This article is long overdue. I’ve been meaning to write it for a while now.
The global health emergency has been problematic in that regard; it has confused a picture that was already looking fairly bleak for the Ibrox club. But this has gone from being a bad picture to being a positively catastrophic one. At Sevco they are still pretending that hard choices can be avoided.
But that strategy is doomed to run out of road, and it always was.
What they are facing now is a multi-front catastrophe which threatens to overwhelm them.
I don’t believe they have the leadership required to see their way out of it. I certainly don’t think they have the money. This article will look at where they are in every aspect of the club and it will pose one the question that would be keeping me up at night if this were Celtic.
Could the global health emergency doom their club to The Second Death?
Back in 2008, I wrote an article for E-Tims called The End Of Rangers?
I started with a story; that of Ray Kroc, the guy who went on to become the first global head of the McDonalds chain.
His business philosophy was brutally simple; “If my competitors were drowning,” he said, “I’d stick a hose in their mouth.”
That, I thought, summed up Murray and his attitude to us.
But that article argued that Murray and his club were not long for this world; the global banking crisis had inflicted too much damage on his standing. He was no longer able to keep funding that club as he had been. It was a matter of time before it all came crashing down.
Failures at Celtic Park – like allowing them to win three titles in a row – helped them survive for a few years beyond what they might otherwise have.
I have seen enough evidence to know that they were allowed to fraudulently obtain a license to play in Europe for a season. The irony is that during those last years they actually dug the hole deeper, and the EBT scandal was unearthed.
The same dynamics are at play with Sevco.
The path to their eventual demise has, to all intents and purposes, already been charted.
No club in this country and few others in Britain were as vulnerable to a bolt from the blue type disaster as Sevco were and remain.
King’s exit seems almost too perfectly timed right now; that was a rat jumping off a sinking ship.
This is an examination of the challenges facing the Ibrox club, and a summation on why I don’t believe they can be successfully navigated.
If I had to offer up a percentage certainty about them going into administration, I’d put it at 100%.
Their odds of survival this crisis at all I’d put at 30%.
If admin makes drastic, epochal, swingeing cuts they could get through it but they would be in no fit state to challenge us for at least another decade, and only then on full houses and a fan-base wholly accustomed to routine, and humiliating, failure.