If Ibrox wants to make some easy money, there’s a man in America with some ideas about how.

It didn’t take long after the final whistle yesterday before the Ibrox fan forums were buzzing with suggestions about how their club might best be helped. I’m going to do a piece later in the week where I talk about the fantasy of big investment and how it is simply not going to happen, although it remains a hot topic of discussion on their forums.

Instead, I have a suggestion for them. And it may sound like I’m joking, but I’m only half-joking because it’s as close as they’re going to get to something that might actually make them some money. Maybe not a lot of money, but something that will actually go some way towards easing their financial burden and giving them a little something to spend.

Bear with me here; as I said, I’m only half-joking.

Over in the States at the moment, Donald Trump is running for office, and basically for his life, while facing threats on numerous fronts.

But by far the most potent problem he is going to have is financial. That might not sound real to people who don’t follow American politics closely and don’t know that it runs almost completely on money. But I assure you, it’s true.

If you’re competing in a battleground state, more often than not, the victory will be determined by who can spend the most in that state in terms of setting up battlefield offices, who can get the most time on TV, and, now, in the context of modern campaigns, how much internet spending you can afford. All of this has to come out of a central cash pool, and you are competing with the requirements of six other states, all of which are crucial to winning the race.

Where Trump is in trouble is that his fundraising is going a little slow. It is not completely gone; there are still big corporate donations coming in, and there’s dark money floating around from various super PACs and whatnot. Some of them are funded by guys like Musk.

All that adds up to giving him a fighting fund of some description, but none of it is going to get him anywhere near the kind of sums that are being raised by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who recently saw their fundraising top half a billion dollars. Considering they’ve only been up and running for a little over a month, it’s astonishing—almost miraculous—and virtually all of it has come from small individual donations from members of the public.

So, losing the spending war in terms of the election is a problem for Trump. But his problems are deeper than that, and his spending problems are more acute. Because he also has to find personal wealth to fight legal challenges, to equip himself for an even tougher battle in the event he loses the election and has to quite literally fight for what’s left of his time on the planet and the prospect of going to prison and never coming out.

And I don’t know if this will be news to any of you, but one of the ways in which Trump is trying to plug those two gaps is by doing what Trump has traditionally done, which is selling his brand. But I have never seen a more desperate, tawdry series of branding ideas than the ones he is using to raise the cash he needs.

If you haven’t checked some of this stuff out, I promise you won’t be disappointed if you do. From gold trainers to Trump Bibles with the Constitution in them to his latest incredibly crass plan: selling Donald Trump trading cards. Even the accompanying video is horrific and wince-inducing.

It’s hard to believe that you’re watching a substantial figure in American history lower himself to pushing such tacky tat to his followers. I don’t wish to delve too deeply into this, because I do find it kind of awful and almost incomprehensible in some ways.

One of the offers he’s making to those who collect his cards is that if you buy a certain number of them—I think they’re $99 each—then you will get a special version where you don’t just get the card, but where the card comes with a little envelope on the front of it, a little plastic, clear envelope, inside of which is a bit of the suit he wore for the Joe Biden debate, which he laughably calls the “knockout suit”.

And I say laughably because he’s spent every day since Biden dropped out expressing his own regret that he even took that debate in the first place, because if not for that, he’s probably still running against the current president. Yet, here he is, selling the suit in little squares to his own fan club. And this man is doing so while running for re-election to the highest political office in the world. That is almost too desperate and cringey to be reality. And yet it is.

But, you know, this is a desperate man now. This is a man who knows the peril he’s in, and this is a man who will now do anything and stoop to any low and crawl through the gutter, if that’s what it takes, in order to stall even some of what’s coming his way.

And I figure that if it works for him, then it can work for them. I figure that if they are willing to do anything, and are willing to be desperate, and are willing to prostitute themselves and sell off the last vestiges of respectability and dignity and all the rest of it that they used to tell themselves were the hallmarks of the club, then there’s nothing that they can’t do in order to make a few bucks.

So, they could sell little shreds of the commemorative 3-3 jerseys, the high point for Clement towards the end of last season.

Their own little trading card system, with his beautiful, polished bald dome adorning every one of them.

Or they could go down the line of selling, I don’t know, their own Ibrox-branded Bible with a heavy emphasis on the resurrection, with themselves in the starring role. That’s tacky and crass, but if it makes money, why not?

Needless to say, if Castore can get away with some of the marketing that they’ve done, then gold sneakers inscribed with the names of the Gallant Pioneers or whatever the hell they want is surely not too difficult to contemplate.

They will look very odd on a Glasgow street.

And Trump’s had a little trouble with his golden sneakers; he’s not been able to sell very many of them.

When people like CNN have gone out to talk to the public, and asked people if they would buy them, even without the Trump connotation, most would rather be seen dead than wear something that horrific. So, it’s not quite clear who they’re marketed at, but the Ibrox club could get away with that, no problem, because usefulness and utility wouldn’t be the first thoughts that a lot of their supporters would have.

They like bling, and so I think this is the kind of thing that some of them would go for.

And there would be no shortage of ex-Ibrox staff players who would line up to help them flog some of this gear. You can see John Brown in a pair of gold trainers, can’t you? You can see him holding up a trading card with that famous snarl on the front of it, spouting some lines about how the club had to get back to its roots and bring in players who understood what playing for them is all about. And the Staunch Collection would sell a bundle.

I can see this stuff working. They only have to be willing to dive into that gutter and take out of it anything they find which can be marketed and sold. And when you’re dealing with their supporters, that’s virtually everything. There’s untapped potential here if they’re willing to just make as much cheap rubbish as possible and sell it at a hideous markup.

Castore have already proved how easy that is!

I don’t think this is too daft to possibly be a thing. I don’t think this is too crazy even for them. I would remind you that no less a person than a former US president and a current party nominee is doing this at this moment, right now, over in America. So, it is neither groundbreaking nor original, far less uniquely pathetic. It is pathetic, just not uniquely so.

And I think they should go for it.

I think they should explore all their options, and this should be one of their options. If they really want to raise money and really think it can help give the manager some kind of fighting fund for January or whatever it is, then I suggest their marketing teams get cracking right now and start turning this stuff out. And it doesn’t matter how stupid the ideas are; we’re dealing here with fans who will swallow anything and thus will buy anything.

I mean, most of them own some shares in the club that are virtually worthless, so a specially branded “Philip Clement, Let’s Do It” mug or T-shirt or trading card won’t be stretching it too much. They will have to get rid of the Todd Cantwell line, though; they can’t wear that anymore.

I mean, their first-team kit already looks like a Formula One car with all the advertising that’s stuck to it, and there’s pretty much nothing in that stadium that is nailed down and which hasn’t been flogged off to some company or another.

They probably have naming rights for their penalty areas under consideration, and if they don’t yet, then it’s just a matter of time.

Because there are no easy answers to the problems that they’ve got over there, and there are no answers which involve someone coming in and simply pouring more money into the bottomless pit. So, any solution is going to have to come from the pockets of their own fans and that means that stuff along the lines of what I’m talking about is not completely mad.

It’s just a matter of how desperate they get and how much they think they can make. If there’s even a slight chance that it will give Clement one player rotting in the reserves of some club somewhere who are desperate to get him off the wage bill, then it’s a chance worth taking, isn’t it? I promise, nobody on this side of the city will laugh.

Or at least we won’t laugh any harder than we already are.