Membership Scheme Launched Today

[Hildy 0]

Definitely nothing wrong with a fee-based membership scheme in principal and if anything, I'd have thought that the fee could be significantly higher than £25, especially if such a scheme is to be taken seriously. The £25 fee is less than a week's membership in a good fitness center, so the benefits on offer are paltry.

 

The success of any such scheme requires it to be extremely well designed, to the extent that it's almost perfect and this one simply doesn't fit the bill.

 

Not only that, but as aweebluesoandso demonstrates perfectly, the success of any such scheme also requires almost complete trust in the regime running the show at Ibrox and sadly, trust is something totally amiss at the moment.

 

The more I think about this, it's actually making me feel a bit angry because they're getting this monumentally wrong.

A fee-based membership is fine but a membership scheme which is not about ownership and not about electing a proper club president is a waste of space.

 

This scheme is tokenism of the worst kind. It pretends to be a meaningful democratic structure but it will actually be about safe, peripheral and mostly uncontroversial issues with the club carefully orchestrating its behaviour.

 

It will be influential in the detail of official merchandise; it will do a bit of charity work to make it seem caring and compassionate, it will be given credit for winning, for example, increased ticket allocations for particular games, and it will be the perfect tool for the club to tell us that it is doing what 'we' want it to do.

 

The club will use the power of leading Rangers personalities to sway the group when the going gets tough. If the sale of Auchenhowie is going to happen, expect this fan group to be muted in its opposition - or given the credit for stopping something that was not going to happen anyway.

 

The club hierarchy has a new plaything and it will manipulate it carefully to do exactly what IT wants. For a club board eager to reward itself with generous financial packages and inclined to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible in our midst, a dubious membership scheme is the perfect way to exert greater influence and retain control.

Edited July 30, 2014 by Hildy