“Rangers issue 3 million new shares as Ibrox club create cash boost opportunity” was the headline in The Daily Record last night, and Mark Pirie’s article reflected it. The press does not see anything out of the ordinary in what that lot are doing over there.
But of course, everything across there is in a state of flux and maybe the reason that’s not being reflected in the media is that the club across there is so constantly embroiled in some form of crisis that it’s taken on a kind of normalcy, like the frog sat in a pot of cold water which is slowly heated to the boil. You get frog soup with that. At Ibrox you get a dead club.
The way the media constantly ignores that reality is astonishing.
Celtic is a club which has been run properly for years, and every single time we have a fissure between the boardroom and the coaches or a player wants away or the fans are unhappy with something it generates a mountain of media negativity.
At Ibrox they can be mired in scandal and up to their nuts in debt and nobody in the press corps cracks a light. This isn’t really about the normalisation of crisis. It is about the media not wanting to acknowledge it at all. Yet it exists whatever they write.
In the last few weeks they have lost their chairman and their director of football. They have issued two separate tranches of equity confetti.
You cannot look at that and believe that things are all good over there.
They have key players walking out on freedom of contract in a few weeks and the manager claims they didn’t even offer them anything to change their minds. In the meantime, the final version of the accounts suggests that all the money they made from the sales of their players last season has already been spent … leaving very little for the manager to spend.
What does it all add up to? If even one of these things had just happened at Celtic, they would be pulling apart the meaning of it and trying to ascertain what else is going on. Yet we appear to be the only ones with a mounting sense that things over there are disintegrating prior to a summer in which the manager has demanded – and expects – to be backed.
The two guys who would have been responsible for signing off on that – Park and Wilson – have gone.
Did you hear what The Mooch said about Wilson’s departure? “I have lost a key ally.” Does that suggest there are enemies at Ibrox too? That the place is divided into camps? Who talks like that? That’s not a common phrase to use unless he feels he’s meeting resistance. Yet nobody in the press has raised the question of whether that’s a healthy place for them to be.
Celtic players can give the most innocuous statements and the media has them ripped apart looking for coded meanings. Yet The Mooch says something that seems so clear-cut and direct and nobody wants to know what it means?
Keith Jackson, who actually has a decent record of asking questions about the Ibrox board – he cares about his club, it’s what you would expect – devoted his entire column on Monday to breaking down the crisis at Hearts … he claims there are big revelations to come out at that club. How can he know that and not know what’s happening right on his doorstep?
Does he really think everything at Ibrox is hunky-dory? How come he has completely failed to see anything suspect in The Mooch’s talk about allies? We know people inside the club were working against one another not that long ago – he wrote about it. Are we really expected to believe they are all pulling in the same direction now? After two high profile departures, one of whom was closer to the manager than anyone else in the building?
He’s either very stupid or he thinks that his readers are. Whatever is going on at Hearts is not nearly as big a deal as what is evidently happening at Ibrox. All we can do from here is look for patterns and try to join the dots. He can talk to people on the inside … and there is very evidently a big, big problem over there and serious questions about the summer.
It bears repeating. There would not be this silence if any of this was happening at Celtic Park. The media would never have allowed equity confetti to become normalised; they would have called it out as a sign of a distressed company. If two key figures had walked out of the club within weeks of each other, even as people on the outside are agitating for a coup the whole of the media would be asking who was now pulling the strings over there and how close things were to civil war.
Instead we get puff-pieces on how the latest “share issue” is some kind of cash bonus.
Who exactly is a story like that for? It’s not just spin, it is flat-out dishonesty and it not fooling any of us … is it for the Ibrox fans? I’ve said before that this kind of stuff actually brings no benefit to the club, although it’s clearly spin on their behalf. It keeps fans from the full facts and an understanding of things in their proper context.
But it might also have an impact on season ticket sales, so of course that can’t happen. Nothing would plunge them deeper into whatever crisis is swallowing them up over there at the current time. This is why the press is throwing softballs.
They might as well just go back to paying Ibrox for access again. They aren’t journalists as long as they live in that club’s pocket.
I’m no financial expert, however, the allocation of so many shares to a board member dilutes the value of the ordinary shareholders (over and above a repayable loan). The likes of Club 1690 are being shafted both in value and in overall percentage. Bear in mind that secured loans are top of the list in the event of Administration. Sinking ship ? Rats.
Its all about staying in the loop.
Every one of them know that one line out of place, stray from the narrative by a vowel or two and your gone, such is the Orwellian type stranglehold that club seems to have right across the media board.
Quite why that is needs to be addressed, but they certainly seem to have dirt on just about everybody, with the 5WA at the heart of it.
It’s best to ignore it James and hopefully the media will do the same. As in 2012 they’re once again heading for a financial disaster, and like 2012 the media are ignoring all the warning signs. History is repeating itself and the media’s silence means that they are actually being unintentionally complicit in their downfall once again.
Let’s keep it a secret please and we can enjoy the Entities death just as much we did for the original one.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Sevco issue second set of shares in two weeks, and Glasgow radio station, clyde, are talking about Aberdeen red card. They’re kidding nobody on. HH
Share issue after share issue is only paying back director loans on paper, it makes the book look better for June audit by reducing outstanding debt.
However it’s no more than paper, buying at 25p does not mean they are worth 25p, reality is the value is seriously diluted with each share issue.
Directors have more money than since, eventually it comes back and bites the financial black hole its creating.
Must admit that I find the whole financial shitshow of the scum currently, very confusing and wondering how legit these confetti issues can really be.
Even more staggering with the scum on a European watch list.
Add in this FSR eufa are introducing with the key word been “sustainability” to gain a European licence to play in European competition (as I’m led to believe) when all the signs are the scum are still trading while insolvent?
Serious questions continue to arise with every confetti issue yet still to hear how the whole thing can really be classed as totally legit still?
How shocking would it really be for the scum still to be using there cheating ways still?
Administration must surely be in the reckoning yet again with liquidation number 2 to surely follow as there current assets are worth fuck all on the playing side, and a bulldozer for the shithole itself, all for the wishful thinking fast approaching
You can Liquidate a legal entity only once.
That issue of Legal Jeopardy is the proof positive
that the shower operating out of the DebtDome, as are the New Club’s Annual Accounts
giving the legally verifiable date of the Club/ Company’s date of incorporation
with a new Company Registration number, that Sevco was Incorporated as a New Business/Club in 2012.
Their own public records prove it, the Directors know it’s as do the more sentient of the fan.
They know that if they admit it Publicly the charade falls.They are Fooked.
Liquidation 2 is not possible .
Beale has gone he knows now there is no cash for the players he wants,lose the semi-final he goes there and then,win it he will see the final out probably win it and leave on some sort of a high.
Shares for confetti,5 chins offski and Jocky away to Nottingham with other nickel&dime share issues on the horizon month to month.
The new klub playing out of ibrox is now DROWNING in DEBT but their friends in media are in total denial of this,just like the last time they did with Rangers before the went to the GRAVEYARD.
Typical press corp. bowing down to their ipox masters, hell mend them when the sh1t hits the fan. All the press in Glasgow are owned by the OL at ipox, What goes round – comes round. We know your names and when sevco go bust, you can all feck off, like the club your covering for, your BUST. Even the chip shops wont take your papers!!!