Today, a Scottish clickbait mainstream media site has posted a piece on how the Ibrox club has struck a “peace deal” with the organisers of the Australian tour event which they pulled out of last season.
The AngeBall Tour, which saw Celtic head out there as champions was due to have the hapless Ibrox club as our support act, but when they tried to market the deceased Old Firm “brand” Celtic put its foot down and dummies were launched out of prams.
When it became clear to them that it was us, not them, who were the centrepiece of the competition, and when their fans exploded with apoplexy that their club should be considered an afterthought, they withdrew, leaving £4 million on the table and facing sanctions of that much again as the organisers threatened to drag them through the courts.
If, therefore, you find the phrasing being used here a little odd – “a peace deal” – then you’re not alone. Most people call that an “out of court settlement” and since this is being spun as a victory for the Ibrox club “to avoid £1.6 million in legal costs”, you can be sure that they would have paid almost as much to get out from under those sanctions.
So what’s with these reports today that suddenly both parties are all chummy?
They are now “official tour partners.” Really?
Why do I laugh reading the way the media has spun this on Ibrox’s behalf?
This was a cast-iron stonewall case the organsiers had here, and if Ibrox is spinning it like this then you just know the truth is nowhere near as rosy.
Ibrox’s version of this is as vague as a Boris Johnson promise; over the next three years they will get “opportunities” to play in lucrative friendlies.
But lucrative for who?
The report doesn’t say but if you were owed money by these people and you had the ability to make them jump through some hoops wouldn’t you do it? The only people who will make money from Ibrox coming to heel and playing in those “lucrative” games are the organisers.
It’s one way to make your money back without court cases, right? And it’s one way for Ibrox to slither out from under this without paying through the nose for it.
When you add that to the cost of actually not playing the games … what a disaster the whole affair has turned into for their club, yet when they backed out of the deal our media bizarrely credited it as a masterstroke because they had satisfied their most rabid supporters.
I wrote earlier about the blowback from just such a decision, the one to restrict our support at their ground to a mere 700.
That continues to generate fallout covering their club as well as ours … they were never going to get away with so openly and blatantly breaching a contract in the way they did in the Australian case, but our press hailed it as some kind of piece of strategic brilliance.
Yet their cash-strapped club left money, significant money, by their current CEO’s own admission more money they get for finishing second in the SPFL, on the table when they walked away from that event and now more of it has been pissed against the wall.
Peace deal. God almighty.
They’ve been forced into a humiliating and costly climb-down to save themselves being further embarrassed in court.
They went to the organisers, cap in hand, and pleaded to be let off with a slap on the wrist and they’ve done so deal wherein the Ibrox club can “work off the debt.”
Cynical? Just clued in from long experience of just this sort of nonsense.
How do we know that, and that this is just spin in the papers today?
We know it because they told these same outlets that they had settled the matter with Mike Ashley some years back and that turned out to be a barefaced lie.
They have no qualms about spinning and obfuscating and spreading disinformation, especially to a media which so readily repeats every word.
The shamelessness of that club is matched only by the utter cowardice of the media which is supposed to cover them properly.