Chasing Celtic: Rangers, Sevco And The Sunk Cost Fallacy.

I know people who have given years to relationships which are solid gone dead and over. I wish I could say I have dodged that particular bullet but I haven’t.

One of my exes and I lasted far longer than we should have, and I knew it was done for a long time before it crashed spectacularly and left us both far more bruised than if we’d just sat down and talked it out on one of the many occasions where we had the chance to be straight about the stuff that we were thinking, and try to at least be friends.

Do you know why we do this stuff? Part of the reason, at least, is something called the “sunk cost fallacy.” It’s what keeps some gamblers going.

It’s why some people stay deep in projects they have an inkling aren’t worth the candle and won’t deliver a result … but there’s a part of your brain that says to you “look at everything you’ve already put into this … walking away now means all that was for nothing.” And so, you hang on and throw more good money after bad, or fritter away the one thing none of us can really afford to waste; time.

People – probably some people we know – have wasted the better part of their lives on that particular roundabout, because they believe that they’ve made such an investment in their jobs or their relationships or whatever it is that they can’t walk away. But a lot of these people would be much, much happier if they did.

There’s a great Del Amitri song called The Ones That You Love Will Lead You Nowhere, and that’s as true of the Ibrox fans as anything ever was.

They follow follow and take great pride in having done so around every wrong turn and up every blind alley that there is to navigate. They don’t realise that this is an abusive relationship they’re in and that it’s those in charge of their club who are guilty of the abuse. But don’t be too hard on them.

Everyone at Ibrox is deep into their version of the sunk cost fallacy and the unicorn they keep on chasing is Celtic, but that’s only part of the problem.

Before this year ends, I’ll hit 10,000 articles on this site. That’s a vast number, I never thought there would be a number like that in my future when I started working on this blog. When you consider that even the shortest articles on this site run to 350 words that’s a minimum of 3.5 million of them, and it’s much larger than that, of course it is.

(This article, including the title, already comes in at 475.)

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look back, the other day, at what my very first article on this website was and I found it easily.

It was called “Guiding Gudetti’s Gob”.

It was about how our on loan Swedish striker couldn’t stop doing his talking off the pitch instead of on it. It was a trip looking back at the earliest pieces on here … and in the first ten I found a neat little number whose title got to me and inspired me to read it, and it made me laugh like Hell.

It was called “My name is Norman and I’m a ‘Rangers’ fan.”

It was about the madness of the Sevco support, and I was not surprised to find I was discussing Orwell and doublethink in there, but there was also a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter which many of you will find very familiar indeed; ““No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Which, in the article, brought me to Norman Bates.

“Sevco, and their fans, are to football investment what Norman Bates is to the budget hotel trade. It’s only fitting they more and more come to resemble him.

Norman, you see, was a guy with a problem. The problem was Mother. They would argue constantly, fighting over such things as occupancy rates, the linen and, on occasion, Norman’s taste in women. Those were the worst fights. She would often get very angry during those. That’s normal though. We all go a little mad sometimes.

Not quite mad enough to kill, but that’s another story ….

Norman’s real problem, of course, wasn’t really Mother … not in the way you’d think. Norman’s problem was that Mother was dead.

Mother had been dead for a long time. Mother, in fact, had been murdered, by Norman himself. He stole her body from the grave. Then, wracked in guilt and confusion, he had turned over half of his life to pursuing a dark fantasy; that Mother still lived. That Mother was still there. He would dress in her clothes. He would speak in her voice. He would give her half of everything he was.

Now, there were times when he could be mostly Norman … and times when he could be mostly Mother. Indeed, there could be times when he was simply all Mother. But there were never times when he was all Norman.”

And that’s who they still are. A club gone mad.

They chase Celtic, but we’re not their biggest problem.

Rangers is Sevco’s biggest problem.

Because as I said at the time, and which has been proved over and over again in the time since, Norman Bates FC may dress in Mother’s clothes and sit in her chair … but he ain’t Mother. He just thinks he is, and so not only does he have his own issues to deal with, but he’s got to deal with all of hers as well.

