Articles

Fear And Loathing At Ibrox: Sevco’s Apparent “Stability” Is Illusory. They Are Still Football’s Most Anarchic Club.

|
Image for Fear And Loathing At Ibrox: Sevco’s Apparent “Stability” Is Illusory. They Are Still Football’s Most Anarchic Club.

Whenever I think of Sevco these days I think of Jeremy Irons, sitting in an expensive suit, at the head of a table of frightened men and women, a man engulfed in a chaotic situation but still the calmest, and smartest, guy in the room.

There is nobody like him on the Sevco board.

The movie is Margin Call, and in the scene in question a young analyst is presenting his findings to an emergency board meeting.

The country, the world, sits on the brink of the financial crisis of 2008, and this kid has stumbled upon evidence that his company stands to be wiped out if the derivatives they hold drop in value by even 25%.

“The music is slowing down,” the kid tells the room. “If it were to stop, this model wouldn’t even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.”

In other words, the fall will be so great that they’ll be lucky to even keep their personal assets. He’s predicting Armageddon.

Irons keeps on smiling calmly throughout. He gets to his feet and tells the room that the reason he gets “the big bucks” is that his job is to know what the music will be doing far into the future. As he lets that sink in, he walks to the window and looks out into the darkness.

“And standing here tonight,” he says, “I’m afraid I don’t hear a thing. Just … silence.”

It is his ability to realise, just in front of everyone else, that things are much worse than even the kid anticipates, and to act according to that truth, that will decide the future of his company, and all those with whom it does business.

“There are three ways to make a living in this business,” Irons tells the room. “Be first, be smarter or cheat. I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have a lot of smart people in this building it sure is a Hell of a lot easier to just be first …”

And that’s where Sevco has problems, and it’s why The Daily Record headline today about how they have the most stable board over there in years is so absolutely outrageous and is deserving of the scorn I am about to pour on it.

1 of 20

In the 1951/52 season, SFA chairman George Graham tried to stop Celtic from flying the Irish tricolour flag over Celtic Park, leading to a bitter stand off between him and the club. Which Scottish club backed Graham over his stance?

At Ibrox, they’ve tried cheating. It works up to a point.

But when Rangers used EBT’s they got caught and that had deadly consequences.

They aren’t going to be first as long as Celtic exists to tower over them, so they might as well forget about that … and the idea that there are any smart people at Ibrox plainly hilarious. They are the most dysfunctional club in the game.

The Record is quoting Gordon Smith.

That’s probably not a good idea in and of itself, since he is widely regarded as one of the worst CEO’s in the history of the Scottish game. He was a disaster at the SFA, where his hiring was a scandal, and hilariously served Craig Whyte and helped him run Rangers into the administration from which it never emerged.

Why should anyone take him seriously on what constitutes good governance? The Daily Record really has no standards at all on this stuff. It’s as if the Journal Of British Medicine had given Harold Shipman a column on good patient care before he snuffed it.

Sevco is in as much financial trouble as Irons’ fictional company in Margin Call, yet the board over there is acting as if it’s all good. They are signing players. They are growing the wage bill. They blatantly ignore the swirling chaos that the game is in, at a time when even Celtic are admitting that every club – ours included – are facing hard times.

The so-called “stability” hasn’t been in evidence in their barking mad press releases, or their behaviour in relation to the SPFL. This is the board that recently spent an entire month pushing bizarre conspiracy theories and trying to get every other club to pony up for an investigation into their ridiculous claims.

They don’t behave like responsible people … quite the opposite.

Ironically, it is Celtic’s alleged support for their failed attempt to ram-rod reconstruction through which has given them their only shot in the arm for months.

This is the board that persists with a loser at the helm, in Gerrard.

And there’s more; Phil Mac Giolla Bhain has written two excellent pieces on them lately which make it clear that they are just as amateurish as those which came before them.

In the first, he said that not all the board members are aware of the precise details of the Castore deal.

In the second, he said that Douglas Park got all the way to the top of the Marble Staircase before finding out that Dave King had loaned the club nearly £7 million and was clamouring for it to be paid back. This is not how a properly functioning organisation works.

The only difference between their current board and the one that’s been running the club for the past five years is that King is no longer chairman; is Smith saying – and is the media agreeing – that they were a shambles under The Glib and Shameless Liar?

That would be a turn up for the books.

This site and others were saying that the whole time, but the press kept on telling us how brilliantly he was running the show. Amazing that they have changed their tune.

Even King could see the writing on the wall. One of the reasons he hastened his exit was that he knew what would have to happen at the club as the global health crisis began to bite. The other reason, of course, was that his cold shouldering had severely limited his ability to act in the UK. Those who are there at the moment were happy to do his bidding, so the suggestion that they are paragons of virtue and professionalism is a little bit hard to swallow.

Gordon Smith is one of the stupidest men ever to assume a senior executive position at a Scottish club and he’s the last person anyone should be listening to at this moment in time. He is not only a believer in conspiracy theories, but his refusal to condemn sectarianism was once so stark that it earned him a rebuke from none other than Jim Traynor himself.

It is a joke that The Record printed his words, but a bigger one is the suggestion that we should take any of them remotely seriously.

In Margin Call, Irons saves his company’s balance sheet but destroys its reputation … Sevco has neither the balance sheet nor the reputation.

Nor do they have someone who is in any way atuned to the music of the moment.

Across Scottish football, the music might be about to stop.

At Ibrox, the sound of the flutes and the lambeg drums drowns out all else … they didn’t even know there was other music playing.

The shock when they realise that it no longer is will be seismic.

We’ll see who tries to paint a picture of them as strong and stable then.

As Scottish football goes through the current crisis it is important to keep up with developments and the key issues. We are determined to do so, and to keep you informed as well. Please subscribe to the blog.

Share this article