The origins of Sevco’s current crisis lie in their beginnings; following the insanity of Rangers.

This article tackles a subject I’ve wanted to dive into for a while. It was initially meant to be the second part of a double feature on the Ibrox situation, exploring what’s driven it to this point. However, I realise there are two separate issues here, and it doesn’t matter which order I address them in, as long as both get covered.

Over the weekend, all the Ibrox fan podcasts were doing their post-mortems on the game. I stumbled upon one in particular, though I can’t recall the name or who the hosts were. It was the most interesting I’ve seen because, unlike most that I follow for a laugh, this one had a sober, serious discussion. None of them were kidding themselves about what they watched or the situation their club is in.

Yesterday, I put up a piece on the five stages of grief, where I pointed out that many Ibrox fans have been stuck in denial for years, while others are stuck in anger. There are fans outside these two groups who have spent years in depression. At least they acknowledge that the situation is dire and probably won’t get any better. Then there’s the group stuck somewhere in bargaining, still clinging to hope. To some extent, the guys on this podcast fell into that category, but they’re slowly moving from bargaining into depression. You can tell by how they speak—they’re nearly at the point where they realise that hope is futile.

At the very least, they understand they’re facing a long, hard road with no easy answers or quick fixes. Almost all of them accept that while investment would be nice, there’s none on the horizon. No credible parties are publicly discussing it, and even if they were, it would be fraught with difficulties due to financial sustainability regulations under UEFA’s ever-watchful eye.

Everyone has a theory on how they got here. My old man and I have talked about this many times, and there are some within the Ibrox support who recognise that this didn’t happen overnight. This has been a process ongoing for over a decade, ever since they crawled out of the grave of Rangers. In truth, the critical mistakes were made back then.

The second article I ever posted on this site was about Norman Bates, and I used that story to describe what’s happening at Ibrox as a form of insanity. In the film, Norman Bates goes mad trying to keep the notion alive that his mother is still alive. Partly out of guilt, because he’s the one who killed her, and partly because Norman was always a bit mad. When you think about the Ibrox situation, it’s not dissimilar.

Sevco exists to maintain the illusion that Rangers still exists. But Sevco is not Rangers, and nothing will make them the Rangers that the fans grew up watching. That’s the other article I’ve been planning to write, and I will tackle it in due course. But they wear the clothes, speak in the voice, and sit in Mother’s chair. And because Mother was mad, Norman, who was never alright in the first place, becomes even madder.

Not only did Norman keep his own issues, excesses, and personality defects, but he took on his mother’s worst traits as well. It’s the combination of both sets of madness that leads to murder and mayhem and all the good stuff you see in the movie.

Rangers’ issues were twofold: an overestimation of their own importance and supremacy. This led to the egotism that David Murray best expressed in his famous braggadocio about how, for every £5 Celtic spent, he would spend £10. And that, of course, led to disaster.

So, there was a personality defect and a behavioural defect. The personality defect on its own made them a toxic mess of sectarianism and bigotry. The behavioural defect drove them towards suicide by overspending money they didn’t have. Combined with the delusion that “administration can’t happen to us because we are Rangers,” this is why they ended up where they did.

If you want the root cause of their current predicament, go back to the beginning. Go back to when Charles Green was standing on the pitch on the day they played their first-ever game as Sevco in the bottom tier. Green was both pursuing the “survival lie” and giving birth to the “victim lie” right there and then: that Rangers had survived and that they were treated unfairly by everyone else.

In my view, the moment they started wearing the dead club’s clothes and claiming its trophies, history, and “staunchness,” they were already in trouble. All the lunacy that led them to the grave was tied up in the very thing they tried to resurrect. By resurrecting it with all that baggage, they set themselves on their current path.

But it got worse because, once Charles Green birthed the “victim lie,” they acquired a whole new set of delusional beliefs, ideals, and justifications on top of what was already there. All the problems of pretending to be Rangers were bad enough on their own, but that added sense of grievance, victimhood, and persecution made a toxic brew that no board of directors—no matter how well-intentioned—was ever equipped to deal with.

What my old man and I have talked about over and over, and what one of the guys on that podcast brought up the other day, was that everything went wrong right at the start. It went wrong when the new club started acting as if it were Rangers and as if what happened to Rangers was someone else’s fault. Nothing encapsulates that better than the players they signed and the attitudes of people like Ally McCoist, who openly boasted about travelling in luxury coaches and staying in five-star hotels.

