Last night we did our podcast, and we covered, as always, the shenanigans across the street and the utter insanity of some of the conversations surrounding that club.
We talked a lot about the management, a lot about the takeover, but we also talked about the likelihood that next season’s team across the city is going to bear a striking resemblance to the one that’s playing there right now. To me, that seems like a perfectly obvious conclusion to draw.
I referenced Tom English for his assertion a couple of weeks ago that a lot of players would be leaving the Ibrox club. I could have referenced a story I saw later, where one of their websites was trying to decide what to do about Igamane in the summer — whether to sell him for big money or not — when there’s no big money offer for him. But the one that kept coming to mind was this assertion that they need six or seven players, which The Village Idiot was banging on about last night too.
Talk about people who are deeply delusional.
There is no way that team is going to be markedly different from the one currently playing there. As I said last night on the podcast, there simply aren’t enough clubs out there who’ll be interested in buying footballers stamped with the word “loser”. And that is how these people are known.
In the Spurs piece I wrote recently, I said that isn’t a club people sign for if their ambition is to win things — and Ibrox is getting a little bit like that now. They have one title in 14 years. All this stuff where Ferguson and others try to invoke the “great name” of Rangers… whatever they call themselves, that’s one title in 14 years, guys. That’s the record. And there’s no getting away from it.
So the club at Ibrox is not known for attracting winners anymore — and if you can’t attract winners, then clubs who are looking for winners aren’t going to sign your players either.
There will come a day at that club when a new manager gets no money to spend at all. When he’s drafted in and told, “Listen, that’s an expensively assembled squad. Your first job is to go in there and see what you can do with them. If you still can’t get results, we’ll review the situation in January or next summer. But before you get a penny, you work with what you’ve got.”
Football really is a weird industry — the one industry where people just repeat the same patterns and the same mistakes over and over again in the hope of getting a different outcome. How many years have we been hearing now that the Ibrox club needs a full summer rebuild? It’s every season!
At what point do they say “enough is enough”?
All the talk about needing new investment — that’s all it’s ever been about. Who’s going to come in and fund the next rebuild? What if no one’s interested in funding the next rebuild? What if finally that club just has to get by on what it makes? Where the transfer budget will be decided on who they can sell.
And who can they sell? Who are the realistic options who are going to attract big-money deals? It’s difficult, isn’t it? You look at their squad and you don’t see very many obvious candidates. None of the new signings look up to it, and they were hyped up to the max. We were told they were exactly the guys who were going to come in and do the job. That they’d be the ones to watch out for.
You have Nsiala at centre-back who looks useless. You have Igamane, who Barry Ferguson dropped in favour of Dessers. You have Jefte, the “left-back genius”, who was playing in Cyprus a year ago and doesn’t look like he’s progressed much since then.
And outside of them, who? Nico Raskin’s one good game in ten? Is there anyone else in that squad who stands out to you? Is there anyone there you can automatically see attracting a big-money offer?
They brought in £800,000 from sales last summer — and lied about it to their own supporters, and got caught because the figure was in the AGM results. Most of us paying attention knew some of the numbers the media were throwing around were hocus-pocus, phoney. The fee for Connor Goldson, for example, was highly suspect right from the start. Goldson was supposed to have gone for £2 million, but if you looked at the history of the club he signed for, their record signing cost less than half of that. So on reading that story, I knew it was ridiculous.
But those are the kind of fees they can expect for players this coming summer. They’re not going to command massive sums — not for anybody in that team. So even if they are able to move players on, what they bring in will be minuscule.
And if they don’t sell a bunch of those footballers, then all they’ll do with any new signings is pad the wage bill, pad the football budget, and put it within touching distance of the kind of number that trips the wires at UEFA.
Whoever the next Ibrox boss is, the guts of his squad is already at the club right now. All six or seven signings will do is pad out a dire team and put them on the brink of breaching financial sustainability regulations. The only way they’re going to get that number of signings is if they get rid of that number of players — and everyone in our media wants that to sound easy. But how easy actually is it?
It hasn’t proved easy up until now. It’s not just wanting these guys off the wage bill — you have to find people willing to put them on their wage bill, and my suspicion is that a lot of these guys are on much more money than is sensible to pay them.
Any Ibrox manager who has to try and make something out of that abysmal squad is on a loser. And that’s why all the talk of a Marco Rose or whomever is fanciful rubbish. They need someone who can work on a budget. They need someone who has a record of improving the players he inherits.
And when it comes to signings, they’re also going to need someone, as I said last night, who’s willing to work in a data-driven system rather than one that relies on good old-fashioned scouting.
