Ibrox Is Edging Closer To A Major Confession About The Scale Of Their Stadium Problems.

There is mounting media speculation that Ibrox could be out of commission way longer than the club has so far admitted. You can see it.

It’s there in leaks from out of the club, it is there in the subtle ways in which the conversation is increasingly being had in terms of mitigation measures and not so much on the timeframe. It’s in the way the conversation has morphed from one about the club finding a temporary home to the suggestion of playing at Ibrox in front of just three stands. It’s there in suggestions that they could only use Hampden if they pay for the new turf and to give Queens Park a sweetener for giving up their own rights to its usage.

That last one is critical to understanding how the narrative has shifted. Because Queens Park are not due back at Hampden until September.

Why, then, would the Ibrox board have to pay them off to get them to stay at Lesser Hampden, and how much would that cost?

Does that sound as if they expect this to be over and the problems solved weeks after the materials arrive? That seems to me like the club and the SFA are anticipating a much longer stay at the National Stadium than the Ibrox fans are currently aware.

Everything we are hearing out of there right now, all of it through “deniable” sources in the media, as if is not obvious what’s really going on, points towards their being away from home for a while. There is no confident chatter about this being a minor thing. The club has not issued any denials – not even through its fan outlets – about the more lurid speculation, not even the sort which was being put out by Keith Wyness and which The Record ran just days ago.

(He’s in the news today claiming that Goldson isn’t worth “much more than £25-30 million.” That’s Football Insider for you; the worst publication in Scottish sports media bar none, and that is the level of its commentary. Ignore everything they put out.)

The time it’s taking is also a key indicator, and I write that as a guy who is concerned that with weeks behind us now that we’ve not made a single signing. But this is a vastly more serious issue than who lines up in the team. When we had to move temporarily to Murrayfield it was easy to negotiate because we knew the timeframe and it was just about getting an agreement. I bet that didn’t take half as long as this has taken to get.

One possible problem is the money or so it seems at first glance. But in fact, the money is the easy part. Getting an agreement on that is not the difficult bit. The difficult bit comes if this is longer than a handful of games. Because that’s more disruptive for both sides. That’s more complicated. There are aspects to that which are out of the club’s control … there is policing to consider for a start if the Ibrox club is suddenly playing “home games” in Edinburgh when two clubs already do that and their schedules are specifically calibrated around that.

There will be no easily getting around that, and that’s why the tone is getting increasingly desperate, and why the focus is shifting more and more towards using Hampden; because they might not have a choice. Yet it’s clear that Hampden will come with its own range of problems.

So too will using Ibrox, and the biggest one will be the need to offer refunds to every fan sitting in the Copeland Road stand for the matches they won’t be able to attend. There are 8000 of them in there, including the Union Bears, who foolishly accepted a move there last season. The cost of the refunds alone could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

We’ve been saying right from the start that their club has not been giving the fans the full picture. In an earlier piece on this, I told you how media operations works with governments and political parties; first the denial, then the smokescreen, then the partial admission of guilt, then the steady emergence over time of the full picture and only then the real apology and talk about lessons learned. And usually, if they can, these organisations will chuck some sacrificial meat into the mix … that’s clearly going to be James Bisgrove.

What’s apparent here is that the full picture of this mess is finally starting to emerge, and nothing about it is a positive for the Ibrox club’s fans.

We are edging ever closer to the point where they will no longer be able to hide that truth from them. The announcement is coming. It is going to be explosive.