After the Ibrox AGM the “football finance experts” are looking stupid yet again.

You have to laugh at Scottish football and its so-called finance experts. Just the other day, I was reading a piece by Neil Plumley, an alleged football finance expert in the same vein as our good friend Kieran Maguire. He talks just as much rubbish.

I sometimes wonder where they find these guys and what their qualifications are to call themselves football finance experts.

There are people out there who genuinely understand football finance. You can tell who they are because they can actually read a balance sheet and report accurately on what’s in it. That excludes almost everyone in our mainstream media and a lot of these self-styled gurus as well.

Surely, if you’re going to call yourself a football finance expert, you should at least understand the basics, like the bottom line—the headline number that shows whether a club or company made a profit or a loss. This is one of the most fundamental and straightforward parts of accountancy, yet these so-called experts act like it’s rocket science.

The Ibrox club is in a desperate race to slash costs to the bone—we all know this. They admitted it at their AGM the other day. They freely shared that with their own fans. They’re trying to reduce their debt, get the wage bill under control, and find a smarter way to handle transfer spending. Last year’s numbers were a car crash, and this year’s look like they’ll be even worse.

So, when I read Plumley’s piece the other day, claiming that Ibrox could afford to spend £4 million in the January window on Lennon Miller, I was reminded of a recent Ibrox News article suggesting that now might be the right time to move for Morgan Whittaker.

Whittaker, who snubbed them twice, would cost an eight figure sum. But in the context of where they are financially, both suggestions are equally ridiculous.

If you exclude the profit and loss figures, ignore UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations, and pretend £17 million in debt doesn’t exist—along with directors who are fed up carrying those costs—you might as well shoot for the stars. When the club faces mounting challenges this season, and might even have to sack a manager before January, articles about spending £4 million sound as ridiculous as you can get, and so to me, a fan media article proposing a £10 million outlay on a player has no less credibility than a so-called finance expert claiming they can spend £4 million.

The reality at Ibrox is verging on catastrophic. Their own directors made no attempt to hide this at the AGM. It amazes me how many people, both inside and outside their support, don’t seem to grasp the scale of the trouble. You’d think someone whose livelihood depends on understanding money could put two and two together and grasp this.

I’m not sure whose interests this nonsense serves. All it does is raise the expectations of Ibrox fans, giving them the impression that a spending spree is imminent. When that fails to materialise, it creates even bigger problems for the club. And yet, these so-called finance experts keep pushing crazy interpretations of the accounts.

The Ibrox board might have tried to hide some of the finer details, but the other day they laid out the problems they face. They knew it was better to temper expectations and tell the truth. When asked about Vaclav Cerny, Clement basically said straight out that at £6.5 million they cannot afford to keep him at the club. Miller would cost less, but not by enough to matter. We all know they need to pull some kind of rabbit out of the hat in January to give their fans hope, but it won’t be a £4 million rabbit and although they’ve talked about signing younger players this is too rich for their blood.

The Ibrox hierarchy cannot afford to have their fans continue listening to these “experts” and living in a fantasy. It doesn’t help anyone—not the club, not its position, and not the so-called experts themselves. When the money isn’t there, and the spending doesn’t happen, what do they think comes next? The blame game does. And it’ll be directed at them.

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