Bloodletting Has Got To Be A Habit At Ibrox. They Aren’t Quitting That Habit Any Time Soon.

People who study politics and political systems, as I do, know that political parties and major organisations are built, to a certain extent, on discipline.

Once that discipline collapses, it is very, very hard to get it back.

There was a time when political parties in the UK didn’t suffer much public bickering. If you were a backbencher, you were essentially trusted to stay on message, vote with the government, and do what was in the best interests of your career rather than your constituents.

And then something changed. When did it change?

Probably around the time John Major was trying to hold together the tattered remnants of his Conservative government after branding certain members of it “bastards” for their frequent rebellions. There were attempts to knife him in the back.

That was the moment mutiny entered the Conservative Party’s bloodstream, and it’s been coursing through it ever since. Leaders have been destroyed by it, careers shattered, and eventually, governments have fallen.

The Tory Party likes nothing better than a good rebellion—unless it’s a bit of regicide.

Across the benches with Labour, rebellion came later to the party, but as Blair more and more tested the patience of the PLP, it too entered the bloodstream of their members.

It wasn’t terribly unusual to see dozens, if not more, Labour MPs voting against the government in the run-up to the 2010 election and in the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn being made leader those rebellions happened over and over again.

Starmer, too, has faced his challenges on that front, and although he seems, at the moment, to be ruling with an iron hand and intent on stamping out any rebellion before it even begins, he’s already suffered one in his very brief tenure as Prime Minister. When the vote on the two-child cap went before the Commons, some of his own MPs defied him on it.

What happened here is not difficult to understand.

Rebellion becomes a habit. Once discipline has collapsed and insurgency becomes commonplace, it is very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

I thought about this today when I looked at the developing situation across the city and Barry Ferguson’s insistence that, at some point, the club from Ibrox has to break out of this constant cycle of hiring a new manager every 12 months because they’ve sent the old one to a watery grave.

But the problem here is the same one that stalks the Tories, and to a lesser extent, is now stalking Labour. This stuff is now normalised. It’s taken for granted. It’s just part of the process; it’s what these people do. There is no real discipline anymore.

The situation facing Clement right now is perilous, to say the least.

They’ve given him an extension to his deal, and that’s something neutral observers can barely believe. In doing so, they appear to have told him they’ll stand by him no matter the consequences. But, as this blog has made clear on any number of occasions, that would be feasible if you didn’t have a fanbase conditioned to believe that winning is its entitlement.

Their fanbase is now so used to rebellion, protest, and pouring its venom on those inside its own walls that it’s actually impossible to imagine this guy getting any time at all if it becomes obvious that the wheels have come completely off the wagon and that he is floundering in deep water.

The thing is, Ferguson’s not wrong.

At some point, they do have to give someone time and space and let them develop their ideas. They do have to bring someone in with a long-term plan. But they would also have to acknowledge a few hard realities here, and that’s the difficult part because their supporters don’t want to hear about those realities. They don’t want to acknowledge those inconvenient facts, and as long as they don’t, they’ll never move forward.

They have to hire somebody who comes in to take the long-term view—someone with a history of building, developing, and growing a team from nothing. And they have to commit to giving that guy a minimum of three years, no matter what the results are. Any sensible club would have done this already, would have acknowledged their position, acknowledged their limitations, and brought such a person in with a sweeping mandate.

But they’re not that kind of club.

I see no sign whatsoever that they’re going to become that kind of club. Their directors have accepted that the days of financial doping are over. But that does not mean they won’t spend money recklessly. That does not mean they won’t still be prone to knee-jerk reactions. That does not mean they have accepted their limitations and the full implications of those, which are that they won’t be challenging Celtic for the foreseeable future.

So yes, on the surface of it, Ferguson has a point, and the club has to take a more long-term approach. But they are hindered at every stage by those inside their own walls who won’t accept that, by those in the stands who won’t accept it, and by a media that will relentlessly apply pressure if it looks as if they’re giving up the ghost.

This very weekend, their fans are threatening to protest outside Hampden.

The purpose of this is unclear because there’s no one to move out the board, no one to buy their shares, and no one who will step in with investment. As far as the summer goes, it’s probably too late to matter even if there was.

But their supporters need to vent. They need to express their anger, and they need to point it at someone. They’ve chosen to point it, for the moment, at the board. The board has two choices to make here in how it responds to that. It can either try to ignore it and understand that this is only the beginning of the flak they’re going to take, or they can find another outlet for that anger and throw the baying mob some red meat.

In the end, that’s what they’re going to do.

Because, like every other board of directors at every other football club that gets into the habit of shedding blood and sacking managers, and whose supporters have the love of rebellion, they’re not going to walk away from the table. They’re not going to sacrifice their own jobs and positions unless someone hands them a big pot of money to do so.

It’ll be the manager who suffers, because it’s always the manager who suffers. The people who hired him never take a shred of responsibility. The people who gave him the money to spend always blame him for how badly he spends it. No one stops to think that perhaps they should have seen if he could improve the players he inherited before being allowed to buy more.

And so starts the next phase of the cycle.

A boss will come in mid-season on a staggeringly ill-advised long-term deal. There’ll be an initial period of euphoria as he gets a couple of results, and then as teams in the league get used to his system and start to understand it, the same old weaknesses will show themselves up. The steady undermining will begin. His jacket will already be on a shaky nail before the season even starts. If it starts badly, we’ll be back here all over again.

Because this gets to be a habit. It gets to be routine.

There are clubs in England that, in the last decade, have changed their manager eight or nine times. The club from Ibrox has been on a similar self-destructive course, and that’s what worries Ferguson, and that’s what worries a lot of people inside the walls.

They know that the longer this goes on, the harder it is to break, the less credibility they have, and the less attractive the job is for the next guy. But once you’re in that cycle, it’s very hard to stop. And I don’t think they’re breaking out of it anytime soon.