Last night, I published a piece about the Sevco website Ibrox Noise.
I realised, writing it, that it was time to look at the issue of Sevco and its delusional mind-set in some greater detail.
This piece will be one of a number that aims to do just that.
In order to understand Sevco and lies you first have to list what they are. That’s what this piece will aim to do. I do not pretend that it is a definitive list of Sevco lies, but these are the most pervasive, the most resistant to fact and logic.
I think some of these will not survive the season.
Most of them will not survive the next campaign.
It will be interesting to see what Sevconia does when these articles of faith are finally be challenged.
It will be interesting to see how much of their club can be saved.
My guess would be that not much of it will survive. When you base your life on lies, and then those lies start to crumble, it can bring about one of the biggest psychological shocks to the system that there is. There may be no recovering from it.
Sevco is seven years old. It is already in a death spiral. I know a lot of people do not recognise that fact, but it is a fact nonetheless, and the only two options open to the people who run that club are to live within their means or die as Rangers did … there are no others.
Lies are necessary for some people.
The whole history of Sevco so far has been built on suspension of belief. That can only last so long.
These are the greatest lies that Sevco fans still believe … but not forever.
Steven Gerrard Is A Winner And That Makes Him A Winning Manager.
One of the most ridiculous of all the lies, and one of the hardest to sustain belief in over the medium term, is that Gerrard is a “natural winner” and that this translates automatically into some great talent in the dugout.
That this has been disproved on numerous occasions, that football is littered with the corpses of those who’ve shattered this myth, does not seem to matter.
Gerrard never actually won a Premiership title. Roy Keane won a bunch of them.
He too was heralded as a top candidate for management based on his career as a player, and there are few players in the history of these islands who ever led on the field the way he did and who was man enough and brave enough to go head to head with Ferguson himself.
Keane had all the ingredients Gerrard does and a few on top.
And Keane is a disaster area as a manager.
He is not the only one. The ex-Ibrox and England captain Terry Butcher was a natural born leader. His managerial tenure was dreadful. The game is full of guys who thought taking the step from leading on the pitch to leading off of it was a straightforward and easy progression. Most of them learn the hard way.
There are a slew of other skills which go into making a great manager, and we don’t know that Gerrard doesn’t have them all … but nor do the Sevco fans know that he has any of them.
Players, even if they are captains, can retreat from criticism … managers cannot. Players do not get sacked by clubs for the failures of those clubs. Managers do. Players cannot arbitrarily take decisions on the pitch which affect the outcome of games … they do what managers tell them.
Much has been made of Gerrard’s “on field leadership” than night in Turkey when Liverpool came back from the dead to win the Champions League; Gerrard was definitely magnificent that night, but the instructions which turned the game came from Benitez.
Even the goals Gerrard scored were actually masterminded on the touchline; it was Benitez decision to push him further forward that turned that tie. Gerrard did his bit … but within the scope of the manager’s plan.
Gerrard’s first season at Ibrox was a failure; don’t let anyone rewrite history on that. We won the three domestic trophies and he couldn’t stop us. The media is overjoyed at the start they’ve made to the season … that start includes losing to us.
Gerrard has yet to prove he can win when it really, really counts … that kind of pressure crushes a lot of managers. He has yet to be fully tested in this campaign … but it will come. And then we’ll see what he’s made of. For the record, I still don’t think he’ll last the season.
Sevco Fans Believe That Their Club Is Financially Stable.
This is probably the most dangerous of all the lies that we’re going to look at. The idea that this club is “financially stable” is for the birds, frankly. I do not know how any sane person who knows the first thing about the numbers can actually believe that on any level.
When their accounts finally materialise from last season the expectation is that they’ll have made a loss. How big a loss remains to be seen; I will be surprised if it’s not at least £6 million. They may do some creative accounting but the truth will be there in the numbers.
Participation in the Europa League will have given them a cash boost of more than £10 million.
A loss on top of that is a disastrous result no matter how it is spun.
During the course of this pre-season they shifted only a couple of players from their books and signed a dozen new ones.