There was an opportunity for a different path, but it had to start with an acknowledgment of what actually took place. They spent their way to the grave. They did stupid and reckless things in pursuit of trophies and titles and keeping up with Celtic, things they were foolish to ever have done. Yes, these mistakes were part of what I’ve called the “personality defect.” The problems with Rangers were ingrained; they were in the DNA, embedded in the culture surrounding the club, and the culture in which its fan base was immersed. It was never going to be a straightforward task to eradicate some of that nonsense from the Newco.

Because of the arrogance and egotism tied up in the “We Are The People” mentality, it was always going to be an uphill battle for any board of directors trying to chart an alternative course.

But regardless of that, the simple fact is that the alternative course was there. It was available to them, and they chose very deliberately not to pursue it. And whatever their supporters claim now, all of them were in favour of the course of action they did pursue and the policies they enacted at the time. No one objected to the five-star hotels, the signing of SPL players to play Third Division football, and no one questioned the absurdity of a team in the bottom tier having the second-biggest wage bill in the country.

Only now, in hindsight, can some of them clearly recognise this for the madness it always was. And it’s too late by at least a decade. Maybe even longer because the time to change course was at the start. The time to chart a whole different path was when the path was being laid.

It’s obvious now what they should have done, but it was just as obvious back then what opportunity they had been given. They had a minimum of three years to climb to the top flight. Three years in which they could have accumulated cash, built toward their future, signed the best young players in the country instead of going for seasoned veterans in the vain hope they could play their way to a cup win, developed their academy system, and brought in forward-thinking coaches. They could have emerged into the Premier League with a cadre of young talent, assembled carefully with strategically set, realistic targets and goals, focusing on taking it one step at a time.

It may be the greatest wasted opportunity in the history of Scottish sport.

A club with the second-biggest revenues could have continued to grow, develop, and get stronger as it climbed the leagues without necessarily bankrupting itself in the process. But instead, they insisted on paying outlandish salaries to the likes of Fran Sandaza and Ian Black and other raging mediocrities who were delighted just to take the money and go through the motions. And why wouldn’t you go through the motions if you were a Premier League footballer suddenly playing in the bottom tier for more money than you ever earned in the top flight?

Let’s not pretend there were voices of reason because the media went right along for the ride. They loved it. Every year, when predictions were made for who would win the major honours, there were always hacks happy to bet their credibility on the Ibrox club as the winner of the League or Scottish Cup. I remember one hack predicting they would win both domestic trophies in the season they reached the Championship.

So, this wasn’t an insanity confined just to their supporters and those inside their club who prioritised keeping up with Celtic above all else.

This was a collective lunacy shared by many in the mainstream media, and very few, if any, ever stopped to think that maybe this wasn’t a good long-term solution to their obvious problem: they were up against a Celtic that was careful, smarter in its business, and sufficiently strong to afford the odd mistake in signings or even managerial hires.

The moment it became clear that the Ibrox club would be in the top flight, and that they were intent on mounting a season-one challenge—which itself was ludicrous—we flexed our muscle sufficiently by hiring Brendan Rodgers to pull ahead of them all over again. When they responded to that, they did what Rangers had traditionally done: spent other people’s money with no thought for the consequences.

And that’s why they’re here.

That’s why they are now in a position where they are skint again.

When Sevco started life, it was widely agreed that they would try to operate as a break-even club. That lasted no time at all, and they were soon back to borrowing from directors and raising share capital just so they could throw it at the playing squad.

That’s the insanity of it. Norman Bates all over again—mad on top of mad. No matter how bad it gets, there will always be a guy inside the boardroom or the dressing room or the dugout who will be willing to spend, spend, spend, with no regard for where it’s coming from or what the consequences are. They can’t escape it. Not whilst they persist in the delusion that they’re Rangers.

Tonight, Souness is mouthing again; I’ll tackle his lunacy tomorrow. But for now let’s just marvel at those on the periphery of that club having no common sense at all and on falling back to the same tired “solutions” – the very ones that got them into this trouble.

It’s possible that there are people over there will not properly learn these lessons until they’ve faced another financial meltdown and reconstituted the club in yet another form. It’s not enough for them to stop overspending. They have to be a club that completely realigns itself, accepts its place in Scottish football, and understands that they must plan for the long term with the rest of us, not as if they still had the money to go head-to-head with Celtic.

To the credit of this Ibrox board, whether necessity has forced them to the realisation or not, they do appear to be coming to terms with this inconvenient fact.

If Ibrox fans don’t want to hear this, that’s fine. I don’t think they want to hear most of what the people they regard as “enemies” have to say anyway.

But, as I said before, there is no solution that involves them continuing down the path they’ve been on for the last dozen years. At some point, they must face a reckoning—an honest one. And on that day, the conversation will start from where it always should have: that they are not Rangers and that they should never have tried to act as if they were.

Anything else leads back to where they started; the graveyard.