Talk of “investment” at Ibrox is more moonbeams. That club is finally being run right.

Amidst all the noise and bluster from the weekend, a familiar tune is playing over in Govan. At least on the forums and from their media allies, and it’s this: the club needs major investment. How many times have we heard that one before?

The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

They talk about investment as though it were something real and credible, but in their case, it’s neither. When you’re asking people to invest, you’re expected to give them a return on what they put in. But that’s not what any of these people are talking about.

They’re not talking about genuine investment. Even the notion of someone coming to the club and giving tens of millions of pounds in exchange for an ownership stake doesn’t represent value for money in any way, shape, or form. Shares in that club are currently worth nothing. You wouldn’t even get an emotional return right now—just grief and hassle.

There are broadly two types of investors in football clubs.

First, there are owners who want the ultimate “bling” purchase. Then, there are those who see the possibility of a financial return.

The latter are much rarer, but they’re also the most dangerous to a football club. These are the ones with an unsentimental vision—people who do things like sell the stadium to finance houses and then charge the club an exorbitant rent for 100 years. They cut costs to the bone, find the subsistence level, and pay themselves handsome sums as directors while taking big dividends as shareholders. They don’t care how well the team plays, so long as fans keep buying tickets.

That’s what is meant by “subsistence level” in football: the lowest point where costs can be cut while still maintaining fan interest.

The “bling” owners throw good money after bad, but since the club is a vanity project to them and they have far deeper pockets than most people can imagine, they don’t care. However, no oligarch is going to buy a Scottish football team just to live the dream of owning a club.

Anyone expecting a Wrexham-style ownership is fundamentally misjudging the situation. The Wrexham owners bought into the idea of taking a team from the lower reaches of the game to the top flight in England. Their goal is a Premier League club and, potentially, the most saleable asset of all time.

The critical thing these owners are doing—and what most people watching from the outside don’t quite grasp—is running the club properly. They aim to operate on a break-even basis so that when the club faces financial difficulties, the solution isn’t simply to call the chairman for more money.

What amuses me most about the current moment is how skewed the media narrative is. It’s distorted by what’s happening on the pitch, while what’s happening off the pitch is probably more important, but which is only obvious to people paying close attention.

There has been mismanagement at Ibrox for almost the entire time the “newco” has existed. Gross financial mismanagement. When directors are paying the bills and equity confetti is being thrown around, that’s a band-aid solution to bigger problems. That’s what financial mismanagement looks like: the pursuit of glory at all costs, even at the expense of the club’s long-term stability. Those days are over, and that’s what many in the Ibrox fan base and the media apparently don’t understand.

The club is now being run properly.

I can’t believe this is so difficult for people to grasp.

I understand that it’s difficult to accept because it involves confronting reality—something that club has been avoiding for over a decade. It’s hard for people who assumed their club would always spend money, always try to catch Celtic, and always strive to be the biggest in the country, to accept that this is no longer the case.

But why this is so hard to grasp is beyond me.

Things over there are in an absolute state. It’s all very well saying it will take money to fix, but overspending is what caused the problem in the first place. Sometimes the only way to fix that is through course correction.

That is exactly what’s happening now: a profound and deep course correction. Anyone who looks at it properly recognises it may not be nice to watch if you’re one of their fans. It may be traumatic, but it is necessary if the club is to have any future at all.

Can you even imagine how the conversation would go if they approached institutions or high-net-worth individuals about so-called “investment” at the moment? When those people ask about the club’s financial situation, the Ibrox board would have to admit it’s a mess but claim they’re trying to get it in order, cut costs, and run on a break-even basis, perhaps even returning to profitability. Then, when asked how they intend to use “the investment” they’d have to admit it’s for one last spending spree to prop up the egos of the fans and their notions of superiority in the meantime.

They’d be laughed out of the room, if they were lucky.

All this media talk about outside investment might sound charming and thrilling for the fans, but it’s sheer fantasy. Surely, sensible people know this by now.

What they’re basically saying is that the club needs people willing to come in and throw more cash down the drain, as there’s no financial return to be had in someone spending tens of millions on football players and chasing a dream—someone else’s dream, at that. What they want, in a sense, is even more recklessness, even more crazy spending, and even more insanity, for the club never to learn and never to grow.

You and I both know that their supporters need to be weaned off the diet of other people’s money they’ve been fed for decades.

It will be hard, it will be tough, making them financially stable and running on a break-even basis. These supporters will have to come to grips with the need for it and the consequences that come with it—consequences where they can’t challenge for titles as the club undergoes a full-scale restructuring and realignment. Even when it’s done, there’s no guarantee they’ll be in any better shape to challenge Celtic. But they certainly can’t do it this way.

Ibrox fans have had 30 years of this—30 years since the start of the Murray era, watching the two Ibrox clubs spend outrageous sums of money that it could not afford. Fans have literally grown up and grown old watching this, and now it’s over.

That long spell has come to an end, and finally, they are in a place where some common sense is being applied. Those who accuse the board over there of not running the club right are dead wrong. Oh there might be some slapstick, some general incompetence, but they are on the right road at last when it comes to the finances; the road to a club which lives within its means.

This is how it has to be; it is the only way it will be.

The sooner the Ibrox fans and their media buddies understand this and stop deluding themselves with fantasies of new investment, or of chasing this board out when it’s simply trying to right the ship, the sooner they will come to terms with it.

It will be painful. It will be rough. And there are no guarantees that better times are just around the corner. If they are, they are miles off, years in the distance. But they are finally where they need to be, with people in charge who understand the simple facts and the hard numbers.

Demanding that big money come from somewhere to be spent frivolously and foolishly, as has been done so many times before, just keeps them on the same old road to nowhere. Here, at least, and at last, sanity is starting to prevail.

The big spending days are gone, and they are never coming back.