Talk about stupid. The Ibrox websites are filling up today with the most ridiculous stories about how their hiring of an Ajax youth coach will see the best young players in Holland flocking to the SPFL, presumably for no money. They refuse to accept they are skint.
They harbour other fantasies aside from signing players they cannot afford. One of the most fervent is that their club will pursue an Ajax style path; this is a crazy.
Their opportunity to do something like that – heavily investing in youth and signing one quality player a year to augment their own home-grown footballers – was a decade ago and they flogged it.
Put simply, their club is too fond of spending money.
Even better if it’s money they don’t have.
They can bring in as many coaches as they want from Ajax but that will not turn them into that club.
Ajax spends real money on that department and they would rather spend theirs trying to get instant results.
They had Liverpool youth coaches at the club not that long ago and promoted precisely one player from their development ranks in that time. One.
Even if the money was there for an Ajax style development program – and we probably couldn’t do it with vastly more resources than them – they would rather see it spent on signings and that they are actually talking about signing established Dutch players shows you how little patience they have for any kind of long term thinking.
These Peepul absolutely live on another planet. They really do.
You couldn’t invent this stuff. They posted losses in the tens of millions and they need an additional pile of money just to get through this campaign and they are genuinely getting excited over sheer fantasy.
Clubs all over the world have Dutch coaches. But there is only one Ajax. The players they are talking about will be sought after by teams all across Europe, from better leagues than this and those clubs – shock horror – actually have the cash to spend.
How many of Europe’s top players ended up at Ibrox because of the “Gerrard factor”?
Remember some of the names they were talking about back then?
The best they got was a Liverpool reserve who they vastly overpaid for. Oh yeah, and their own version of the Famous Name, who doesn’t have a 100th of his father’s talent and doesn’t justify any of the hype.
What a shock this lot are in for.
They set themselves up for it time after time.