Sevco’s commercial director is getting praise in the papers again today, and I guess he’s entitled to some of it. All this guy has to do is keep his company in the public eye, and every deal he gets signed, no matter how modest, gets media attention.
It’s easy to do in a country where they are given far more respect than they deserve, and far more media coverage than any other club would get.
For all that, it still amazes me when anyone is allowed to just make stuff up and claim whatever the Hell they want, which is pretty much what he did today when he repeated the oft-heard nonsense that the Ibrox club are “the world’s most successful team.”
It’s cobblers, and this is even allowing for the Survival Lie.
There are a number of ways in which this is counted, and Sevco is not first by any of those metrics. For openers, not one of them accepts titles and trophies won by some whole other team, and that’s crucial if you are going to give Sevco 115 trophies … to my way of counting they’ve won exactly zero major honours.
Yet even accounting for that number, it’s still not true.
There’s a certain absurdity to putting a team top of the “world’s most successful club” list when others have won multiple European Cups and World Club titles as the likes of Barcelona, Liverpool and Real Madrid have.
If you acknowledge that those things should be what counts towards a “successful club” then Sevco isn’t even in the top 10.
No matter how many domestic honours they’ve got, Rangers’ solitary European Cup Winners Cup (presenting in a dressing room due to their rioting fans) does not, even if it was all included in Sevco’s haul, get them into that exalted company.
But let’s give them the enormous benefit of the doubt – in fact, let’s deny reality completely and give them every single one of Rangers’ trophies, tainted ones and all.
They still don’t stack up as the world’s most successful side; that accolade belongs to Egyptian club Al Ahly, who at the last count were 118 trophies to Sevco’s 115 … and I include them in spite of the fact that it means we’re not the only club in world football to have gone through an entire domestic campaign – league and cups – unbeaten.
Not only did Al Ahly manage that in 2005, but they took the Confederation of African Football’s Champions League unbeaten as well.
The Sevconuts might not want to acknowledge them, but actually their record is quite incredible.
They have no fewer than eight CAF Champions Leagues, they have four CAF Cup Winners Cups, one CAF Confederations Cup and six CAF Super Cups. So they are undisputedly the absolute best and most successful team on the African continent bar none.
Someone wants to ask Sevco’s marketing and PR team if they believe African titles are less worthy of counting than Scottish ones. With the debate over racism raging at the moment I’d be very interested in hearing any answer they give to that question.
For all of that, Celtic is on 110 trophies and with the Scottish Cup still up for grabs we’re got a good chance of making it 111 before the next campaign is even included.
With the way Sevco is flapping at the moment it’s not going to be long before we’re creeping up on Rangers’ record.
Right now we’re between just a couple of seasons from overtaking them … and you would not bet against us to do it.
In the end, we’re going to crush all of it, even the lie they tell themselves.
In the meantime, it would be good if the papers would actually start challenging that lie instead of merely reprinting it every time someone at Ibrox repeats it.
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