For the last two months, Dave King and his board have been on the offensive against the SFA and the SPFL. This much is known. Yesterday, they played their trump card; they secured a legal victory over the SFA that compels that organisation to move the whole thing to the Court of Arbitration in Sport, who will be asked to decide whether the case even has merit.
The media is loving this of course, and they have trumpeted it as a win for King. Of course they have, and today it’s very hard to deny that that’s exactly what it is. Sevco has secured a big win here, but the media will not write about what that means.
I’ll take a stab at it later on.
What I find funny about all this is how it all looks when placed in context alongside the other stuff King has going on with the governing bodies, and with one thing involving him that isn’t. He has led a campaign against one SFA board member which ended in the guy stepping down and he is still going after the chairman of the SPFL, for reasons beyond understanding.
On top of that, in spite of numerous inflammatory statements and a pending contempt of court case – more on that later – the man continues to elude SFA sanction.
This man alleges that Celtic runs Scottish football, that the leaders of the game here are a cabal of anti-Sevco minds, determined to destroy his club. The simple fact is, though, that the governing bodies here are far more accommodating of the board at Ibrox than they would be for any board, anywhere else in the country.
And that’s why the real question that comes out of this is “who actually runs Scottish football?”
The answer is most certainly not Celtic. We are not the ones bullying and harassing and hammering away at all around us, heedless of the consequences, ignoring the potential for huge damage to be done. We are not the ones openly questioning the motivates of people who haven’t even done anything wrong. We’re not the ones trying to wriggle out of responsibility for a decade or more of blatant cheating and a European license scandal.
Clubs out of Ibrox have been breaking the rules for so long that it’s second nature to them, and the SFA has to see this thing through no matter what because otherwise that club is running Scottish football.
Over on The Scottish Football Monitor today, BarcaBhoy summed it up better than I ever could when he said, “If the SFA refuse to take (Sevco) to CAS then they will be guilty of allowing (them) to benefit from co-efficient points gained pre 2012, whilst allowing them to take no responsibility for the rule breaches that earned those points. That would be bias in full sight.”
And that is the unarguable fact of it. Celtic cannot allow this, but neither can the SFA itself.
This has to be pursued all the way, no matter the cost or how flimsy the final punishment. That club has to be sanctioned, it has to pay a price, and then UEFA will then be obliged to look at the whole of this and decide what it can do in return.
This cannot be allowed to end here, or this game might as well adopt anarchy as its default position because that’s exactly what we’ll have.