Their Post-Celtic Game Meltdown Has Done Ibrox Reputational Harm That Will Last Years.

The last year has seen Ibrox embark on a major public relations offensive which the media was right behind and happy to promote not just as something that was good for their club but something that, actually, was beneficial to Scottish football as a whole.

Part of the media’s rationale was that it was somehow in the best interests of the game for there to be a counterpoint to Celtic’s alleged dominance at the top. This is not a new idea; however discredited it might be, people continue to push the line that we are somehow pulling the strings for the whole sport. The other idea which underpinned this theory was that Ibrox “belongs” at the top table, an idea I find absurd and even dangerous.

For the record, those same people would make the same claim about Celtic and I consider that idea to be just as bad. This is why I’ve long urged the ditching of this annual farce where the two clubs swap seats on the executive committees as though they were ours by right. No such right should exist. A seat at the table should be earned, not bestowed.

Still, for all this talk of entitlement, the Ibrox club has never, at any time, been considered to be a leader in our national game. This is why the current board have, in the last 12 months, began the task of promoting themselves as responsible partners and reached out in a bid to build alliances now that people like King and Park are out of the way.

No rapprochement was possible whilst the people whose names was all over the dodgy dossier and the Cinch fiasco were still in charge, but once they were gone – or allegedly gone – Ibrox’s PR offensive swung into gear. It was a “new beginning.”

The press ate it up. They started talking about the Ibrox club taking its “rightful place” in Scottish football again. Only the Celtic sites scorned this as a fantasy, and warned that nobody should be fooled because, of course, these were the very Ibrox directors who had warned about settling scores and who’d made it clear what they had in mind.

This morning, Keith Jackson was spitting in fury at the way he and others have been utterly humiliated by the club in the past week. Dupes. Morons. His article, which reads very much like some you might be familiar with, right down to its assertion that the club has behaved in a “Trumpian” fashion, is not cut and pasted from our sites but, like that written by Keown the other day, is very obviously inspired by them … and that must hurt most of all.

Imagine being one of those guys and having to resort to the language of the Celtic blogs to express your own anger over being played for an absolute fool. I’ll get to Jackson’s article later on or perhaps tomorrow because there is stuff in there that needs dragging out into the harsh light of scrutiny, but for the moment let’s just say that he is correct in his assessment of their behaviour this past week as reputationally disastrous, although he completely fails to accept that he and others are at least partly responsible for enabling this behaviour in the past.

I wrote over the weekend about how we should not let the media off the hook here; there are so many of them slithering on it right now, talking about how Ibrox was right, about how they would have had support up until the moment they mentioned Collum by name and in doing so ignoring the fact that this was very obviously all about Collum from the first.

They never made any real secret about what the objective here was. It’s the hack’s own fault if they were not able to recognise that until they were too late and had already as good as thrown their support behind the club. Inside football, there was no doubt what this nasty little game was about and other clubs acted accordingly.

Not one club spoke up to lend them support. Not one. There are plenty who harbour deep concerns about VAR, plenty who are angry about the lack of transparency. Even when the Ibrox club appeared only to be asking “legitimate questions” not one club echoed their views. Because inside those clubs everyone already knew what this was really about.

I have no idea how “successful” Ibrox had been at trying to build relationships with other clubs and in terms of creating the appearance of sanity and stability under its roof. But I do know that whatever progress they made has been undone, spectacularly, in the space of the last seven days, rendering all of it a waste and making them look further away from the mainstream than they’ve ever been. As Jackson and others have twigged, the decision to leak the Collum story to their “official fan media partners” is seen by other clubs as almost unfathomably irresponsible.

And there is no fixing this, at least not in the short to medium term. Ibrox is the source of such constant drama and manufactured crisis that the directors of other clubs must sigh in frustration every time their media departments inform them that another story is set to break from there.

If it’s not harassment of officials, it is trying to decapitate the upper echelons of the SPFL and the SFA, and when it isn’t that it is screwing with the commercial contracts for no reason other than they can … we’ve seen everything from resignation demands to dodgy dossiers in the past few years and nobody sensible really thought those days were over with … but the club’s media allies so badly wanted to. I’ll say it again; these people are mugs, just begging to be lied to.

The clubs, thankfully, always knew better. It will be years before they have faith in anything out of that club. It will be years before the damage of the past week can be repaired. But it can, never, ever be undone. It is a colossal self-inflicted wound, revealing them at their very worst, reminding all those who needed it what really lies beneath Ibrox’s veneer of professionalism and calm.