The latest piece of Ibrox feel-good is ridiculous. They didn’t “make” Castore a global brand.

Yesterday, the Daily Record produced one of its Ibrox feel-good pieces. And it was pretty ridiculous. It focused on the Heaton brothers, the founders of the Castore label, and was full of the kind of guff we associate with the Scottish press and the lies they tell themselves about the Ibrox club.

Let’s start with the central premise of the piece—that without the Ibrox club’s help, Castore would still be some kind of floundering business. I mean, that is the general tone of the article, and it is rubbish. Castore was already an established brand when they entered a partnership with the Ibrox club to manufacture their kit.

There are two things to know about that. The first is that Castore were not a major manufacturer; they were a boutique brand. The thing that made them special no longer applies because they’re no longer a boutique brand. Their stuff is mass-produced in the same way as every other firm’s. And they’ve had constant complaints about the quality of their materials—including, as the report points out, from Aston Villa last season, who were furious at the state of the strips.

Nevertheless, Castore have leveraged themselves into some major deals, including Formula One and other sports, and they’ve done very well indeed. The idea that they owe this to the Ibrox club is ludicrous.

The article starts with a lie:

“Not many of the clubs Castore have made kits for are truly global – but (the Ibrox one) are one of the exceptions.”

No, they’re not one of the exceptions. And I don’t know how many times we must go over this. They’re not a global club. This lie has been pushed for decades now, and it’s been disproved and debunked repeatedly, but they still tell themselves it’s true. They still bang on about it. They still act as if it were fact when it is pure fiction. And the people who write this stuff know it. They are well aware of it.

Let’s go through this nonsense and see how many similar pieces of rubbish we can count. It’s not a long article, so it’s remarkable that there were so many mistruths and misconceptions in it.

“They’ve been talked up as a legitimate contender to Nike and Adidas,” the article says of Castore.

Not true. Not even close to being true. They had a turnover last year of £250 million. Do you know what Nike turned over? Do you know what Adidas turned over? Adidas’ global turnover was £23.6 billion. Nike’s annual turnover last year was more than twice that—at £51 billion.

Nobody in the sportswear world is talking about Castore as a genuine challenger to those gigantic global firms. Nobody. But I guess the writer of this nonsense sees some value in attaching the Ibrox club to a success story than with having facts in it.

“Castore were little-known when they took on the (Ibrox) kits back in 2020, but they’re a big deal in sportswear now.”

They made very specialised, bespoke gear. They were relatively small. But they were not “little-known” either. Within certain sports circles, they were already an established brand. They had Andy Murray as a client, for God’s sake. So, the idea that they were some struggling, down-on-their-luck firm that the Ibrox club discovered and made is absolute nonsense in every single way.

Much of the rest of the piece is one of the Heaton brothers talking up the Ibrox contract and the Ibrox club. But since they have the Ibrox club as a client and are deep into the firmament at Ibrox, what else are they going to say?

The Ibrox club would have been quite happy to get by with the fraud that they had gone over to Umbro in the coming campaign. But Castore—who are not universally popular with their supporters—still actually hold the deal, which will not surprise any regular reader of this website or some of the other Celtic fan sites.

One of the reasons for Castore’s £1 billion stock market valuation is that they are a firm approved to carry the Umbro brand. Think about it. Think about what that means. They’re a firm that has been granted permission to license someone else’s name. So they’re not even in Umbro’s league, far less Nike or Adidas.

Another reason for that £1 billion valuation is that they have just completed a round of £150 million fundraising from institutions and finance houses. But the result of that is that the brothers’ ownership in their own company has been cut to a mere 30%. So, we’ll see how that shakes out for them in the future.

I do love these little Ibrox feel-good pieces.

If the Ibrox club is not experiencing success itself, it can at least cling to the coattails of those who are. I genuinely do not know what this article is supposed to be. I don’t know who it’s supposed to make feel good—although that is obviously its aim. The Ibrox fans certainly don’t because they didn’t like Castore as a supplier. And they know that they’re going to have to wear Castore shirts for the foreseeable future, whichever label is on them. That’s not exactly got them breaking out in smiles.

They forget that they once had a shirt deal with a billionaire. But that was, of course, a merchandising and distribution agreement of a different sort. And their supporters and their assorted media friends ran that guy out of the building, and for what? To usher in an era run by a self-made tax cheat … and of course it had consequences, and a cost which they are still, in effect, counting to this day.

And of course, the fact remains that many of us do suspect that Mike Ashley is still involved in their kit deal somewhere, as a partner of the Heaton’s and their firm.

But that single word—billionaire—has a weird effect on them. They get all googly eyed as if someone’s going to throw them some scratch from the rich kids’ table. It’s not going to happen. The Ibrox club is broke. All this does is remind their fans that some of their money has put other people on Easy Street.

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