Even by their own lowly standards things are getting desperate at the Daily Record with today’s example involving Connor Goldson
With print circulation falling off a cliff at less than 50,000 a day everyone at the ailing Glasgow publisher is trying to find a place on the digital lifeboat.
Unfortunately for the Record the online audience is a bit sharper and smarter than their legacy print audience, especially as they are more likely to trust Internet Bampots than the publisher that spent more than a year backing up a billionaire from Motherwell when the rest of the world knew that not only was Sir Craig behind with the mortgage and maintenance payments to his ex-wife but he also didn’t possess a pot.
The digital Record is chasing that same, declining audience as they deliver good news for bears 24/7, mostly without flinching and certainly not without running a Spell Check across the largely cut and paste copy.
When you are treating tales from the Rangers Review and Football Insider as gospel you are already assuming your readers are idiots, if you can’t Spell Check across 100 words you are pushing things too far in the race for cheap clicks.
Beside the spelling mistakes anyone with any footballing knowledge knows that on no planet has a Cypriot club taken on the near £40,000 a week wages of a 31-year-old journeyman and shelled out a transfer fee complete with add-ons.
ARIS which is their real name, groundshare and play in front of average crowds of 3,000. Last season they signed 23 players at a COMBINED cost of 1.86m euros. This season’s budget it unlikely to change ‘sunstantially’ as the Record might put it.
Just like last week’s Sam Lammers deal for another undisclosed fee no extra money will be finding its way into Phil Clement’s war-chest. With the Champions League signing deadline on August 1 no fees will be paid out as Clement scrambles around for loan deals to make his squad look competitive.
Goldson was probably due to be paid around £4m for the remaining two years of his contract, ARIS maybe spend that on their entire squad for one season.
Although he was no doubt desperate to get away from the support that he had to explain Black Lives Matter to, at the age of 31 he wasn’t ready to take any sort of massive pay cut.
Perhaps he has settled for half of his remaining contract being paid up and taken the chance to play again in front of non toxic supporters and enjoy the game.
A year ago it was the Rangers Review that broke the details of the Malik Tillman deal where Bayern Munich paid out a fee to groom a player alongside Ryan Jack and John Lundstram and agreed to include a future sell on percentage as a sign of their gratitude.
Strangely no other club has been able to negotiate a similar deal but give it a week or two and the Rangers Review and the Record will be explaining the Fabio Silva windfall when Wolves manage to offload their £80,000 a week striker to some other set of easily impressed mugs.
Signed in the summer of 2018 Goldson leaves with three winners medals from what the Record claim is a two horse race for honours.
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