Don’t forget what the psychiatrist says at the end of the movie; it was Norman’s belief that Mother was a mad jealous bitch that led him to kill in her name. And Sevco is a club that has taken on board all the insanity of Rangers … although that’s what killed Rangers.

Or, to put it how I put it in that article so long ago now …

“Mother had never been “right in the head”. She’d always been a bit … out there. So when Norman gave her half his life, he took onboard all her anger, her frustration, her jealousy and her rage. It was the same with the Sevconians. Their inability to let go haunted them. The baggage associated with Rangers was ported over whole.

Financial irresponsibility. A superiority complex. Bigotry and bile.

The confusion manifests itself in many ways, but most tragic is this;

There are times when they are mostly Rangers. There are times when they are mostly Sevco. Indeed, there are times when, if you believe them, they are all Rangers.

There are no times when they are simply all Sevco. This madness doesn’t allow them to break free, or to move on.”

The thing is … Rangers was, in the first place, as nuts as Norman’s mother was and the whole club was like some mad illusionist’s wet dream.

They were never as rich or as strong as they appeared to be, and so not only is Sevco chasing Rangers’ shadow, they don’t even realise that’s all Rangers ever was.

They’re trying to keep up with the spending of a club which had never been able to spend that money in the first place and which eventually died when reality couldn’t be held at bay any longer.

But one of the things that keeps them coming back for more, and keeps them sinking untold fortunes into this mad fantasy, this endless power trip, this egotistic thrill ride they’re on is definitely the “sunk cost fallacy.”

Look at the team in the summer, look at the players they bought. They could cut their losses and admit it was a failed endeavour and accept the consequences … or they can throw more money down this bottomless pit they can’t stop feeding.

We already know what they’re going to do.

They’ve sunk so much in already they can’t walk away because that would be to admit that none of those funds are ever coming back, that all of it was in vain, that the more they indulge this the deeper the trouble they are saving up for the future gets … but that’s any gambler out there who can’t walk away from a growing debt but keeps trying to put it right by throwing more and more money at the problem.

Their fans, of course, have largely never heard of the sunk cost fallacy and they wouldn’t recognise that it applies to them even if they had.

The unreality that swirls around them has been there for eons, of course, since they were following Rangers, but it still makes my head spin when I think about the stuff they’ve managed to convince themselves of, such as the Survival and Victim Lies.

I sometimes try to put myself in a place like that; it would be akin to being in one of those doomed sunk cost relationships and finding out your partner is cheating on you and actually sticking with it by shutting out the reality of what that means.

See, if you never deal with the reality of it, you never need to dig into root causes and question whether it’s really worth hanging onto. If they were willing to acknowledge the death of Rangers, they might be able to evaluate how it happened and recognise that they’re in serious danger of heading down the same road.

Over the course of the last few days, stories have circulated that they intend to try and secure the signing of Sima in the January window.

That this is a ridiculous prospect appears not to have dawned on anyone over there. That’s an EPL footballer with options, and that some of their websites are not just saying it’s a good idea but actually demanding – yes demanding – that their club move heaven and earth to do it is a symptom of what haunts them.

That’s what Rangers would have done after all, because catching Celtic comes before everything, even at the risk to the club’s own future. Rangers’ saw its role as checking the progress of Celtic.

This is obvious.

From the moment Fergus finished his revolution we were a bigger club than they were, and their every thought was bent on changing that, no matter the risk to themselves. The prize we won in Lisbon was the one most sought after, and in those days Murray believed he could spend his way to that and by putting our greatest ever triumph in the shade he would undo all Fergus had accomplished.

As the Celtic fan saying goes, “they died chasing lions.”

Sevco did not have to follow them down that ruinous road but when they locked themselves into the Survival Lie the way they saw it, they didn’t have any other choice.

Now, 12 years and 11 Celtic titles and five trebles later these people still won’t recognise how outgunned and overmatched they are, like gamblers telling themselves that it’s just a streak and that the only way to break out of it and get back what they’ve put in is to stay the course … and that means throwing more money onto the table because what else are you gonna do?

Walk away? Seek help? That’s like admitting defeat, right?

And for them, that’s the one thing they’ll never be able to do.

They’d rather die. So be it.