Souness’ daft remarks won’t help Ibrox catch Celtic. He might doom their club instead.

Last night, I posted a very lengthy article about how, when it was founded, the Ibrox club had a chance to remake itself in a different form, but the voices around it — and much of the debate within it — continued to focus on mad ideas and incomprehensibly bad policy. Nothing sums this up better than the ongoing ranting of Graeme Souness.

We know that, for a while now, he’s had a tenuous relationship with reality and often doesn’t seem to be playing with a full deck.

But to say, on one hand, that the game at the weekend was close — a claim which Martin O’Neill has already described as delusional — and then, on the other, that what Ibrox needs to reach parity with Celtic is four signings worth £50 million, shows the fundamental disconnect between what Souness claims to believe and anything that is feasible in the real world.

It’s incredible that, after one Ibrox club has already died and the other continues to flounder in a disastrous situation entirely of its own making, people like this are still talking the same nonsense: that the solution to all their problems is exactly the same sort of profligacy that got them into this trouble in the first place.

I know Souness is just wishing for this, rather than seriously suggesting they do it, because he knows — as we all do — that they are skint. He says so in the interview, so even he hasn’t made the complete break from rational thought that would inspire genuine belief in this idea.

He doesn’t think the club can or will spend that kind of money.

But everything comes down to the same thing with these guys, and it doesn’t matter which language they frame it in. They want the same old solutions; they want the same old crazy days to just go on and on — all the better if someone else is paying for it.

People around Celtic don’t engage in this kind of fantastical thinking.

I don’t hear any ex-player, ex-manager, ex-director, coach, or even a high-profile fan openly wishing for our club to be bought by some oligarch so we can compete with the Manchester Cities of this world. I don’t hear anybody at Celtic Park engaging in such nonsensical talk, and it doesn’t happen at other clubs in Scotland either.

You may get the wish expressed every now and again by a clown like Neil Doncaster, who imagines the only way to challenge Glasgow — i.e., challenge us — is if some sheikh buys Hearts or Aberdeen or Hibs, but those conversations are happening on the margins and nobody takes them seriously.

It’s not long ago — I’m talking about a matter of weeks — since Ibrox fans were desperately trying to convince themselves that the club was the subject of a £150 million takeover bid. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. Even the story itself said that whoever these people allegedly were, they were interested in taking only a minority stake, not buying the whole shebang. You could get a minority stake in that club for a hell of a lot less than that.

No one even bothered to ask if it was credible.

It was only when Dave King, of all people, came out and denied the story that it went away. And he really had to deny it because he was one of the people named in that story as being willing to sell his shares to these unnamed individuals.

I don’t know how many times I’ve written on here that the biggest danger facing that club is not on the pitch and not from Celtic Park. It’s from their shareholders, the segment that might sell to some faceless wonder hiding behind a corporate shell, whose plans for the club they can only guess at when they’re signing the share certificates over.

I’ll tell you this: if the vultures ever come, if they ever land at Ibrox and start picking through the bones, it’ll be in no small part because they’ve been cheered onto the field by the likes of Souness, Ferguson, Boyd, McCann, and the rest of them.

These people only hear what they want to hear and only tell the fans what they want to hear. The same people who believed in Motherwell Born Billionaires will cheer these guys to the rafters and be spending the money before it’s even on the table.

And if it later turns out that the money was never there, that all these people wanted to do was rape and pillage – and as I’ve said, those are the only ways of making money out of that club – they’ll find a way to blame someone else for it.

As I said last night, there is no appetite for living within their means among either the media or their supporters. That third stage of grief is bargaining, and these guys are still trying to convince themselves that there is a future involving some large institution or individual with deep pockets coming in and pouring cash into the club, which means into the transfer kitty, which means into how much the manager has to spend. In short, not an investment of any sort, except one in their own fantasies.

You’ll notice that not one of our hacks ever asks these people what the so-called investors would get for their money. And the more money they have to spend in the first place, the bigger a return they’re going to want — that stands to reason.

Yet none of the people who constantly talk about “outside investment” ever actually asks what’s in it for those being asked to part with the cash.

We know what’s in it for the Ibrox fanbase, and we know what’s in it for the slobbering media horde who just want to see their favourite club restored to what they think of as its former glory. Although, as I have said, there is a second article I want to write on that subject, which will debunk that idea. But no one ever asks what would be in it for the people putting up the cash.

Even if you assume they are Ibrox fans for whom it’s an emotional investment as much as a financial one, unless those pockets are almost bottomless, those people are going to want a return, the same as any other investor. So where is the upside? Where is the benefit? Why would they do it? Why would someone give that club tens of millions to spend on players?

To get what back? The thanks a grateful support? That has a short self-life.

I don’t mind Souness voicing his thoughts; Souness is a moron and his career in the media has almost been destroyed, at least once, by the stupid stuff that comes out of his mouth. And it’s no surprise to see him in the Goons Gallery on Talksport, which is the last refuge for someone who’s trying to make a living as a controversialist, as if the daft stuff that he said in the past hasn’t already done that and made him a joke amongst more serious broadcasters.

What bothers me is the other people in the media treating his comments as if they were to be taken seriously, as if they were credible, as if — as someone put it — he’s proposed a plan. He hasn’t proposed a plan; he’s made the suggestion that if only Santa Claus were real and dropped a big cheque down the Ibrox chimney, things would be all right. That’s not a plan.

None of this does anybody over there any favours.

They have a board of directors that is finally grasping the nettle and trying to impose sanity and stability on a club which has needed it since its formation.

Instead of helping with that job, you have loudmouths like this making it more difficult. But that’s the curse of Ibrox, carried over from Rangers to Sevco, like I said last night, making it impossible for anybody with a rational outlook to get a fair hearing. Because everywhere, all around them, are people demanding a different plan — a plan that involves someone else coming in and spending more money than the club itself could never afford to spend.

And this is just who they are. This is just what they are.

As I said some days ago, this has been going on for 30 years — 30 years of other people buying players, paying the bills. And they don’t know how to stop. They don’t know how to break out of this way of thinking, and they don’t want to because that would mean finally coming through the five stages of grief to acceptance; an acceptance of Celtic’s supremacy.

A lot of these people just aren’t ready to accept it.

Certainly not Souness, one of the pioneers of the kind of mad behaviour he continues to agitate for. In his growing deterioration, he apparently does not notice that everything has changed. He certainly cannot bring himself to admit that the most fundamental shift is at Celtic: that we are now in front, that we are now stronger, and that’s where we’re going to stay.