Even faced with financial disaster, Ibrox fans still cling to comforting fictions.

Yesterday’s Ibrox accounts threw up numerous avenues for exploration. But I’m going to focus on two distinct lines of inquiry that, while complementary, are separate. In a later piece, I’ll dissect the distraction tactic they used to divert attention from those numbers.

For now, though, I’ll talk about their fans’ reaction.

Anyone who’s read The CelticBlog for a while knows there’s something uniquely abnormal about the Ibrox support. That peculiarity stems from several sources, but it’s best understood through the lens of Rangers’ liquidation. Had they spent the last 12 years accepting reality rather than concocting revisionist fantasies, I doubt their current club would be in its present state.

The root of this is their refusal to confront facts.

The reality evasion, embracing conspiracy theories, and the Victim and Survival Lies, have made it nearly impossible for them to objectively address their club’s issues or tackle them pragmatically. This is why their situation appears hopeless.

A term often used back in 2012 when Rangers collapsed was “moral hazard.” It’s rare to hear it mentioned now, but it was relevant then and it’s even more so today.

It perfectly encapsulates the lesson we should have learned from those events. Moral hazard is what arises when a business behaves recklessly and yet expects to be bailed out. The idea is that no one should rescue a failing business, allowing its collapse to stand as a warning. But instead of learning from that collapse, Scottish football’s governing bodies—the SPFL and the SFA—seemed determined that a club named Rangers should remain in the top flight, essentially trying to erase all consequences of their financial recklessness.

By skirting around the reality of liquidation, the media have effectively nullified the concept of moral hazard, making Rangers’ collapse meaningless as a cautionary tale.

If there was no liquidation, as the media maintains, then what lesson is there to learn? If Scottish football didn’t force a new club to start from scratch but instead chose to “relegate” an old one, then did a genuine crisis even happen? Or, as some have spun it, was it a crisis manufactured by the rest of the clubs, at “Rangers” expense?

This wilful blindness is why their fans fail to grasp the depth of their club’s current peril. They can’t understand that the path their club is on leads only one place: to the same graveyard where Rangers is buried. If the directors propping them up decided to walk away tomorrow, the club would be out of business within months. No one else would shoulder the debt, and without them, there’s no money to pay the bills or keep the lights on.

The fans also continue to be misled by so-called “finance experts” like the hopelessly out-of-depth Kieran Maguire, who last night went on an Ibrox fan podcast to mouth some “it’ll be alright” phony platitudes and engage in his bizarre version of voodoo economics where a company is in good financial health as long as it has someone to underwrite its losses.

He’s spent much of today on Twitter picking fights with Celtic fans because his Ibrox account analyses have been repeatedly, demonstrably flawed. Maguire claims they’re on the path to recovery. But the numbers paint a bleaker picture: £17.2 million in losses doesn’t sound like recovery; it’s the fast track to financial ruin. I wouldn’t let this guy invest the contents of a piggy bank.

It’s no wonder that these fans have convinced themselves that the current club’s debt situation is manageable, even as forums and fan sites are filled with discussions of “player sales” as a magic solution. But large-scale sales over there are rare, and there’s no one in the squad capable of fetching the kind of money they’d need to halve these losses, let alone clear them.

The belief – widespread on their forums yesterday and today – that they can simply sell six or seven players to cover the debt and emerge unscathed is pure fantasy.

One reason they’re struggling is that they have no true assets worth selling; their squad lacks quality players anyone else would actually want. Another issue is that the squad is already down to bare bones. So, if they did manage to sell six or seven players, what would their first team look like? They’re essentially building castles in the air.

An air of unreality permeates the entire club and is only reinforced by the press. Every time trouble brews, the media helpfully rolls out another “squirrel,” a distraction, to shift focus away from the club’s true predicament. Yesterday was a prime example of this strategy.

I’ll talk about that a little later on.

The club is still borrowing heavily from its so-called investors and issuing yet another round of “equity confetti.” This is no short-term fix but a tactic with severe long-term consequences.

There are only so many times a club can swap debt for shares before those shares become utterly worthless. The old joke that Ibrox shares are worth less than toilet paper has more truth in it with every passing year.

A small fraction of their supporters grasp what these numbers actually mean.

They understand that next season’s numbers could well be even worse, and they know what that implies. At some point, the club has to start dealing with its problems. A strategy focused on “challenging Celtic” will destroy them, just as it did Rangers.

This is the harsh reality, one that the vast majority of their fans refuse to confront. They’ll do anything to avoid staring that bleak truth in the face. But the facts remain unchanged.

Either they scale down dramatically and abandon any notion of competing with us, or they risk losing their club altogether.

No white knight investor is coming to rescue them from this mess. Clubs across football manage to live within their means—Celtic does it and still wins. There is no justification for the reckless conduct that puts other clubs and the entire league at risk, yet this is the path they pursue.

Even when confronted with these massive losses, even when they’re told the hole is only growing larger, many of their fans refuse to accept the truth.

The numbers are stark, unspinnable, and yet, although the BBC is trying and Kieran Maguire is out there doing his utmost to sell the fiction. Their fans still believe some benevolent sugar daddy is going to come along, erase the debt, and bankroll new signings for both January and the summer.

The reality, though, is that they’re teetering on the edge. This year’s cost-cutting is only the beginning. If they’re going to avoid going the way of Rangers, those cuts will have to deepen and accelerate. One day soon, they’ll have no choice but to accept it.