Glasgow World Hits Rock Bottom With Mad Claim About Unwanted Ibrox Player.

Regular readers will be well aware that there are a handful of publications which I believe don’t just plumb the depths but which actually are the depths. One of them is Football Insider. That’s rock bottom.

There is no worse one and I cannot imagine that there could be.

Their “information” should all be filed under fiction.

It has the stupidest people writing on its books, and for the sake of the site I hope it isn’t paying them for their contributions.

That so much of the media re-publishes their rubbish astonishes me, as most of the hacks who puts their names to the articles have to know that’s all it is. Some of them don’t care. One of the worst is Ben Banks, and the publication he “writes” for; Glasgow World.

As a movie lover, I have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of those movies that are so bad that they become stuck in the public consciousness and elevated to the level of “cult classic” status. Ed Wood brought the world the original “so-bad-its-good” masterpiece – if we can use that word – Plan 9 From Outer Space.

I’ve written here too about The Room, often touted as the worst film ever made but which, like Ed Wood’s story, has spawned a book and a movie – The Disaster Artist, which everyone should track down and watch or read; you won’t regret it.

There are lot of “works” from those who make a living in Scottish sports “journalism” which are so awful that they reach a place where they gain some notoriety; Jim Traynor and “succulent lamb”, Keith Jackson’s “Motherwell born billionaire” and so forth.

But sometimes an article is just bad. Sometimes what’s within the tent isn’t even the circus, it’s the freak show.

And so, it is today with Banks latest disaster-piece, entitled “Ibrox star slapped with record-breaking transfer tag as value soars astronomically amid exit speculation”.

I looked at that headline and knew in an instant what the article was about, although I shook my head in disbelief at it. I thought “they aren’t running this crap, are they?” But I knew they were.

But more than just running it is the way that it is being run.

Let me start from the obvious; this is an article about Connor Goldson. The second you read that you should be like, “His value has soared astronomically?”

From what starting point to where, you might ask next?

If I went into a shop to buy a packet of Space Raiders and they tried to charge me 50p for them I would say that the price had soared astronomically; to me the 10p packet of crisps was a good reflection of a no-frills product. But I wouldn’t pay more than 20p for them.

The idea that Goldson has some “value” that has soared is ludicrous. Value is a representation of what something is worth. The price is what someone would have to pay. Connor Goldson’s “value” is less than £2 million. I don’t believe for a second that anyone will pay much more.

He’s in his 30’s, he’s a failed Ibrox player. The complete absence of any interest in him beyond reports linking him to Birmingham reveals that.

So what valuation are they referring to? Brace yourselves.

£25-30 million. For Connor Goldson.

Which Ben Banks appears to be taking entirely seriously. Note the headline again. Look at the words he has allowed to go over his name. Price tag. Transfer value. That’s what you call “soaring astronomically.” From a standing start to a number higher than Celtic might get for Matt O’Riley.

This is obviously absolutely ridiculous.

So where in God’s name has this garbage come from?

Banks has actually taken it from Football Insider, and that ranting clown they have on there, Keith Wyness.

He threw that number out there the other day, a completely thoughtless piece of speculation from someone wired to the moon.

I laughed at that when I read it.

So when you are borrowing from that publication, when you are quoting even its most hysterical rubbish, you have left the path not only of sanity but even the merest pretence that you care about quality content.

Banks out to be mortified when he looks at stories like this, because it’s not even the standard of “journalism” you get on a student paper.

If he had come up with it on its own it might one day have stood the test of time along with those other masterworks of pro-Ibrox fan-boy fantasy which I mentioned earlier.

But he nicked that from a source which nobody takes even remotely seriously.

And if you are getting your ideas from there … what does that say for your own limited skill-set?

Connor Goldson worth £30 million? Christ sake.

Ibrox Noise wouldn’t publish that, although it didn’t surprise me in the slightest to see that Football Insider was willing to. That’s not even bad. That stinks like a fish left under a radiator. That heaps disrepute on any outlet which runs it.

And yeah, it’s blackly amusing to those of us who live in the real world, and exposes our media as a joke and an embarrassment.

Plan 9 was regarded as an embarrassment, and so was The Room.

You know why those films endure? They were each crafted by one so-crazy-he-might-be-a-genius individual who loved them, who knew what he wanted to do with them and who worked tireless to bring that vision to life. They weren’t just thrown together during a lunchbreak … and that gives them a kind of beauty, a kind of mad energy, a kind of credibility.

If Banks thought about his cut-and-paste garbage for longer than 20 seconds that was too long.

These people are wretched. They are a blight on our media landscape.