Today, one of the worst kept secrets in Ibrox was confirmed to their fans; the era of directors funding the club out of their own pockets by trading cold hard cash for increasingly worthless shares is at an end.
The next time a director puts his hand in his pockets to fund the mad fantasises of Ibrox fans, or to give The Mooch some extra cash that money will need to be repaid, on a timely schedule, and at a rate of interest currently running at 6%.
This was the stark revelation today from one of their directors, John Bennett, who has revealed that his own current loan to the club still stands at £8 million and that is accruing interest every single day. And he said something else that was equally informative.
Bennett confirmed that he has made available a £10 million overdraft facility, which the club is expected to start drawing down from February, and it will be charged at 5% interest.
Isn’t that curious for a club which has sold key players and qualified for the Champions League already in this campaign? How can it be that they are talking openly about tapping into an overdraft? Why isn’t there enough money to get through the season without requiring that sort of additional funding? What will UEFA make of all this?
Obviously, this is part of a pattern which you can already see emerging and which is found in the comments from Ross Wilson and The Mooch himself, praising the recruitment policies and the so-called strength of the Ibrox squad.
Tonight some of their fan-sites are writing exactly the same sort of stuff; appeals to the rest of their fan-base to get behind the new “vision” which more and more sounds like it will have to be constructed on an austerity budget in spite of all the positive spin.
For all the hype, that club is not in a good place.
If they couldn’t post a profit on the back of a run to a European final and they need director loans – not equity confetti but loans – to keep the lights on this season, when that should be easy on the back of player sales and Champions League wonga, then you have to wonder if they ever can or ever will.
And that’s not sustainable. Eventually, even the interest will give you a heart attack.
They are doomed…and I couldn’t be happier at the thought.
As they say SarfLandin….Gawdin Bennett…..
lets put up a big statue for the orange bus driver and get squinty dave to boot dougie parks bawz !!! p.s. and pay no cunt .
I wouldn’t get too worked up about their financial state, it’s been ongoing since their rebirth and they always manage to survive somehow. Granted it weakens them, so we can still take heart from that, and of course they are still there to be scorned and laughed at on a continual basis.
They’re not going to collapse as an organisation. But they’re clearly in financial trouble. It strikes me that they spent big, on director loans and worthless share issues, in order to get success a couple of seasons back. They bet the house and to be fair, it worked. Those chickens have now come home and, again, to be fair, they have some money to make people whole again. But they don’t have money to plough into the first team squad at the same time. In terms of how this relates to the first team, their new manager has to take the second best squad in the country and get them back to comfortably seeing off the remaining ten teams in the league. It is possible, indeed likely, that he will do that. Then they make the games against Celtic cup finals and take their chances. But, there is no medium-term prospect of them competing with Celtic financially. From this point this season (admittedly, with almost twice as many fixtures to come as have already been played), Celtic has EVERY advantage, and so should exploit that.
They’ve got nothing to worry about with pistol Pete back on board.
Quite a new business to be liquidated KARMA,poor fans,boo hoo.