Which means that the running costs will be higher and the wage bill through the roof.
With their level of transfer spending I don’t see how they can avoid making another loss, and perhaps a bigger one even than last year. I’d bet on that in fact. In any year when they fail to qualify for the Groups they will post an eight figure loss.
Sevco has no access to an overdraft of that size. As no reputable lender would float you a loan if the purpose was to pay down debt, so no bank will loan a company money for that purpose. At that point not only do you have to find a way to pay what you owe, but you need to start cutting if you’re going to survive the following year.
This is just how the world works; there’s no getting around this, there’s no avoiding it. Any year in which they don’t have Group Stage football will be difficult to survive. The more they borrow to plug the hole the deeper the hole they’re digging. As long as mugs in the director’s box are happy to give them the cash and convert into shares they could, theoretically, go on forever … but none of their directors has the kind of money to keep on doing it.
These are businessmen. They didn’t make money by pissing it away, and they know what we do; that as long as the club doesn’t prioritise success over survival there’s no reason for them to spend all that money in the first place.
Even at their present level of spending – when I think they’re still a significant way behind us – even now they are spending more than they earn.
They are spending too much. It cannot be sustained and it will not be sustained.
They are a volcano … and it will blow.
Dave King Has Been A Good Chairman Who’s Tenure Has Been Positive.
Absolutely reeking of lunacy this one, and yet a lot of them believe it.
Let’s start with the headline fact. Since King captured the Ibrox throne he has sacked four managers; Ally McCoist, Stuart McCall, Mark Warburton and Pedro Caixinha.
McCoist had to go because he was so spectacularly out of his depth even running a football club at all that it was painfully embarrassing to watch. Painful because of the sore sides we got from laughing at it. McCall was a disastrous temporary appointment who consigned them to another year in the SPFL Championship. Warburton was hired in spite of a single year as a manager … a ludicrous and idiotic move which was highly costly.
Pedro Caixinha takes the prize though. Hired via Skype without the chairman ever meeting him, there are still rumours that he was brought to the club because people were convinced his time in UAE had put him close to sources who had money.
King’s latest managerial hire is Steven Gerrard, a famous name who had, nevertheless, never managed a single game at the senior level before he rolled into Ibrox. In any other industry a guy with that hiring record would have been drummed out the door ages ago.
You can measure King’s impact on Sevco by the following fact; in five years between their founding and their landing in the SPL Celtic had won a slew of titles but dropped a lot of domestic trophies as well. Since their return – under the stewardship of this genius – we have won the lot.
Three trebles in a row.
He has thus far been powerless to stop us.
Their financial position has not improved one iota on his watch.
Any corresponding rise in income has been offset by ridiculous levels of spending which have sent him back to his fellow board members for money time and time again. Indeed, the club still has no overdraft facility. They have no Stock Market listing. They don’t even have a NOMAD.
And King loves litigation.
He has been in and out of court since the day and hour he took over.
He has not won a single legal battle. Think on that. Not one.
That is quite incredible. As I’ll cover in another section, Ashley – his nemesis – remains as hooked into the club as he ever was, and you could argue now has a tighter hold on it than before.
King has lied and dissembled in his dealings with the fans.
His promises to be more open, transparent and ready to listen were barefaced falsehoods for which he has never been held to account. His plans for the shareholders were being shrieked from Celtic fan sites right from the moment he pulled the company off the AIM Exchange … and nobody listened.
The fans organisation Club 1872 heralded their reaching 10% of the shares in the club only two years ago; since then they have seen the power of those shares diluted at least twice. In spite of having spent another £2 million they own less of the club – around 5.4% now – than they did just 24 months ago. And King has the authority to dilute them further anytime he likes.
King’s love of the courtroom has placed him in conflict with the club’s commercial partners. He has torn up agreements, dragged them into his mess and he now faces the prospect of being sued by at least one of them, perhaps more.
