A Celtic supporting journalist has come under fire for a damning Forbes article on the current financial situation at Rangers.
Pointing to the timing of the release, Mike Meehall Wood discusses everything from Rangers losing money, to how unsellable the club’s playing assets are and the “worrying stuff” surrounding Rangers’ latest annual report in the piece.
For all the bravado of the article, somewhere in the schadenfreude of 2012 and Wood’s blind allegiance to Celtic, he gets several things very wide of the mark.
The starkest, and forked in somewhere down the bottom of the page, concerns that stuff about Rangers’ playing staff.
The likes of Alfredo Morelos could well command a record transfer fee in Scotland, even in January, and even if Steven Gerrard says that it’s not happening [BT Sport].
Just because you don’t like Morelos or Rangers, it’s not reason enough to undervalue the club’s assets. This is infantile stuff.
According to Wood, the man who has one domestic yellow card this season is apparently “seen as toxic due to his horrendous disciplinary record”.
Yes, he conveniently forgot to mention the sparkling disciplinary record this season.
Wood also conveniently forgets to mention full internationals Niko Katic, Borna Barisic, Filip Helander, Glen Kamara and Joe Aribo in any discussion on playing squad assets and gets a dig into club captain James Tavernier too.
Sutured throughout the lambasting article – which is masquerading as normal financial journalism whilst being more akin to an excitable Celtic blog – there’s this desperate fawning over how brilliant Celtic are on the pitch and off it.
Yawn.
It’s also a serious stretch and a bit desperate to claim Rangers “designed to hide them [the reports] from the media”. They didn’t do a very good job then, did they?
You can understand the link to the annual report’s release during a match last season, but even the biggest green-tinted maniac could surely admit it’s a remarkably tenuous one.
Then there’s the talk of the £11m+ loss without much context. Wood leaves out that around £5m was spent bringing Ibrox and the Hummel Training Centre after years of neglect from previous regimes and the £3.6m cost of the ongoing legal fight with Mike Ashley – legacy issues to the tune of £8.6m which have dramatically affected the final total.
Whilst there may well be genuine questions to be asked about Rangers’ financial situation, Meehall’s credibility takes a serious bashing when he omits information or contorts facts to suit this desperate Admin 2.0 rhetoric.
Rangers chairman Dave King has always been honest about the investment it will take for Rangers to challenge Celtic again [Evening Times]. The club is within reach of doing so.
As for the losses, yes, there’s risk involved in growing Rangers to challenge Celtic again, but I’m more inclined to trust Dave King and those bankrolling the club than a “journalist” with a clear agenda.
Wood doesn’t think Rangers are going bust again, like many other crazed Celtic bloggers, he hopes they are.
And there’s a considerable difference between the two that many of our rival fans cannot seem to grasp.