Ibrox Defends Its Pitiful “Player Trading Record” With A Little Help From Their Friends.

The Record is doing today what it does best; banging the drum for Ibrox, as if it were not a national newspaper at all but an undeclared part of the club’s own PR department.

The story is about their transfer and player development policy and is so smug and self-congratulatory in tone that it makes you wonder if they’re not all buzzing something over there.

In an interview with their academy director Craig Mulholland, the club’s record is bummed up to the nines. The sale of Patterson is described, yet again, as being for an eight figure fee when that story has been blown apart by their own shareholders group.

They are talking up the sterling job they did on developing Billy Gilmour, yet he walked for free and they’ve netted a mere £1 million over it.

There’s a brief mention of the kid who joined Villa this week and who they wanted to keep but couldn’t hold onto … they got £300,000 for him in a settlement to keep it from going in front of UEFA’s arbitration committee.

If this is success their interpretation of it is weird.

But this is article is also a piece about their transfer strategy and how it has started to pay off. Which as we all know is arrant nonsense. They are talking about Bassey as if a deal to sell him back to the EPL has already been done, as if the millions are already in the bank. They are boasting about profits they haven’t even made yet.

There is also pie-in-the-sky talk about how they can capitalise on Brexit by going to England and grabbing their best young players on the cheap, and then taking advantage of how English clubs more and more will have to turn to home grown footballers by selling those same players back to them.

Is it just me who sees the obvious flaw in that?

Namely, why would English clubs in that position sell their best young players to Ibrox on the cheap in the first place? Why not – and here’s what they appear to have missed – develop those young players themselves or sell them to bigger English clubs at a premium?

Too complicated for these clowns, apparently.

It interferes with what they want to believe, and that’s the cardinal sin as far as they are concerned.

Ibrox’s “transfer strategy” has been an utter failure thus far.

The only way in which they come out ahead in this window is either to tie their key players up on extended contracts or to sell them. There is no victory to be had in letting the contracts of Aribo, Kent, Helander, Jack and Morelos all run down so they get nothing for them.

But they are hamstrung by the stupidity of their strategy, which is predicated on doing nothing more than watching what Celtic do and trying to copy us without any real understanding of market forces or the dynamics of the business.

It is pathetic, and worse so that a national title acting like an unpaid PR arm goes along with it.

The season just past was outstanding … but how well do you know it? Take the quiz, go up against your mates, and see who gets the highest score on Celtic’s 2021-22 campaign.