King has not solved the problems in their stands; UEFA fines and partial stadium closures testify to that. He has not made the club more open and inclusive. Miles from it. His tenure has seen them pander to the outriders of hate more strongly than ever.
And today, as everyone is aware, just to cap it off, the City of London Takeover Panel has acted decisively against him and “cold shouldered” him for four years, effectively telling every company in the Square Mile that he’s as far from “fit and proper” as you could get.
No-one can realistically present a shred of evidence of where King has made Sevco better than it was when he found it.
They Believe Their Players Are Worth Absolute Fortunes.
This one is down to the club as much as the fans, but there is no doubt at all that many of them do believe that they are sitting on a goldmine in terms of their squad value.
They look at what Celtic have done and they’ve concluded that it’s all based on hype and that if you keep on saying something long enough that it’ll be proven true.
Morelos is the obvious one, the gold standard of their delusions.
The idea that someone is going to pay mental money for the Colombian Kris Boyd is so discredited that they’ve largely stopped making up stories about it now. Gerrard said just before the window closed that not one club had expressed an interest in him over the summer.
The same applies to Tavernier, in whom there has been exactly zero interest, and not a single offer, in spite of four consecutive summers of rumours and speculation. None of it has enticed any club into actually trying to buy him.
In the time since Sevco crawled out of the grave Rangers was buried in, they have never sold a key player for a major sum.
Never. Not once in seven years.
Ibrox Noise thinks they could raise £50 million at the drop of a hat without even having to sell Morelos, such is their confidence in the worth of players like Barasic, Kamara, Tavernier, Aribo and the rest. It is patently nonsensical of course, but they are convinced.
Much of this is the media’s fault, because the delusional Peepul might not be so certain of all this if the press wasn’t constantly pushing the same line … but honestly, I am at a loss to understand how any of them can seriously believe it anyway.
Scottish Football – And Especially Celtic – Needs Them.
This is one of the darkest fantasies they labour under; that Scottish football “needs them” and that Celtic, in particular, would collapse without them in our world.
This is an old and discredited piece of nonsense which has lasted from the Rangers era, another club who were convinced that the game would die without them in it. Such were the despairing wails from the governing bodies when the vote on Sevco was being held … the game was facing “Armageddon” without a club called Rangers in the top flight.
What rot that turned out to be.
Scottish football thrived as the club calling itself Rangers was trying to climb through the leagues.
The SPL clubs didn’t miss them at all. Most took the opportunity to win trophies, play European football and consolidate … many of them erased their debts and now have sustainable operations. Only one club – Hearts- experienced significant turbulence and they would have anyway because for years they too had been spending money they didn’t have.
Celtic’s board has long argued that our club is built on the basis that we are self-sustaining and not dependent on any other.
I know there are Celtic fans who think the reason they’re not dead is that we never killed them … but it was never in our gift to “kill” Rangers … like it or not, there will always be a version of them in the league because their fans, and the game itself, will never let them go … but Celtic has not needed them and never will.
The Old Firm tag serves only one club and it has only served one club for years … theirs.
Far from Celtic needing them, they define themselves by that rivalry because that rivalry is the only currency they have in the game.
Without it, they are nothing.
They Believe They Are Still Following Rangers.
The greatest lie of them all. The big one. The daddy of lies. The alpha and omega of Sevco’s cognitive dissonance.
We call it The Survival Lie, and it has beget a multitude of problems and will be haunting this game for as long as people are pushing it like a drug.
The Survival Lie is an obvious fiction as everyone knows full well. The media who support it know it is a lie because the front pages of every newspaper in the land carried the truth on the day the CVA was refused. They pronounced the club dead. They wrote obituaries. The front page of one daily had a picture of a coffin on it.
The players who fled on freedom of contract refused to go to the NewCo, many of them making it quite clear that the club they had played for was gone.
Every employment lawyer in the land was clear that they had a cast-iron case.
The vote to accept NewCo into the SPL was voted on by the Rangers administrators as well the eleven other clubs; how the Hell does that happen if the two clubs are one in the same?
The SFA issued a “transfer of membership.” Between one club and itself? Of course not. The idea is stupid.
