But that’s not to say all of Rangers problems are behind them. Uefa has said that Rangers and Newcastle Utd can’t play in the same competition at any time while they have a link of ownership which they now do through Mike Ashley owning 10% of Rangers.
But Mike Ashley is the one who is putting in a million quid every month or so to keep the club afloat. Without his money there would be nothing in the kitty to pay the players – which means all the season ticket money has already been spent – and we are not yet in December.
Come the end of December the club will need Ashley’s money again, and each month there is no alternative funding. Which means Ashley has total power. Without him there is no club, and each time, I guess, he is taking on more and more in the way of fixed assets and the like to guarantee his debts. He is, one might say (although of course I am not a financier and I might be quite wrong on this) getting control of the club while being told he is not allowed to have control of the club.
If Ashley doesn’t keep this up the club could go down the drain again. That would mean them losing 10 points or more and so having even greater difficulty than now of getting back into the top league in Scotland. That approach could give even more power to Ashley without him actually having to invest further and further into the club.
On the other hand it would make promotion more difficult if not impossible, but Rangers are still getting around 35,000 average for league games. One more year of that wouldn’t matter too much – because Rangers can’t expect to challenge at the top of the Premier League without new players, which they can’t afford to buy and whom they can’t at the moment afford to pay.
So what can the SFA do with such a club? Throw it out? Unlikely indeed. The fact is that the SFA is as powerless to do anything about Rangers as the FA in England is to do anything about Man C or Chelsea if they don’t like them. The clubs are more powerful now than the FA – especially in England where the FAs own funding is so ludicrously precarious and its credibility vis a vis Fifa, its world cup bid and the Sport England funding which has been withdrawn, is so low.
But administration still looks a possibility for Rangers given that the club lost another huge sum for the financial year ending in June 2014 and it seems to have no chance of doing anything other than this year on year.
At the moment, the focus is on Rangers, and we really don’t know too much about other clubs that are in financial trouble – but you can be fairly sure that they are out there. It is just that the media won’t talk about them.
The BBC invited someone from the club once known as Glasgow Rangers onto 5live over the summer to beg fans to buy season tickets, without explaining to those fans where the money was going or why it was needed. Quite a contrast their proven an deliberate deliberate disinformation pumped out about prices for tickets at AFC.
That is more then strange. But we have seen consistent and similar oddities in their coverage of AFC – the BBCs football department is an organisation whose sympatheties in their propaganda can be seen to lie with football agents as opposed to football clubs. A simple and straightforward conclusion.
In other news further evidence that Chambers or Hayden are better prospects then the older more experienced third party Mendes Mule Mangala who is only the most expensive CB ever bought in the PL. No wonder hacks or self-declared PR-Expert working for R&W Holdings (do they honestly think people can’t join the dots following the patterns easily observed with Usmanov comments?) who know more about laundries and Glaswegian tanning shops then they do about the football have been ramming their “no defenders” meme down the throat of every gullible fool
Deliberate deliberate as in genuinely genuine 😉
To be fair to Mangala he gets sent off a lot easier then some other players do
http://www.thickaccent.com/2014/11/30/vine-chelseas-diego-costa-tries-to-roundhouse-kick-sunderlands-john-oshea/
Glaswegian Tanning Shops FC, sponsored by the specialist in signing players signed from special agents? 😉
Very good read and interesting article. With the monopoly money of Chelsea and Man City, this will eventually lead to other clubs facing bankruptcy. The FA or media do not talk much about Leeds or Portsmouth. Whilst we would like Wenger to do more, we have to understand and appreciate his business acumen. We all wish for success, but not at the expense of our beloved Arsenal. The thick media, pundits and fans, are the last people to understand the economics of the club remaining solvent. I believe with the players and hangers on earning so much money, it will not be long before we see a major failure in the premier league. As usual the FA, media and the football establishment will show total disbelief, that such a situation could occur. They are all too busy like, before the financial crisis, enjoying the rich pickings, to pretend there even a possibility of such a disaster around the corner.It is no wonder that the hard core season ticket holders are disappearing, and are are being replaced by fair weather uncommitted fans. Even the top clubs such as ourselves, do not seem to openly acknowledge this trend. And Arsenal are perhaps the best example of any club trying to run a club, in a commercially and sustainable manner. COYG
@jordangooner – I always remember when a senior executive from Supporters Direct addressed the AST and opened his remarks by saying that of all the Supporters Trusts that he had visited around the country ours was the only one that he had found that didn’t want it’s football club run like Arsenal.
We’re too close, too emotional, too knee-jerk reactive to see the wood for the trees when it comes to finance and the business of running a club.
It seems ironic (and not a little mad) that in an age where we have access to more information about ourselves and other clubs there has never been a time when a greater proportion of it is ignored because it doesn’t fit into our dogmatic view of ‘the truth’.
Thank goodness the Arsenal management don’t adopt the same blinkered attitude.
insideright, how much of that is due to the constant garbage we are fed from the media? Quite a lot, I imagine.
Insideright – that is a fantastic quote. And one we should remember.
On Mangala, I remember when Man C bought him for £32mm or so he was regarded as the next big thing.
The facts are that he is 4th choice French centre back (so well behind Koscielny in the pecking order – and in fact a similar ranking to Squillaci at the time we bought him) and not that young either – coming up 24.
To me this proves the theory that all the media care about is the price tag – never mind the reality of what actually happens on the pitch.
It also goes to show just how hard it is to find a top quality centre back these days. If the guy well behind Koscielny is worth £32mm then one would probably need to double that to find someone better!
Yes – even David Luiz is not good enough for Arsenal!
Has Chelseas lead slipped to 13 points now!!..