“How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?”
So begins one of my favourite songs, by The Beatles; “Baby You’re A Rich Man Too.”
Well, it’s not one any of us is going to be singing to the un-beautiful Peepul across town. Because last night we took a huge step towards another avalanche of riches … and they took another step towards circling the drain.
Anyone who thinks they’ll catch us is a mug.
European football is their holy grail. And like that mythical instrument of deliverance, many who’ve gone in search of it have never been seen again. The OldCo famously died because it tied its fortunes to European prize money. The utter insanity of allowing Caixinha to spend a fortune on his team is that if this doesn’t work out – and what could possibly go wrong, I ask you? – then where the Hell do they go next?
Back towards the Real Rangers Men?
Honestly, I could bust a gut laughing here.
That club is absolute mess. Years of this, of brain-dead pandering to the supremacists, those who will forever define themselves by our standards, our immaculate, incredibly high standards, has led them to the brink of The Second Death.
Their nutjob of a manager is in the papers today saying he has the best squad in Scotland.
Not even the dumbest hack could support such a laughable assertion, and hilariously, of course, this is the second time he’s said this, and the squad he said it about before is the one he dismantled to build this one. He reminds me more and more of Trump – the whole club does – with these stupid comments. It’s like he just loves to set himself up for ridicule. The man is bonkers, absolutely off his nut, and they’ve backed him to the hilt.
The press loves this kind of talk from Ibrox, but all the media fawning and all the talk in the world will not erase the fact that we will lodge major profits again this season whilst they post the kind of loss that would give George Soros a nosebleed.
Hearts are on the verge of selling their best player to this club, a club, it has to be said, without a pot to piss in; their fans must be furious, and Hell mend them because they’ve not pushed hard enough for their club to support FFP regulations which would have prevented this and put this mob back in their box.
The early estimate is that we will make £8 million minimum even if we go out of the Champions League at the next stage, by virtue of dropping into the Europa League groups. That’s big money and would open up a sizeable enough gap on Sevco and the rest even if it were all we achieved, but if we get to the Champions League then forget about it, we’re over the hills and far away. Sevco’s criminal chairman and the certifiable loony in the dugout can dream up whatever fantasies they like but the simple fact will remain that the only way to catch us is to spend enormous sums of money they don’t have access to, and as they flounder we get stronger.
There are a lot of their fans who cling to the idea that we were once in the position they are in now, and they think that if roles could reverse like this they can be reversed again. They are so deluded you almost feel pity for them.
From the day Fergus McCann’s vision of a 60,000 Celtic Park was completed the structural advantage we had over them was established and it grew year on year. Their own financial power was largely illusory; ours was, and remains, very real, built on solid foundations, sustainable and ever capable of growing. They have never had anything like it; the modern structure of Rangers was built on debt and without Murray’s financial sleight of hand we’d have been the dominant force in the game here decades ago.
If we reach the Champions League we will have made a minimum of £60 million more than them in just two years.
And actually, the number is far higher than that.
They had no way of closing the financial gap this season, regardless of what happened on the European arena, but with their exit at the hands of Progres and our qualification for at least the Europa League groups, the colossal advantage it give us is beyond anything they can recover from.
That darkness over Ibrox right now is the shadow of our financial supremacy … and they better get used to it, all of them.
We will live the rest of our lives without them touching us in this regard.