Charlie Miller Is The Latest Person To Indulge An Ibrox Fantasy That Simply Refuses To Die.

This morning, former Ibrox player Charlie Miller was in the media flexing his muscular intellect. His subject of choice? The Ibrox board and their perceived failings.

And, as usual, he’s repeated a years-old lie that the fans over there have been simultaneously soothing and torturing themselves with.

What I always find amusing about the fans at Ibrox is their ability to construct myths and fantasies about the past, the present, and the future. And what Miller is talking about in the papers today is a clear example of doing all three.

Now, when I refer to Charlie Miller’s “muscular intellect,” I am, of course, being deeply sarcastic, because he is one of the stupidest people ever to walk the face of the Earth.

But the thing is, he’s not the only one who believes in the nonsense he was spouting this morning. In fact, it’s almost an article of faith among the Ibrox supporters that they had some big opportunity after they won the COVID title to allegedly push on and build on that.

According to this pernicious myth, they had established themselves as the biggest club in Scotland and laid a foundation on which Gerrard was expected to build a dominant team. The board is accused of failing to properly back him at that point, of not providing him with the transfer funds which would have enabled him to build a dynasty.

There’s so much wrong with that surface-level analysis that it’s sort of unbelievable anyone swallows it.

For a start, all the money was spent.

And if they want to fully appreciate that fact, they need to consider two things.

First, the COVID campaign cost every club in Scotland millions and millions of pounds. And secondly, Dave King himself had told their fans explicitly that Gerrard had been given all the money up front that the club could afford to spend, and more beyond that, in what King himself referred to as “front-loaded” transfer spending.

So this wasn’t a failure to back Gerrard. Gerrard had been backed. They had spent more money than they were able to spend, giving Steven Gerrard the means to put together that side. And in doing so, every member of their board put up money of his own. That anyone in the Ibrox fan base still believes there was some pot of cash sitting somewhere that could have been given to the manager and wasn’t is incredible.

Celtic recovered from COVID in far better shape because we had a surplus that we were able to eat into, and we had in the squad a number of bankable assets who we knew would fetch good prices, and who we were able to sell in order to fund a new manager’s season one rebuild. And that’s exactly what we did under Ange Postecoglou.

Celtic’s strategic mistake, the one that led us to disaster in the COVID campaign, was the simple act of hiring Neil Lennon, and we paid a high price for it. The mistake the Ibrox fans have always made was that they confused our errors with their own strength. They hadn’t moved forward; we had gone backwards. And that was why we lost the COVID title.

Another thing they got confused about was when they looked at the league table at the end of that season and saw such a wide gap.

They were stupid enough to believe that gap represented some vast gulf between the two teams and that it would take us a long time to catch up. But what actually happened was that, after a point in that campaign, our players gave up the ghost, and we replaced Lennon with an interim manager who nobody was motivated to play for. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Major mistakes and bad decision-making on our side contributed to the scale of that defeat. But they mistook that for the club itself being weak and for their club being strong. And all of it was an illusion made to seem real by the unique circumstances of that one campaign. When fans were back in the grounds again, once we got a chance to do a rebuild, and once Lennon was no longer the boss, things righted themselves within a year.

There’s something else that Miller appears largely ignorant of, and it’s this: Steven Gerrard wanted out of Ibrox from almost the minute he arrived. He saw that club as a stepping stone and nothing else, and he was never particularly happy there.

On top of that, outside of the COVID campaign, there wasn’t any real indication that Gerrard knew what he was doing or would have achieved any kind of sustained success at Ibrox, even if they had found more money to give him.

The campaign before COVID hit full scale was cut several weeks short, and we won the title early. Had that campaign gone the full way, I have not the slightest doubt that Steven Gerrard would have lost the league regardless and been dismissed as manager, as most of their fans were calling for at the time.

The simple truth is, as difficult as this is for some of them to accept, the opportunity they believe existed never did. The fundamental structural weaknesses of their club would never have enabled them to establish themselves as the dominant force, and the structural strength of Celtic would have propelled us back to the top of the league in very short order, whatever decisions they’d taken and whatever moves they had made.

It’s easy and convenient for people over there to blame the board of directors for the abject state the club is in. There’s some merit in doing so because those people clearly do not have a clue how to build and run a modern football club. But to suggest that they have failed or not done enough to support previous managers is obviously absurd.

Every penny that has come in the door over there has been spent, and over and above that, the directors have made up the shortfall. Even as Miller admits that, he does not think through the implications of it, so let me clue him in.

Without that money, without that overspend, there would never have been any challenge to Celtic worthy of the name, not just in the last three years but over the last decade. The problem they find themselves in now was always going to be waiting for them somewhere on this road. They can no longer spend money they don’t have, and spending that money was the only reason they were able to challenge Celtic, even in the short term.

I accept that this is difficult for a lot of their supporters to face, whether they are in the stands or around the press box, or wherever they might be.

But the inconvenient truth is that this has been coming for years now, this reckoning with reality. And yes, they’ve squandered millions of pounds on poor signings, but what else is new? Ibrox clubs have been doing that for as long as I can remember.

The difference now is they’re not doing it to forge ahead—they’re doing it just to try to keep up. And that strategy? It’s over with, and this Ibrox board has finally faced some difficult facts. And so too must the supporters.

This is their future. This is where they are.

And nothing is going to fundamentally change that.

No one is going to walk into that club and pump vast sums of money into the first-team squad because that’s like taking your own cash pile into the back garden and setting it ablaze. The media calls it “investment,” but that must be one of the most grotesque misuses of a word in the English language. Real investors know that you can’t get a return pouring money into a black hole, and that’s all they’d be doing to get involved with that lot.

Even if such a person existed, some expat billionaire with a King Billy tattoo on his backside wanting to indulge the fantasy and be the hero to his Peepul, guess what? Financial sustainability regulations would not permit him to do so.

They’re stuck spending what they can afford, and that will always, forever, be less than what we can afford, even with this board of directors, who don’t seem to like spending at all.

Their squad is a considerable distance behind ours, and in order to fix that, they require spending huge sums of money, which they don’t have.

The horrible truth is that they can no more easily bridge that gap than Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, or any of the rest of the chasing pack.

If some magic formula existed, one of those other clubs would already be using it. If the magic money tree was real, we’d have no reason to worry about our shitty TV deal.

Charlie Miller is no genius, but his poor analysis of this situation isn’t because of his lack of intellect. It’s because this entire debate within the Ibrox support is almost wholly based on a series of untruths, myths, and outright lies that they continue to tell themselves.