Ibrox Fans Shouldn’t Excited Over Consortium Near Miss. They Should Be Petrified.

Every week now throws up its bizarre news story, and this week we had one of the best in Scottish football for a long, long time. We had the strange tale of the Ibrox “takeover bid” which never was. A group of “Scottish based Americans” – fourteen of them in total – almost came together to take the club over in 2021. So claims a single individual on a business podcast.

How much of this is credible? To me it sounds absolutely loony. Imagine trying to chair a meeting of that lot? It is exactly the sort of bonkers proposition that you just knew would have them eating it up on the fan forums and elsewhere online, especially at a time when they would love nothing more than to move the whole of their board out for another.

It makes me laugh, it really does. Due diligence, anybody? Do they even understand the concept? Even if this story is true, they have no way of knowing who any of these people were, what interests they represented, what they would have brought to the table or what kind of structure would have been in place to do the deal.

Even the money is crazy. “A £10 million convertible note.” I presume that was per consortium member. So, debt financing. Right away the company would be saddled with that. His contention too that these were the “fourteen richest Scots living in America” seems absurd as well.

So none of the fourteen richest Scots living in the States thought that this idea was out of their wheelhouse, did they?

The fourteen richest Scots living in the States all just happen to be Ibrox fans?

That’s the first I’ve heard that version of events.

Charles Green went looking for investors in America and found none.

You know who went looked before that? David Murray when he owned Rangers.

And before he did that he sent Hugh Adam, the former director of the club, and the man who founded The Rangers Pools and made them a small fortune, to examine the likelihood of setting up a Club 1872 type fund where high-worth ex-pats would give a sum every month to the club … like the pools idea but without prizes.

And you know what Adam discovered? As he told Glenn Gibbons in a 2002 interview, there was virtually nobody out there prepared to do anything of the sort. His actual comments require reprinting in full.

“Rangers so-called global appeal is a myth,” he said. “When I was there, we did an exercise which involved asking 50,000 fans on the database to recommend a friend or a relative abroad. A big response was expected – some were even talking about getting 100,000 names – because everybody in Scotland seems to know somebody abroad.

“We got back 2,800 names and three-quarters of them didn’t know they had been nominated. It’s no surprise that Celtic are officially the best-supported football club in North America, with more official clubs than anybody else. The difference is the Irish connection. Many Irish people may support Manchester United, Liverpool or whoever, but they all – every one of them – have an affection for Celtic. And, of course, Celtic also have a great Scottish following.

“The difference is that, while the Irish all have an allegiance to Parkhead, there are millions of Scots who not only don’t support Rangers, but actively dislike them. Despite the claims of international appeal, Rangers are, essentially, a West of Scotland club.

“They talk of supporters’ buses leaving from all parts of Scotland, but if you look closely, you’ll see there aren’t many from each area and they are not all full. This doesn’t mean that even Celtic will earn fortunes from emigrant supporters. There may be more of them than Rangers fans, but it doesn’t amount to the kind of income necessary to fund their ambitions. But Celtic have been, since Fergus McCann’s arrival, much the better-run club.”

So, the whole premise of the story is so flimsy you could knock it down with a feather. It’s not even the story itself which I find interesting though, but this idea, this idea that refuses to die, that somewhere out there is a saviour on a white stallion who will one day hear the call and come in and transform their club and its fortunes.

There is a far more likely scenario than that though. I think fate has something else in store for them, something that will make them view their present state with fondness.

I have long thought that their club is staggeringly vulnerable to a vulture capital approach and this story, and how it has been received both in the media and online, confirms this view. They have no idea how dangerous that is. The longer they agitate for change the more likely that some of the current shareholders decide to go … and with King also wanting someone to buy his shares there’s a chance that someone could acquire enough for control.

And they have no idea who that someone would be or what that someone would want, but the whole world knows that Ibrox’s directors are the best placed in the business to rule by bluff and BS and the chances are that the media would do not one bit of independent scrutiny either.

Which means that anyone who wanted to could come in with a bid, blatantly lie about their intentions and breeze through so-called fit and proper without blinking.

The Ibrox fans would likely never know how serious it was until they were already deep, deep in trouble. Their fan media can be cheaply bought and the mainstream media certainly cannot be trusted to protect them. Neither can the governing bodies.

History should have taught these people about the complete failure of the systems here and what that could mean for them.

It has taught them nothing and they seem incapable of learning.

They should not be drooling over these reports. They should be terrified of them.