The Ibrox Transfer Window Has Been A Fiasco In A Way That Makes Ours Look Sane And Professional.

You have to hand it to the Ibrox fans; they really are a rare breed.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading their forums and checking out their views on the players their club can’t wait to usher out the door.

The way they talk about some of these players is unbelievable. And so, right now, on this website, I’m going to do something I never believed I would do.

I’m going to stand up, however briefly, for Todd Cantwell.

There’s a perception on the Ibrox fan sites now, which is virtually universal, that Todd Cantwell has somehow betrayed the club by asking to leave. Bear in mind that we don’t know, and they don’t know, what the details behind that request are. This is a guy who’s talked about how much he loves the club and the fans. So, what force on heaven or earth would compel him to want to go? That’s a question no one appears to want to ask.

Because there is an obvious answer and although we don’t know it for sure, we can certainly take an educated guess: he doesn’t get on with Clement. He doesn’t rate Clement as a manager, and he knows that Clement doesn’t rate him as a player.

There is no repairing a relationship as damaged as that. There is no going back from it. And so, if Cantwell wants to leave a manager he doesn’t like and a team where he feels unappreciated—when he’s in the team at all—who can blame him for that?

Well, the Ibrox fans can, and the Ibrox fans do.

The cognitive dissonance here is remarkable to me because, for the most part, they don’t like him any longer. Most of them can’t wait to see the back of him, and are broadly in agreement that he should be sold in this transfer window.

I just don’t know how you get from there, having a fair idea of what the big picture is in terms of his relationship with the manager, to a place where you can accuse him of some form of treachery because he no longer wants to be at the club—a club where the fans can’t stand him and barrack him on social media, where a manager doesn’t like him and complains endlessly about his work rate, a club that has been trying to get rid of him for the whole summer, regardless of what his own wishes were. It blows my mind that they can hold such contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time.

Todd Cantwell is a waste of space. He wouldn’t get near our team.

He wouldn’t get near our club, and he spends far more time obsessing about his image and his own self-perception than he does working hard on his game and being the best footballer he can be. There are plenty of reasons for wanting Todd Cantwell out of Ibrox if you are a coach, director, or fan there. He is an empty shirt most of the time, a player who undoubtedly has talent of a sort but lacks the application, self-awareness, consistency, and self-discipline to make anything of it.

It was Rodgers who said not that long ago that talent is everywhere, but on its own, it’s not enough. And there’s that old adage about there being plenty of Michelangelo’s starving on the streets of Rome.

Some neat tricks with the ball once in a blue moon do not make you an elite footballer. So, the fans are right, and the manager is right, to think that this guy needs to move on. But you cannot hold that view and make that view clear, and then conduct a character assassination on the basis that he agrees with you and also thinks it’s time to go.

There are half a dozen players over there right now who know they have no future at the club and nevertheless are in the team every week.

Look at Rabbi Matondo, playing almost every game this season at some stage, all the while knowing they’re trying to play pass the parcel with his contract around the clubs of the English Championship—Leeds, Blackburn, whomever. As we’ve already discussed, Tavernier knows he’s not wanted. Ben Davies knows he’s not rated. Scott Wright—no matter how hard they try, they can’t even give the guy away, and he still gets in the team.

Even Cyriel Dessers cannot surely be kidding himself that he has a future at Ibrox in anything like the medium term, when they’ve offered him to various clubs and even accepted a bid from a team in the MLS last week, which he himself turned down, I am sure to the satisfaction of nobody inside the club.

Ianis Hagi may not be the kind of player you would want to see at Celtic, but he is head and shoulders above some of the dreck that currently plays in the Ibrox first-team squad. But he is being frozen out over a £6,000-a-week wage increase—money they could get back very easily if they could get Tom Lawrence off the wage bill.

But this is also an intriguing story for another reason; while that £6,000-a-week wage rise is hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles, he’s not going to play first-team football, no matter what. And with that being the case, you would think that the people around him would be smart enough to say, “For the sake of your own career, we’d better get out of here.”

But the club also has to deal with the irritation that is Gheorghe Hagi, who may have been one of the great footballers of his generation but is also a royal pain in the backside as his son’s agent and biggest advocate, with completely delusional perceptions of his son’s natural ability.

He has been a major part of the problem for Hagi as a player, for the whole of his career in that aggressive way he’s tried to promote him as a footballer, something that wouldn’t be necessary if he was even half as good as the hype.

And it’s Daddy Hagi who right now stands between the Ibrox club and getting him off the wage bill permanently, because he has personally, on his son’s behalf, turned down a move back to Romania because that’s not the level his boy should be playing at.

He apparently hasn’t noticed that it’s that level or the Ibrox B team level, playing in the Lowland League, because the number of clubs which think he’d be a worthwhile signing is roughly equivalent to the number of clubs that would pay James Tavernier £40,000 a week.

I actually laughed this morning when I read that it was Daddy Hagi who put the blockers on his son’s exit, at least to that particular club. Perhaps he is waiting for Barcelona. Perhaps he is waiting for some other elite-level team in a top-five league. I think he’ll be waiting a long time, unless he’s Man City’s secret Kyogo alternative target. (I rather suspect not.)

You have to hand it to the club over there—they really do know how to make a mess of things. I think their current transfer situation is, in its own way, even more symbolic than ours—and ours is pretty bad, as I’ve repeated over and over again.

At every stage, there is hypocrisy; at every stage, there is stupidity. And if they can’t get some of these guys off the wage bill by the time this window shuts, they’re looking at having to retain them on expensive wages, when many of them aren’t contributing a thing. Even those who are in the team know that they aren’t wanted.

And none of that makes for a happy, far less a successful, football operation.