SamTeàrlachH
Well-known member
We're all used to it by now. Anyone who reads the Scottish football media during the transfer window will know that one of their most loved tropes is the 'Rangers [sic] pip Celtic to [insert any player they sign] signature'. Now, it's not as if I'm sitting here crying into my cornflakes about this stuff, but I just find it astounding. And while I'm not making light of genuine totalitarianism, this endeavour of the Scottish football media to upkeep the delusion that Sevco are beating us to signings reeks of the kind of cognitive dissonance that you find in authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Where entirely invented non-realities and superficial narratives that serve organised agendas are maintained and perpetuated, very effectively, by the media. No, I'm not saying we live under a totalitarian system, but some of the techniques used by the media come straight from that playbook. It's much more instinctive in this country and this concerns football and not mass social manipulation as you get in genuinely totalitarian or authoritarian polities, but the comparison with totalitarianism concerns the ubiquity of it all - the ceaseless pushing of these narratives across a broad spectrum of outlets. Forget total football, this is totalitarian football. They attempt, often successfully, to turn fiction into 'popular belief'.
Those who find this stuff fascinating will have known for a while that the media claim, repeated multiple different times by multiple different outlets (it was ubiquitous and has become accepted among the media and less discerning consumers), regarding Celtic losing out on Aribo to Sevco was nonsense. There was never any indication from Celtic that we were interested in Aribo, while his former manager at Charlton stated quite clearly that the only other club that had made a solid query about him was Brentford. Now Aribo himself has let slip that Celtic's interest in him was entirely non-existent. He has confirmed that Celtic were never interested in him.
So the same outlets who have been banging on about how Sevco gloriously beat us to the signing of Aribo are now all doing u-turns all over the place, pretending as if it wasn't them who cooked up this rubbish to begin with. In very brief fairness to the media, there is every possibility that the Ibrox club's PR squad are simply making this shit up and feeding it to all-too-willing newspaper hacks. We all know of the history of Scottish football 'journalists' and their tendency to take any info that emanates from Ibrox as gospel unworthy of journalistic or even just mildly critical scrutiny. In fact, forget the 'PR squad' and perfectly willing little journalist henchmen, Slippy Gerrard himself peddled the 'Celtic wanted Aribo' lie in one of his little deranged press conferences. Whether he was basing that on what the media were writing or whether he was basing it on lies concocted by Sevco's PR team were saying is impossible to discern. Does the tail wag the dog?
People like to call us paranoid, but this entire narrative is explicitly anti-Celtic. There is a concrete example of how this is so. Way back at the beginning of silly season, Sevco were linked with a specific player. He was young. Exciting. Attracting EPL interest and was scouse. His name was Luca Connell. Go onto Google and do the necessary searching, you'll find Connell was linked by the media to Sevco before he was linked to us. Now, I have absolutely no idea if Sevco were ever seriously interested in Luca Connell, but, by the media's own standards, here you had a literal and concrete case of us signing a player that the media claimed Sevco were interested in. Where were all the articles about how Celtic had 'beaten', 'pipped' etc. Sevco to the signature of Connell? You won't find any. Not one. Not one question to Connell about why he chose Celtic over Sevco. None of the rubbish that has been spouted about our entirely false pursuit of Aribo has been applied to our signing of Luca Connell.
The reason you won't find any of this stuff regarding Connell or any signing made by Celtic is because, shock horror, there is a leading core, an advanced guard if you will, of 'journalists' in Scotland who have an obvious and pathological hatred of Celtic and/or a conviction to constantly portray our club in a negative light - almost always to the benefit of the Sevco outfit. In a country determined, to some extent, by ethnoreligious chauvinism, it's hardly a huge surprise that many of the hacks that comprise our hyper-Unionist, British-loving media want their beloved Queen's 11 to rule the waves again against the f**ian upstarts. Not every journalist, pundit or writer, of course. But a significant little cabal.
The Aribo-Connell contrast proves this. It's pathetic.
Those who find this stuff fascinating will have known for a while that the media claim, repeated multiple different times by multiple different outlets (it was ubiquitous and has become accepted among the media and less discerning consumers), regarding Celtic losing out on Aribo to Sevco was nonsense. There was never any indication from Celtic that we were interested in Aribo, while his former manager at Charlton stated quite clearly that the only other club that had made a solid query about him was Brentford. Now Aribo himself has let slip that Celtic's interest in him was entirely non-existent. He has confirmed that Celtic were never interested in him.
So the same outlets who have been banging on about how Sevco gloriously beat us to the signing of Aribo are now all doing u-turns all over the place, pretending as if it wasn't them who cooked up this rubbish to begin with. In very brief fairness to the media, there is every possibility that the Ibrox club's PR squad are simply making this shit up and feeding it to all-too-willing newspaper hacks. We all know of the history of Scottish football 'journalists' and their tendency to take any info that emanates from Ibrox as gospel unworthy of journalistic or even just mildly critical scrutiny. In fact, forget the 'PR squad' and perfectly willing little journalist henchmen, Slippy Gerrard himself peddled the 'Celtic wanted Aribo' lie in one of his little deranged press conferences. Whether he was basing that on what the media were writing or whether he was basing it on lies concocted by Sevco's PR team were saying is impossible to discern. Does the tail wag the dog?
People like to call us paranoid, but this entire narrative is explicitly anti-Celtic. There is a concrete example of how this is so. Way back at the beginning of silly season, Sevco were linked with a specific player. He was young. Exciting. Attracting EPL interest and was scouse. His name was Luca Connell. Go onto Google and do the necessary searching, you'll find Connell was linked by the media to Sevco before he was linked to us. Now, I have absolutely no idea if Sevco were ever seriously interested in Luca Connell, but, by the media's own standards, here you had a literal and concrete case of us signing a player that the media claimed Sevco were interested in. Where were all the articles about how Celtic had 'beaten', 'pipped' etc. Sevco to the signature of Connell? You won't find any. Not one. Not one question to Connell about why he chose Celtic over Sevco. None of the rubbish that has been spouted about our entirely false pursuit of Aribo has been applied to our signing of Luca Connell.
The reason you won't find any of this stuff regarding Connell or any signing made by Celtic is because, shock horror, there is a leading core, an advanced guard if you will, of 'journalists' in Scotland who have an obvious and pathological hatred of Celtic and/or a conviction to constantly portray our club in a negative light - almost always to the benefit of the Sevco outfit. In a country determined, to some extent, by ethnoreligious chauvinism, it's hardly a huge surprise that many of the hacks that comprise our hyper-Unionist, British-loving media want their beloved Queen's 11 to rule the waves again against the f**ian upstarts. Not every journalist, pundit or writer, of course. But a significant little cabal.
The Aribo-Connell contrast proves this. It's pathetic.
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