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Dave King’s incredible Champions League short cut

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Image for Dave King’s incredible Champions League short cut

Dave King Dave King believes that he can bring Champions League football to Ibrox for £30m!

The bargain assessment was given to the club website today as the man labelled a glib and shameless liar by a South African judge takes control after being granted approval by the SFA.

Sevco finished the current season as the 15th best team in Scotland with a share issue in September for £3m and crisis loans of £6.5m needed to keep the lights on to complete the campaign.

In their last accounts, which were produced before auditors Deloitte walked away, the club made a loss of £8.6m in the period till 30 June 2014, running costs came to £33.2m.

King has made his calculations based on the shortfall between income and expenditure and will put up 50% of the money needed to reach the Champions League.

While Financial Fare Play seems optional in Scotland UEFA now have a strict series of conditions to apply for any club licensed to play in their competitions- unlike in 2011 when Rangers (IL) were nominated by the SFA despite having a £6m tax bill outstanding. That bill was never paid to Her Majestey’s Revenue and Customs.

Speaking to the in-house television channel Mr King claimed: “The level of investment required to get us there is not a known factor, we can’t be sure of that. By way of example, if Rangers went to the Premiership and didn’t come second in the first season and came third or fourth.

You would have a second season without Europa League income and my view is that whether it is one season or whether it is two seasons, we are here to see it through to the end.

If we were to miss a year in the Premiership then it could be up to 37 or 40. If things go really well and we can change the commercial relationships then that might go down to 25, but it’s certainly tens of millions and it is not a finite amount of money.

If Rangers don’t do it in year two or three then we aren’t going to stop – we will go for year four. We are determined to get there and get the club back to where it has to be.

I think that the budget will be very different if we are in the Premiership or not – certainly the income changes and the quality of the opposition changes. 

One way or another, we are going to have to be very fluid in terms of the quantum and the timing of the investment.

We have to be flexible and it’s why I think it’s been very important to have investors who are coming in with that level of flexibility. We are not sitting down and saying this is our financial plan and that we’ll have to either make it or break on that plan, we will have to be flexible enough to say that the end game is to get Rangers back to where I suggested we have to be if we can do what it takes to get there.

Looking at his own investment, the man that sat as a director to Craig Whyte, added: “The arrangement that I still have with the existing board of directors, assuming that no new ones come in, is that I will provide 50% of what we are finding is required and the others will provide 50% between them.

We may be fortunate to get other investors to come in meaning it might change in the meantime, but that is the commitment as we are sitting here today.”

In contrast to the pitiful Sevco income of £25m, Celtic have averaged income of £60m a year over the last three seasons with the money coming from commercial and sponsorship deals, transfer fees and European football as well as ticket money.

Sevco’s commercial and sponsorship deals are in the hands of Sports Direct, the £800,000 transfer fee for Lewis MacLeod is the record transfer fee the club has received while reaching the final of the Ramsdens Cup in 2014 generated around £60,000- enough to pay a gardener for three and a half weeks. Should Sevco ever play in a Uefa competition they will be unseeded in every qualifying round.

It’s not expected that shares in the Ibrox club will be appearing on an exchange any time soon, ruling out another share issue. Mr King has no plans to repay the £5m owed to Sports Direct which is likely to result in an arrest of any remaining assets if it is not repaid within a fortnight.

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