This is a meant to be a bigger article; there’s a much bigger issue at play here than just the way the media is covering the latest round of equity confetti at Ibrox.
There needs to be a discussion as to how it fits into the wider arc of what that club is doing – and being allowed to do.
It needs to be part of a conversation about how football clubs die.
But for the moment I want to focus on what might seem like a pedantic point; the way the media has chosen, again, to use the word “investment” in all the articles posted in the media about this matter so far.
Because, let’s be honest, that’s not what this is.
All Stuart Gibson has done here is bought a £4 million copy of the Big Issue.
That’s what we’re talking about.
He thinks he’s got his hands on some shares and that they will retain their value; actually, he might as well have given the money to charity because it will certainly not fulfil the purposes usually associated with investing.
For openers, short of a share issue which gets him his money back, there’s no return to be made here.
Gibson might as well have taken the cash into the back garden and set it aflame. When this website did an article earlier in the week on this, there wasn’t speculation about who had taken up the shares because it couldn’t matter less.
This is Sevco flogging off more of the family silver to keep on the lights.
Chris Jack wins the prize for the most ridiculous spin on this so far; “His significant Ibrox investment comes as George Taylor, Douglas Park and George Letham also put more money into their boyhood heroes to further strengthen Rangers’ financial position.”
Yeah. Of course. In the same way that all those emergency funds that Nick Leeson was getting from Barings London were “strengthening the financial position” of their Far Eastern trading operation. That, if you’ll remember, was the one that took down the whole bank.
There is no “strength” to Sevco’s financial position; this is a club which is floundering.
Sevco is a drowning man who’s just caught a rubber ring.
That they had to secure this cash at all is the proof that everything we’ve been saying is spot on; that club needs money right now like a vampire needs blood and they don’t care where they get it from.
The media’s coverage of this is so fundamentally dishonest … this isn’t an investment, it’s emergency funding to keep on the lights.
If our media had a shred of bottle, or were possessed of people with the slightest bit of professional pride, they’d write it that way.
Instead, we get the usual claptrap as if this was the normal way football clubs are run.
This is the fifth team in the last three years that Sevco has had to convert either cash or loans into equity; that is about as unsustainable as it gets.
If the media would tell it like is we might get something approaching a proper examination of the issues at play here, like the need for financial fair play in Scotland, the need for greater scrutiny of how clubs are funded and by whom.