So today Sevconia is enraptured at two things; the number of tickets they have sold for a pre-season friendly and their first glimpse at Gerrard, and the possibility that he might be about to bring an English Premiership striker on loan.
And in the meantime, the bigger picture is being entirely missed.
I have to hand it to their supporters on one thing at least; their loyalty has been tested to the limit and they still fork out major cash every season. Mugs, yes, but they appear to have a bottomless pit of faith that their club is on the brink of something special. I agree with them, if by special you mean a car-crash season that makes an eighteen vehicle pile-up look like a minor traffic accident. They think things can’t be worse than previous years.
How wrong they are.
Against my own inclination, I have to give King a round of applause too.
The Gerrard appointment has worked out better than he ever dreamed. He’s bought himself time. Not much of it, not as much as Gerrard himself seems to think, but for a while at least the Peepul are filled with optimism and as long as that’s the case they’ll keep on spending money.
But I really don’t know why they are missing the bigger picture, because there’s so much wrong over there that you can’t imagine how they cannot notice it.
For one thing, wasn’t there supposed to be a share issue last month?
You notice how the press pushed that and then dropped it? Is it because it was already £1 million undersubscribed due to Club 1872’s failure to chisel more money out of their fans or recruit more members? Or is it because nobody else was willing to chip their share in?
Hey, it might just be that, as predicted on this site and elsewhere, that the City of London simply won’t allow it whilst King is so openly defying a court order.
It doesn’t really matter which of these it is. This was yet another Dave King promise that wasn’t kept, another part of the Grand Plan which hasn’t come to fruition. The media would rather pretend none of that was real. The fans generally don’t seem to care.
There’s a hole in the balance sheet. That much is a self-evident fact. They already required millions in external finance to get through the season and that was before they spent money and brought Gerrard and his backroom team to the club on big wages. The share issue was supposed to bridge some of that gap, but it’s failed to do so.
Directors loans were due for repayment two days ago. We’ll give the club the benefit of the doubt and say the weekend doesn’t count, which means they were due for repayment at close of business today. Has there been an announcement to the Stock Exchange that this has been done? Of course not. Is the media chasing it? Absolutely no.
And of course, if the director’s loans aren’t repaid and if the club hasn’t converted the shares to equity then they can’t possibly meet UEFA FFP guidelines … but the SFA has cleared them anyway and the issue has passed to UEFA itself. We’re now in their “monitoring period” and if the Great Eye at Nyon falls upon that club then hell mend everyone inside it. There is no way UEFA will continue to ignore goings on there, not whilst Resolution 12 continues to work its way through the SFA system and people involved still retain the services of a QC.
Into the mix today comes a story about Danny Ings, a barmy flight of fancy if ever I saw one. It’s not that Ings isn’t available – Celtic have steadfastly refused to even consider a move for him, believing we have three strikers better than him at the club already – it’s that even half of his salary would be too rich for them to afford and Liverpool will want to send him somewhere where the club pays considerably more than that.
Ignore talk that the club will “do Gerrard a favour” and send him up; Liverpool directors and coaches stopped caring about Gerrard the minute he was appointed at Ibrox. This nonsense that they will invest in him – and Sevco – to get him ready for their job is absolutely ridiculous. Liverpool are not the sort of club to hire a complete novice … next time around they will want someone who proved his mettle, not somebody who needed hand-holding.
Sevco will start the season without a game-changing signing. The man who leads them into battle will lack the requisite qualification to coach in most European leagues. He has never run a senior club in his career. Before Christmas the money will run out and if they can’t plug the hole then January will hit them like an F5 tornado.
And that’s to say nothing of court cases, King being charged with contempt, the SFA disciplinary case into Resolution 12, UEFA opening an inquiry into their FFP compliance or any one of a dozen other crises which would be unthinkable at another club but which erupt at Ibrox as a matter of routine.
There is no club like them.
They provide us with endless entertainment.
If their fans could only see the big picture they might be able to focus and try to halt the inexorable progress towards another administration event. They haven’t got the sense to. They would rather embrace fantasies and pipedreams and high hopes of an unlikely victory.