More and more the Ibrox club comes across as one which behaves as if it were all conquering. The media salivates over “the revolution” under Michael Beale; a handful of signings, most of them on frees, one of them on loan. If that’s a revolution, then half the teams in the SPFL go through the same thing each and every year without all this hype.
I try to look at this from the perspective of those other clubs.
Had any of them signed any of the players Ibrox has “unveiled” what would I think of their chances in the coming year? To be blunt, had Hearts signed those guys I’d see them as Hearts level signings, all but the guy they’re trying to bring in right now, and they’ve gone to the brink for that deal.
These are the game-changing players, so we’re told.
We aren’t supposed to notice, I don’t think, that these guys are coming in the front door, that they’re to shove last season’s “game changing players” out the back one. Colak has been told he can go. Davies has been told he can go.
Now, today, they think, hilarious as it sounds, that they’re going to get money for Rabi Motondo. And all the lies they told themselves over him, they’re telling over others here.
Look at the boy they’ve got on loan; The Sun screams of his once having had a “£50 million valuation” and compared him to Thierry Henry. Not to be outdone, The Daily Record put him in a similar bracket as Mbappe and Messi in dribbling … someone was certainly dribbling writing that dire nonsense, that’s for sure.
And all this we heard last season when Matondo signed for them. He had been another player with a reputed valuation in the tens of millions, and yet before he’d even signed their fans got a warning shot from the Welsh national coach when he didn’t name him in a 30 man squad and basically told the media that he wasn’t nearly good enough.
Still, there was excitement. All the talk was of how much Schalke had paid for him and how much he had been valued at once before. A figure of £20 million had been mentioned there; the German club got him for half that. And they were willing to take a multi-million loss just to get him off the wage bill. Right there were the clues as to how this would turn out.
The £50 million man, with the skills of Mbappe, went to England for £7 million, to the might of Brighton. They sent him to Stoke where he played twice in the season. Twice. In a full league campaign. Brighton then sent him to France, where he did in fact play a lot of games but for a player with the alleged skill-set the media is raving about his next move isn’t straight into the Brighton first team but to a year’s loan in the SPFL.
All the swaggering about over there … The Losers Club, setting themselves up for the next failure. And they are taunting us for having lost a manager and because we’re about to lose a top player. But we replaced the manager with one just as good … and we’re getting £25 million for the top player, and that money will inflate a war-chest which is already massively bigger than theirs.
So once again, that’s a club over there over-egging it and hyping itself before a ball is even kicked. If we hadn’t seen it before and before and before it might even impress us or scare us a wee bit.
But like I said, even as they boast about this year’s team they are shipping last year’s team – which they boasted about – out the door for a fraction of what it cost to assemble.
This is how their club runs its affairs. And they wonder why we can’t stop laughing.
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