This one needs covering, so please bear with me regular readers.
There’s a lot of whooping and hollering and cheering over in Sevconia today because they’ve spent some money and are shaping up to spend more. A reputed £4.5 million on two central defenders. It’s a big deal for them, so they’ll have their wee moment but to put in perspective, as I said in an earlier piece, we’re spending the same sum on a new pitch and some lights.
They need radical transfer surgery more than we do as well. Is a Brighton reserve and a defender whose team finished eighth in Croatia last year the answer? Time will tell, but let them have their wee day in the sun. But there are issues they’d rather ignore.
Amidst their glee today is a little bit of gloating. Some of it is directed against individuals and websites, some is directed against the general Celtic supporting blogosphere. That’s par for the course, but I want to make a couple of things clear.
The first is this; Sevco is not skint at this moment in time, and so it’s no surprise that they have the money for these deals.
They are sitting on a cash pile because season tickets have just been sold.
The word “skint” is a loose term anyway; if you have no money in your bank account you are skint. But if you get a screwdriver out of the drawer and go and jimmy the nearest parking meter then you no longer are. And you can feed yourself like that for a while.
But as a way of living day-to-day there are some obvious problems with that. The parking meter can only be popped open once, maybe twice, before people start paying attention. You can start flogging your gear, but that becomes a drag.
Bills start to arrive, and when they do they need to be paid or you quickly find the electric is cut off, the phone goes out, the freezer defrosts and the bailiffs show up to take away what you couldn’t punt on E-Bay.
What I’m saying is that yes, Sevco is flush right now which makes it easy to order takeaways and hit the bookies and jolly it up down the pub with the mates … but it’s like a heroin addict spiking a vein. The pleasure lasts a brief moment … and then the shakes start.
Dave King is digging one Hell of a hole here. When Sevco fans gloat over the money they’re spending now, remember that it’s supposed to last them a full season. That they were already facing a significant cash shortfall. That their wage-bill has exploded already due to the Gerrard punt and his cast of thousands backroom team. That not one player has left their club for a fee and that they are still paying part of the salaries of guys like Pena.
And remember that the days of directors loans are over, and that’s all that was keeping on the lights over there in the first place.