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You have to laugh at Scottish football and its so-called financial experts. Recently I read a piece by Neil Plumley, a supposed football finance expert in the same vein as our good friend Kieran Maguire. He talks just as much nonsense.
I sometimes wonder where they find these guys and what their qualifications are to call themselves football finance experts.
There are people who really understand football financing. You can tell who they are because they can actually read a balance sheet and accurately report what it says. That excludes almost everyone in our mainstream media, including many of these self-proclaimed gurus.
Of course, if you want to call yourself an expert in football finance, you need to understand at least the basics, such as the bottom line: the main number that shows whether a club or company has made a profit or a loss. This is one of the most basic and straightforward parts of accounting, yet these so-called experts act like it’s rocket science.
The Ibrox club is in a desperate race to cut costs to the bone – we all know that. They recently admitted it during their General Meeting. They shared that freely with their own fans. They are trying to reduce their debts, get the wage bill under control and find a smarter way to deal with transfer expenses. Last year the numbers were a car crash, and this year it looks like they will be even worse.
So when I recently read Plumley’s piece claiming that Ibrox could afford to spend £4m on Lennon Miller in the January window, I was reminded of a recent Ibrox News article which suggested that this might be the right time for Morgan to take action. Whittaker.
Whittaker, who she snubbed twice, would cost an eight-figure sum. But in the context of where they stand financially, both suggestions are equally ridiculous.
If you ignore profit and loss figures, ignore UEFA’s financial sustainability rules and pretend £17m of debt doesn’t exist – along with directors fed up with bearing those costs – you can’t just so aim for the stars. With the club facing increasing challenges this season and perhaps even having to sack a manager before January, articles about spending £4m sound as ridiculous as you can get, and so I find an article in the fan media suggesting to spend £10 million on a player has no less credibility than a so-called financial expert claiming he can spend £4 million.
The reality at Ibrox borders on catastrophic. Their own directors made no attempt to hide this during the AGM. It amazes me how many people, both within and outside of their support base, don’t seem to understand the magnitude of the problems. You would think that someone whose livelihood depends on understanding money could put two and two together and understand this.
I’m not sure whose interests this nonsense serves. All it does is raise the expectations of Ibrox fans, giving them the impression that a spending spree is imminent. If that doesn’t work, it will cause even bigger problems for the club. And yet these so-called financial experts continue to push crazy interpretations of the accounts.
The Ibrox board may have tried to hide some of the finer details, but they recently set out the issues they face. They knew it was better to temper expectations and tell the truth. When asked about Vaclav Cerny, Clement actually said outright that with a fee of £6.5m they can’t afford to keep him at the club. Miller would cost less, but not enough to matter. We all know they have to pull some sort of rabbit out of the hat in January to give their fans hope, but it won’t be a £4million rabbit and although they have talked about signing younger players, this is too rich for them blood.
The Ibrox hierarchy cannot afford for their fans to continue to listen to these ‘experts’ and live in a fantasy. It helps no one – not the club, not its position, and not the so-called experts themselves. If the money isn’t there and the spending isn’t happening, what do they think comes next? The blame game does. And it will be addressed to them.
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