Last night I did a piece on Ibrox Noise Up and their latest frothing about how the finance gap between their club and ours no longer matters.
It was a piece of delusional drivel that was as easy to knock down as a house of cards.
Celtic’s wage bill is higher than their clubs entire income … that’s a solid fact and one that no amount of bluster will change.
Today they’ve followed up that article with something that is so moon-howling and fiscally illiterate that I have to wonder if, in fact, they are trolling us with it.
Everything about it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Can they really be this dumb, or do they really believe that numbers they appear to have pulled out of thin air are in any way accurate?
There is so much in the article that is simple gibbering lunacy that it’s difficult to know where to start.
Let’s take this paragraph for openers though.
“Well, as we showed before, this summer alone (we) coined in around £17M (set to keep rising by at least another £4M for the next two home UEL matches gate receipts alone). True, that includes overheads like player wages, but those who disputed our point about the money’s origin just assumed we didn’t factor in standard overheads.”
I have read that about ten times and I can tell you right now that until I hit myself in the head with a hammer until around 50 IQ points had been temporarily stunned, thereby reducing me to their level, I had absolutely no idea what it meant.
Once in that headspace it made a bit more sense … but it’s still blatantly wrong.
The £17 million represents income, so it absolutely does not include, for one second, overheads.
When an article starts out with such a blatant misunderstanding about what even the terminology means how seriously can you take even a word of what follows?
“In short, Rangers are now generating, from all revenue sources shirt issues aside, much more like the levels we used to,” is the next line.
True … and by the way, it is true. I said before that Sevco is operating almost at its peak except for retail … but they then follow it up with a statement that makes it clear just how little they understand that. “We’re seeing that in the level of player fees and salaries we’re starting to pay out.”
Absolutely barmy.
Those salaries and fees cannot, in any way, shape or form, be sustained on the current level of income.
Why the Hell do they think there’s been a £20 million debt for equity swap already, as well as Wonga loans, in just the four years King has been there?
And I’ll tell you, although income is higher those famous overheads are too.
Their club is grossly over-spending. I cannot write that, I cannot say that, enough times.
Their utter refusal to look that fact in the face is astonishing.
Had Legia Warsaw been more potent in the last of their qualifiers their club would be in a dire financial situation at the present time, the kind that would already have had administrators thumbing through the accounts.
Their insanely stupid decision to spend £7 million on Kent, a symptom of pure panic, negated the Europa League cash advantage for this campaign, and has put them in a bad spot.
A negative outcome in the Sports Direct case – certain as the judge has already ruled in Ashley’s favour – puts them on a collision course with a brick wall.
Here’s the best section in the piece.
“As Dave King said in May 2015, this club will be run within its means, sustainable. Indeed, the accounts earlier this year confirmed a solid £5.2M profit, and while that’s not always going to be the case, it shows the club now has the means to land a glove in the transfer market these days.”
Wow. Just wow.
King has no intention of running the club on a sustainable level and he’s admitted this many times.
Indeed, he’s confirmed that as long as he can secure directors loans he will keep on spending what they do not have in order to halt Celtic’s march towards ten in a row … and that’s a policy that should be far more frightening for their fans than for ours.
The accounts they are talking about, of course, are the six monthly ones … the part of the campaign where all the money is coming in.
And the £5.2 million figure, as this site pointed out when they published it, is actually artificially inflated by nearly £2 million.
King’s statement, which accompanied those accounts, made it clear that they expected the club’s financial position to be “near breakeven pre EBITA” when the final numbers – the ones representing the whole season and not just the lucrative first half – are published.
Not in profit, but almost in break even territory.
Almost. And even that isn’t the full story because the real point is the “pre-EBITA” part.
EBITA is an industry term that means Earnings Before Interest Taxes and Amortization.
So those accounts which allegedly “prove” how good the health of the company is don’t even tell half the story and the final projection – which is that they will make a loss over the course of the year – are based on numbers which don’t even take into account several key deductions.
The scant information the Ibrox club released is not remotely accurate in allowing us to gauge the true shape that club is in. We do know the headline numbers paint a picture that is nowhere near as rosy as the reality, a trick King has pulled in every successive year.
And he gets away with it, in part because he has certain media outlets eating out of his hand … but mostly because the Ibrox fan-base is shark-like in its willingness to swallow just about anything.
I guess it’s true; the bigger lie, the more they believe.
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