How do you measure the cost of a thing?
Of a purchase? Of an action? Of an inaction? Even if you are the selling party, there is a cost to be paid.
How is it measured?
It is measured in consequences, in loss, in that thing we talk about on here called cause and effect.
The best example of this comes from a movie, the fantastic Shallow Grave.
In that horror classic (and it’s a horror, don’t let anyone tell you different) three flat-mates find a suitcase full of money in the room of their new lodger (along with his dead body).
Alex and Juliet want to spend the cash right away.
David, the uptight accountant, played by an intense Christopher Ecclestone, knows that they have to sit tight, particularly as he fears (correctly) that someone will come looking for the suitcase and its contents.
Juliet (Kerry Fox) and Alex (the brilliant Ewan McGregor) dismiss his concerns and they go out and they spend a chunk of the money on a lot of ridiculous stuff; fashionable clothes, champagne, a video camera on which they make a hilarious home video of their enjoyment which, watched the second time around, is actually full of dark foreboding.
As David realises at once.
Holding up the video camera to the (stoned?) friends, he asks what they paid for it. “You paid £500 for this?” he demands. “That’s what it cost David,” says Juliet.
And he snaps back, “No, no, that’s what you paid for it. 500 pounds is what you paid for it. We don’t know how much it cost us yet. For you two to have a good time, we don’t know the cost of that yet.”
As it turns out, that ends up being a lot.
All that those two do is fall prey to a simple human impulse; they give in to temptation for a little short term pleasure, never really believing that there will be long term pain. It’s why some people shouldn’t be allowed to have credit cards.
It’s why financial fair play exists in football; to protect the sport, yes, but also – and this is critical – to protect clubs and their owners from themselves.
They say that the burned hand teaches best. It’s certainly true.
But at Ibrox they have never learned a damned thing from the last crisis to engulf a club there. Ironically – or maybe simply some form of cosmic karma – it was Malmo knocking them out of the Champions League which sparked that crisis; the true cost of three titles in a row catching up to them.
For all that, the new club has had a high old time and in doing so proceeded to make the same mistakes, and it’s only now, in the cold light of the morning after, sobriety hitting them like a hammer, that people are waking up over there, looking back over the last campaign and asking, with some due trepidation, “what did that actually cost us?”
For them to live large and spend money when every other club in Europe was making cuts, some of them quite dramatic cuts?
We know what they got out of it – a summer of lording it up and that over inflated sense of supremacy which has them engaged on a multi-front war – but not what the consequences might be.
What did it cost them? That much will become clear in weeks to come.
Their club is in serious peril this afternoon.
No-one knows how deep it goes or how serious the trouble might be, in part because nobody outside of Ibrox really knows where the money to keep the lights on came from over the last 12 months … but someone will eventually come to collect, and when they do there is no guarantee that it will not lead to another shallow grave.