That was the week, just past, that reminded us all that Sevco is still the banter club. If you thought they had an even a shred of professionalism, forget it.
Any residual doubts you had that they are the most shambolic institution in all of football should have been erased yesterday when their new player, Roofe, scored his first goal only to find out that they’d spelled his name wrong on the back of his shirt.
In a week where the shirts have been the focus of much attention, you’d have thought they’d have doubled down on the quality control, but that’s a contradiction in terms for this lot. There is no quality. There is no control. That whole club is a mess, from top to bottom.
This was the week that the Castore deal self-detonated. It was not even remotely surprising.
Every new revelation increased our understanding of the shambles over there.
Every new development drove home for us how outrageously bad they are at organising the most basic stuff.
The deal with Castore was a joke. They relied on the media to sell it, but all the bloggers on our side of the fence were sure it would be a disaster.
I love to remind people that we have no special powers.
All we have is a clear understanding of how certain things work. No company with zero experience in mass manufacture has ever been able to upscale as quickly as they tried to without it being a mess, and that’s during normal conditions and we’re in the middle of a global health crisis.
It didn’t take a genius to see this coming, just as it didn’t take masterminds to suss that “premium” quality is easier when you are producing small batches than when you’re trying to meet major demand. Any Sevco fan who really believed they were getting a bespoke high-value item here was kidding themselves on.
It was no surprise when Castore confirmed that the cheap Turkish knock-offs were actually the kits they had produced for the mass market. Nobody should have been shocked, far less as outraged as the Sevconuts appear to have been.
The Chinese shirts, which are about to go on sale, may or may not be the ones that are on sale on Alibaba.com but enough suspicion has been raised about Castore’s business practices thus far for it to be more than just possible.
They were caught, let’s not forget, slapping their logo onto cheap school jumpers and selling them to the Peepul at £55 a pop. They called it a “mishap” but others might call it something else entirely. Others might call it a trading standards violation at the very least.
Whilst the Celtic bloggers charted every part of this, and had predicted it right from the start, Sevco’s own bloggers were on the defensive.
Many of them had talked this deal up and one, in particular, had run interviews and puff pieces with Castore’s two founders. They reacted in fury, and slapped back and accused the brothers of using them to lie to fellow supporters. I guess it’s different – and more acceptable – when they allow the club to lie to the fans instead.
Still, the fury over in La La Land is beyond anything I’ve seen from them in a long while. These fans are used to having the club and others brazenly lie to them, but this appears to be a step too far. Some are saying that Castore are “finished” and they’ll never trust them.
Shame that the deal has five years to run, isn’t it?
If Sevco were to try and get out of it now the next people to offer to make strips for them will be Nicky’s T-Shirts And Novelty Items of the Gallowgate, who will certainly impose harsh terms on the club in order to get the deal done.
Yesterday, the drama in the dressing room turned into a crisis as Gerrard slammed Morelos in public and dropped him from the squad.
This is a player they value at a ridiculous £20 million … they had little chance of getting it before, but this amateurish strop from the manager has further reduced his value in the eyes of the only people who count … executives at other clubs.
Sevco has made him persona non grata … clubs now know – as if they didn’t before – that Sevco is desperate to get him out of the door. If there are any bids they’ll be a fraction of what the club expects and the board will be under real pressure to take one.
A heads-up here has to go to Phil Mac Giolla Bhain, for being the first guy to inform Sevco fans that they’d be seeing a lot of Brandon Barker and that the hype machine over the player was going to go into overdrive. Those baffled at his sudden place in the team should have been paying attention. This blog also predicted that Greg Stewart wasn’t done at Ibrox … he made a cameo appearance yesterday and it won’t be his last.
These are just two of the players they are hoping to flog, and they’re being put in the shop window for that very reason.
If you listened carefully to Gerrard yesterday, he made one very deliberate point about Kent … he has as good as admitted that the player has a release clause in his contract and that if it’s met there’s nothing the club can do about it.
How did this information get into the press in the first place? Easy. Somebody leaked it to them, someone wanted them to know. Gerrard made sure of it yesterday and has now put up a big banner advertising the availability of a player they bought just last year.
That club need at least one major footballer off the wage bill, and a big money fee in, before this window shuts, and they are now trying everything and anything in order to get that done. This is a desperate time for them, and their win yesterday did nothing to hide that.
That club is a few bad results from a full-scale descent into anarchy.
When they can’t even get the names on the jerseys right, this week of all weeks, you have to wonder how unprofessional is the stuff we don’t know about.
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