Sevco did not inherit the Rangers Scottish Cup seeding for the 2012 campaign.
The Survival Lie exists for just one thing; it was conjured up by Charles Green as a way of selling season tickets to gullible mugs who otherwise might not have turned up to watch the new club.
Those gullible mugs will never admit that they clutched at the only straw available to them, and because they won’t admit that it was a lie they are forced to stick with it.
But the rest of us should not have to.
People are entitled to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden.
What they’re not entitled to do is stop us from passing through in case we step on one of them.
Broadly speaking I have three major problems with the Survival Lie.
First is that it automatically leads to the noxious Victim Lie.
Second is that if we let lies become commonplace in our discourse then the whole thing is down the pan.
Third, the way this lie is pushed forces all of us to live in their delusion and I steadfastly refuse to do it.
Sevco fans cannot back off from the Survival Lie now … their entire edifice of belief would shatter into a million pieces.
It is the one constant for them, the one thing that cannot be erased.
It is not an article of faith … it is the faith.
They Believe That Mike Ashley Will Eventually Back Down.
Ever since Dodgy Dave King rolled into town he has been promising them that victory over Mike Ashley was just around the corner.
There is no question that the Peepul are convinced that this is true. King has lied to them repeatedly on this, time and time again, and there have been more declarations of victory than the Americans had during the Iraqi adventure … and they are still stuck with him.
Back when King rolled into town, Ashley had a seven-year deal.
They could be more than halfway through that by now, and there might be a lot of goodwill around.
But King wasn’t happy with that, and tried to screw the Sports Direct magnate out of what he was due … that was a big mistake.
It has already cost the club millions to escape the consequences of King’s precipitous action and there is more to come. The seven-year deal is now annually renewable … for as long as Ashley and his people want it. They have King and his club by the balls.
There is a belief amongst these fans that if they holler and wail enough that Ashley will walk away.
But that is crazy, because he doesn’t care what they think.
He can maintain this commercial deal at long distance where he can’t even hear the complaints of the Peepul.
This is the man who brazenly sat in the St James Park directors box as the Newcastle fans booed him.
On top of that, his contract with the club is fireproof.
It contains clauses which guarantee him payment in the event that the fickle Ibrox fans decide to boycott; any unsold stock is billed to the club, so not only does a boycott not help the club get rid of him but it actually costs them money which flows into his pocket.
This is not a man who’s going to do walking away.
The Believe Football Success Is Cyclical And It Will Be “Their Turn”.
One of the great lies that football fans who have not seen success in a number of years like to tell themselves is that glory and triumph run in cycles.
That clubs take turns at being on top and go through spells of being down.
That eventually their time comes again.
And it is absolute nonsense. Complete and utter bunk.
Ask the fans of Hibs or Aberdeen or Dundee Utd if they believe it; those clubs were, at one time or another, the top side in the country. It is hard to see circumstances under which any of them will ever sit at the SPL summit again.
Reality trumps fairy tales and the idea that clubs are “entitled” to spells of success is the biggest of them all.
Celtic could have gone out of business in 1994.
More likely than that is that we’d have continued to languish and our potential would not have been realised for another twenty years. Who knows how far ahead someone like Murray – with no domestic completion – would have put Rangers in that time?
They might have been able to actually build the club they dreamed of.
Success wasn’t just going to happen for us; it took Fergus to rebuild the entire club and to put it on a forward trajectory to bring those days back. The club at Ibrox will almost certainly win major domestic honours again, but a league title is a different matter.
There is no immutable law which says they will get a shot of it just “because”.
That’s not how the universe works.
Football is a meritocracy, and you get what you earn.
If you have rivals who do their job right and build and continue to grow and move out in front of you then all the wishing upon stars and hoping for the best will not close the gap.
Sevco’s future will be decided at Celtic Park; that’s the reality of it.
If our club continues to improve, if they take that seriously, if they push for constant success and don’t’ rest on their laurels, then we will not be caught; it’s as simple as that.
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