Nowadays there is little realistic prospect of significantly increased revenue. TV money is down, sponsorship and corporate expenditure has fallen off a cliff, fans are under pressure and our retail third party, JJB, are teetering on the brink. There’s nothing on the horizon to be optimistic about. So our debt is real debt – capped and needing to be repaid. Just like an ordinary loan you or I would take out. They used to say that if you owed the bank £100k, you had a problem: if you owed them £25m, they had a problem. Well the turmoil in world banking means the banks have become aggressive and adept at making £25m our problem – the overdraft has been stopped dead in its tracks. No more could expenditure exceed income: because no one would finance it.
The lack of increased or even sustained revenue will not entice proper financial investment, the likes of ENIC - and emotional investment is only worthwhile if you have enough emotional money to buy out SDM. That rules out any number of millionaire bluenoses: even multimillionaire bluenoses. Imagine you had £10m – how much difference could you make to Rangers? Well giving away your entire family fortune would have a negligible effect on our world clout, ranking, status. Try explaining that to the Mrs. Its not even worth meeting SDM in a London hotel with draft documents if you have less than £100m (and that could be whittled away sharpish, no danger).
I detest the way that the concentration of money has skewed things so in favour of the EPL. Partly because I’m tasting some of our medicine – in the past we were net spenders and could mop up any decent Scottish talent and blend it with European internationalists of note. Along with Celtic we were the rest of Scotland’s ‘EPL’. Now the shoe is on the other foot and its not good for self-worth. Why would a decent strong player like Dan Cousin leave for a team like Hull and worse still, fail? Is this how Hibs fans felt about Kenny Miller in 2000? Or when Derek Riordan went to Celtic a few years later? That said I don’t feel too much guilt about being Scotland’s premier club – at least Rangers, from a gallant standing start, earned their status as a dominant club the natural way. Not even Celtic can boast that.
Barring a miracle run in this year’s CL we will probably fall further, in relative terms, behind the rest of Europe’s concentrated elite. We can barely match English Championship wages. And the champions of Scotland may not be auto entrants to the CL group stages. We have a 50/50 chance of winning our domestic league – and even if we do we may well face an unenviable task of playing a team such as a dazzling Arsenal side who could/would/should hand out a football skelping to any SPL side.
So next year, both Old Firm teams may be denied the CL group stage windfall. And if not next year, the year after. How many Aalborg, Kaunas or Sigma Olomouc’s can our coefficient bear without crumbling. Winning the SPL, while still of great one-upmanship value, may no longer translate into a cash bonanza. Perhaps both OF teams will have to cut their cloth to suit this new, downsized, world we live in. At least we have started to do this – not that I consider that a plus on our rivals, more a necessity to make up for 15 years plus of being worse than them at getting value for money. The sheer and literal folly of the ‘for every fiver Celtic spend....’ statement has come home to roost. We are close on £25m behind matching Celtic’s financial state. And while Arsenal will do us a favour next week and help cover 10% of that deficit I worry that Harry Redknapp could erode our CL windfall by alleviating an idle Celtic of one homo-erratic and very replacable skinhead midfielder. Or perhaps the more talented Irishman, Aiden McGeady.
We have a long way to go and a short time to get there(hey, what song is that?) in terms of rectifying our financial health and we have no wriggle room. Interest rates are likely to rise again in the next few months, making the cost of debt an even bigger burden. And when we’re giving away a 10,000 seat start to our foes that makes it all the harder to go toe to toe. We may have saved the payroll a few quid this coming year by decreasing a fat squad but we haven’t made much capital from transfer sales. So there’s no lumps of cash available to spend on anyone of established quality. We may get lucky with a kid or two. But what can you win with kids, eh!?
No, our situation is very straightforward – we owe the bank more than we can generate through our recent ‘income less expenditure’ model. The club was poorly structured on the promise that tomorrow we’d get that windfall. You could argue that in 2007/08 we did get that windfall. But it only kept us afloat, there wasn’t a thin dime left over. Several successive UEFA finals would help - every 36th year doesn’t.
So to avoid having our ‘house’ repossessed every single action, thought and penny has to be about getting the bank off our back. Our sugar daddy has his own financial distractions. His well has run dry. That’s why we have to support, and likely thank, Arsenal this coming week. As Tesco might say, every little helps. And it’ll be fun to jeer the baddies at the same time – the ‘merchant bankers’ that they are.