Over the last few days, The Evening Times’ “journalist” Chris Jack, – in reality, a tame Ibrox hack – has been doing a canonisation piece on Stuart Gibson, the new Ibrox “investor.”
The first was an awful piece of softball questions and zero insight.
Amongst its many sins is that Jack makes ridiculous assertions about Sevco’s “financial stability” and encourages his interviewee to agree with them, which he does wholeheartedly.
Here’s the thing; Jack might not have done a journalist’s job during the interview, but Gibson, who was recently revealed as the mystery man who coughed up £5 million to get through until Christmas, was too honest for his own good.
We’re not dealing with a mastermind here folks. When he spoke about the financial position of the organisation he’s just sunk a large sum of money into he admitted, with a breath-taking insouciance that he has no idea what Sevco’s finances actually look like.
If I had not read it for myself I would not have believed it.
“With the regards to … the current situation, I am not close to the numbers but it is public information that they lost a wee bit of money last season, but they never sold anyone. The Scottish model is that you have to sell a couple of players to the Premier League to make some money, and hopefully you win domestic trophies along the road and get a run in Europe,” he said.
That first segment does actually sound like he gets it … that the club needed to sell and didn’t.
There appears to be an underlying understanding of the dynamics at play.
He seems to have understood that his “investment” was sought to plug a finance gap.
The thing is, he’s basing this understanding on numbers that are now two years old; the last period of time we have accounts to examine. This would be bad enough for someone to be “investing” based on, but he then he follows it up with a truly unbelievable statement.
“I am not close to the numbers, but (they) should be having a good year financially for the 19/20 and 20/21 season. They haven’t sold anyone yet but they had a decent run in Europe and the season tickets were sold out in days, the full allocation of season tickets are gone.”
There is not one single person who believes financial figures for season 19/20 are anything other than disastrous.
That’s why they didn’t even publish interim half yearly accounts and, of course, the global health emergency would have landed after them with savage consequences for the end of the season figures. Our own numbers are said to be awful … God alone knows how anyone at Sevco feels about their impending publication of theirs.
And if the results of the 19/20 season are expected to be bad, then the figures for the current campaign are likely to be catastrophic.
He mentions Europe, and he right in that Sevco has gotten through to the Europa League Groups, but last season they had more than a half dozen home games in that competition in front of full houses; this season they will not have the benefit of one single penny in gate receipts for those matches, which is an enormous loss of revenue in itself.
To cap that, the club spent a fortune in the transfer window, much of it on the expectation that they would sell at least one key earner for big money and it did not happen.
Sevco’s “financial model” is a joke.
Those looking for method in madness won’t find any; the madness is all there is.
This guy is the absolute epitome of the “emotional investor”. In bookmaking circles they have another name for his type entirely of course; a “mug punter”, someone who places his bets based on nonsense like the colour of the jockey’s livery.
There’s a saying for Peepul like this; “a fool and his money are soon parted” and when Jack asked him if he was ready to “invest” more, he said he probably would.
He would be as well to wipe his arse with fifty pound notes.
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