Keith Jackson and the handful of others in the media who are wondering if the takeover is going to make any meaningful difference next season are right to be concerned. Because so much of what that club is looking at in the next 12 months will resemble the last 12 months — and that starts with the playing squad, which I very much doubt is going to change much at all.
That is a club mired in chaos.
And I’ll tell you — interested parties can still walk away. And they should.
James, you say that interested parties should walk away, but surely it is too late for that, for if they have been buying up shares, then surely it would cost them too much just to walk away. They may not yet have purchased enough shares to have gotten a controlling interest but they must surely keep pushing for that now that they are committed. You said yourself that the consortium involved would likely transfer the debt incurred buying the shares over to the club itself, to do that they will need to go all in with the share purchase in order to get the controlling power to do that. I don’t know enough about these things to be sure of anything, but just going by what I have read so far I am making, what I consider to be, a logical assumption. The takeover will, in my opinion, go ahead in some form or other.
You dont even have to own shares, you can borrow them and still trade them. Thats why stock excchanges are full of crooks!. This lot will simply have a commitment to buy at the appropriate time unless they build up a stake which triggers a full on take out of all shares. The issue here is that this inc does not trade on the stock exchange which i imagine makes things “furry” and a godsend for king et al.
But what would i know
Spot on, there is probably a provisional / handshakes (sic) agreement to buy from several shareholders IF they can get the magic number of 51% subject to their deep dive ‘due diligence’. They won’t have spent a penny until that’s done.
Bennet & Park won’t sell unless they get the price per share they want PLUS their £22 million in loans paid back in full.
Expect more twists and deflections.
Personally, I think the Americans would be mad if they went ahead unless they plan to offload the purchase price & debt repayment onto the Club’s Books. Then pillage the assets, Murray Park, New Edmiston House for example but to do that they need at least 75% and that means either getting a lot of individual ‘ Billy’s’ to part with their 10/20 shares, family heirlooms’ and that is too costly and unpredictable or they flood the zone with a new share issue which they buy up in full allowing them to outvote every other shareholder. They could spend a fortune and reach 70 odd % which is useless for them.
I think it will collapse or become a minor share acquisition as a temporary measure to get their foot in the door and hope to influence the cost cutting and restructuring necessary to achieve profitability.
There will be no Magic Money Tree War Chest this or next summer. No matter what happens.
I wouldn’t know the slightest thing about how ‘shares’ in football work…
Especially at Liebrox as well more than anywhere else –
We will need to be on Red (Bull) alert for any shit cheating for sure !
Plus ca change.
Remember back to the breedman? He was going to revolutionise things at ibrox by using analytics to guide his signings, just as he had at Brentford (?) You won’t need a close analysis to find out how that worked out. He found out he had been sacked by reading the ticker tape along the foot of the Sky Sports News bulletin.
Cold headed, unemotional, data driven analyis and decision making and the Bears. A marriage made in hell.
James, for me I think we all could be missing something. The consortium cannot be mugs, they may see something we do not or could they have things moving that we cannot see. Leeds operate in a different field from our city rivals, but let’s say the consortium are preparing sponsorship deals, Red Bull would be keen to come in to Scottish football, stadium renaming etc. once they have control changing the game plan will be easy. The media and the SFA/SPFL will give them what they want. The big question is, can we compete.
If we need to sell our soul to the devil to keep ahead of them then so be itvas farcas I’m concerned…
But it’ll need to happen first and nobody on Celtic forums have said it’s actually going to !
For fuck sake – Mornings…
If we need to sell our soul to the devil to keep ahead of them then so be IT AS FAR AS I’m concerned and not the mumble jumble you read above of itvas farcas !
It’s great fun pointing out all the problems over there and their player trading model is another one. £800k for all those players last year is a disgrace when you consider what they paid for them, the wages they were on and the time left on the contracts. It was a clear example that they couldn’t afford to turn down any offer but then they baffled everyone by signing Behrami, who’s no better than what they shipped out but he’s dearer!
This summer is the same, I don’t think their players are good enough anyway but they never get the best out of any of them to be able to sell them on. Behrami, Hagi, Lawrence, Matondo, are all probably better than they’ve looked for the tribute act but they’ll not get a decent return on any of them if they can move them at all, so that means trying to sell guys that get a game. Dessers, Igmane, Raskin, Jefte, Diomande, Yilmaz, Butland, the only realistic hope of a sale there is Raskin and Diomande who are both internationals and at a good age. I’d be amazed if that offset the predicted loss for the season of £25m and that’s before buying anyone.