphere and I have never asked for or wanted the media’s respect for doing the job they won’t because respect from them is worth less to me than from the only people who do matter in all this, and that’s the rest of you who are entitled to know what’s going on and won’t get it from them.
When I get stuff wrong I trust you all to hold me to account for it, and I’ll take my medicine like a man.
Because that’s part of the job.
What I will not accept, and will not take kindly to, and I know I speak for the other bloggers here, are lectures and sneering from people so heart lazy, gutless and corrupt that their failures and lack of concern for even the most fundamental principles of journalism are why people like me are necessary in the first place.
We do the job they won’t.
When they start doing it – when they start earning their wages rather than stealing them from the companies they work for – then they can hand out all the lectures they like.
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