The Ibrox Operation Is A Parody Of A Football Club And It’s Running On Empty.

They got lucky today in the game at Dens.

Rumours are sweeping the fan forums that the club from Ibrox hasn’t been able to fully meet the monthly salaries of its players. This might seem impossible to believe at a time when Glen Kamara is signing a new deal, but that’s what I’d do in their place if the worst was true.

I’d make sure there was at least one squirrel flying.

Another squirrel is the Hagi story, one so ridiculous that I expect the media will be glad to see it die and that the club would be embarrassed if it ever surfaces again. You cannot have read that this morning and not realised that its junk.

That club exists in a half-light of this nonsense. They get by on a suspension of disbelief which affects not only their fans but the press. Today they had another of those banal, worthless press events which made not one ripple of news. That’s intentional.

Those who ponied up the £25,000 don’t stop to ask what they got for their money because we all know.

The press who attend those sessions got neutered. They can’t ask hard questions. Those who refused to play ball and didn’t pay aren’t in the vicinity where they can ask them. So the club gets away with being run in a highly dubious fashion, as I wrote earlier.

They are running on empty. We know that much at least. What we do not know is who they owe and how deep the hole is.

But whatever money they have left is nowhere near enough to fill it and so they really will need to pull a rabbit out of the hat in January, which is why the sales talk is already underway as daft as the sums involved might be.

They face crisis on more fronts than they can count. If the cinch deal collapses, then the SPLF will sue them for the money. Ashley hover and wants his pound of flesh.

Dave King was supposed to be paid out of the modest fan share issue; it failed to hit its target and so nobody really knows whether he got his money or not.

It helps not to be on a stock exchange where they might, at some point, have to give a proper explanation about who’s keeping on the lights.

But this is a high-wire act and it can’t last forever.

They thought they’d be safe on the other side by now, but their Champions League catastrophe against Malmo took care of any hopes they had of that. Look at the size of the debts we just posted; their own will be massively greater and the money has to have come from somewhere.

The thing about walking the wire is that you cannot afford the slightest thing to go wrong. You cannot afford for there to be a single unforeseen event … and we can already see that we live in a world where unforeseen events happen all the time.

They “celebrated” Flag Day last weekend with a fake flag, the SPFL leadership boycotted the occasion and their fans booed the team off the park at the 1-1 draw. Yet the media would have you believe that it’s Celtic peering into an abyss.

We have some issues to resolve on the pitch, and we all know there are issues to resolve off it, but as I’ve said before we are a robust club with bad leadership. We are not an organisation living hand to mouth, robbing Peter to pay Paul and staying one step ahead of the bailiffs.

How much trouble are they in over there?

There’s no way to know, but you don’t have to be a forensic accountant to know that the numbers do not add up.