Today, The Daily Record Hotline headline reaches new heights of absurdity.
I comment on this quite a lot, as you all know. Those headlines are occasionally very revealing of the mentality Scottish football fans have to suffer. Today is no exception. The headline is truly bonkers, truly deranged, truly the sort that makes you go “Eah? What?”
The subject matter is the way Sevco is being “held to ransom” by other SPL teams. Because those teams refuse to simply roll over and give them players on the cheap.
“Rangers shouldn’t feed Scottish clubs money after being held to ransom over past difficulties” is what the latest stupid headline reads.
The logic of it is just what you would expect from these self-entitled goons; they are furious that other clubs are making them pay market value at a time when they are skint, and normally I would say that a Record Hotline headline isn’t representative of anybody but the bottom 1% on the IQ chart … but I happen to know that this particular idea is very prevalent amongst Sevco’s supporters.
The call in question, when read in full, says thus:
““It’s as clear as the nose on your face that Scottish clubs do not wish to business with Rangers by hiking up prices for bang-average players. Meanwhile Celtic’s value for a similar standard of player are accepted without quibble. My advice to Rangers would be to ignore all players based in Scotland. Do not feed any money into clubs who are holding you to ransom because of past difficulties. I believe they have all clubbed together to brow beat Rangers.”
Forget for a minute all these references to a dead club; let’s concentrate on the steak and not on the peas. This point is no less barmy for removing Norman Bates FC from the equation.
First, if these players are “bang average” what’s all the strop about? Surely the question should be why their own club wants to sign them in the first place. The point about us getting a similar standard is ridiculous. Maybe this goon missed that we paid over £1 million for Hayes last year. Maybe this clown doesn’t know we’re being quoted £1.5 for a Dundee defender. Or perhaps it’s a reference to Lewis Morgan; perhaps the fact we loaned him back to his club is part of why that deal was so easy to get over the line.
The idea that Sevco should “ignore all players left in Scotland” is hilarious; clubs elsewhere are going to prove no easier to deal with, as Brighton have already shown. No club will accept the paltry terms being offered by the board of their basket case business.
But it’s this idea of starving other Scottish clubs of money which comes up over and over and over again on their forums. As you guys will know, my old man recently posted on this site about how he, personally, will never give money to another club in Scotland but his own … he has good reasons for that. He’s given enough to the clubs which allowed the cheating at Ibrox to go unpunished. Celtic fans, and indeed fans of other sides, are furious about it.
Sevco fans still think they were hard done by. They still think Scottish football did something unspeakable to Rangers, when the truth is that club made its own bed. Nobody “forced” them to start at the bottom: I don’t know how many times I have to write this. There was no provision in the SFA or SPL constitutions for “relegating” a club down three divisions because of debt … it would not have been upheld by UEFA or CAS or any other body.
Had Charles Green believed he had a leg to stand on, legally, he would have pursued that issue to the fullest extent. Why didn’t he? Because it would have been laughed out of the room. It was a bust. There was no foundation whatsoever to the claim.
Sevco was a new club. They had to apply for a new license. They had to apply for league membership. They had to start at the bottom where all new clubs start. This is very simple stuff, very uncomplicated, very easy to grasp when you’re not a halfwit.
There was no “grand conspiracy”. Clubs did not act out of hate. It’s a joke. The idea is ludicrous and only a complete moron could believe it. The idea that there exists, today, in Scottish football, some multi-club anti-Sevco cabal … it doesn’t stand up to the remotest scrutiny.
Ironically, Sevco fans do have something to be angry with the clubs for, but it’s not that which they’ve expended such energy and hate on. It was the clubs themselves who let the SFA bury the inquiry that would have got them answers about everything that went on then. But that inquiry was the brainchild of Celtic, it was about marshalling all that anti-Sevco hate and turning it into a campaign for title stripping, or so they believe.
But that campaign failed because the rest of the teams didn’t back it. The same teams this eejit and so many others think have “clubbed together” to drive up transfer prices on them and to keep them in a state of permanent suffering. The disconnect is profound.
I have long since ceased to wonder how they can view the world in this skewed way. Their wee confused brains just can’t seem to make the connection.
They just can’t seem to get it straight.