If Celtic gets even half what it wants for Bernabei, Ibrox’s utter folly will be laid bare.

Sometimes it is the contrast that is the killer. I always look back with some wonderment at the days when Mike Ashley was on the Ibrox board.

That man was hated. What makes it amazing is that he was hated for no clear reason. Their fans believed—truly believed—that they were being ripped off. Giving Ashley control of the merchandising and distribution deals gave them access to a world-class operation. Yet somehow, someone convinced them that they were being robbed.

The way this was achieved was through contrast. People like Dave King compared how much they earned from merchandising to how much other clubs earned. There was no explanation as to what the context was, and people were steered towards thinking it was something to do with how much of each shirt sale went to their club. In fact, if you looked at it properly—which very few people bothered to do—you found that the money going to their club was more or less consistent with how these deals typically work.

But because they had been fed a contrast without context, they believed King. They backed King, and they ensured that Ashley and his directors were moved on. This may be the single stupidest thing that has been done in the history of the newco. In its aftermath, Celtic put together the best run of domestic success in the history of the game: four trebles in a row, five trebles and two doubles in the last eight years. That’s the Dave King record.

Let’s not forget King’s other bright idea—the decision to “front-load the transfer spending.” Between what happened in the aftermath of Ashley—the lawsuits that followed, the wreckage of their commercial reputation due to all those torn-up contracts, and the major transfer fees and that front-loaded spend—they are where they are now. That’s in a very difficult, dark, and bad place with no obvious exit route.

The contrast is still killing them, and there’s a new one—another area where they’re being judged very harshly. It’s the contrast between what they bring in for transfers and what we can bring in for transfers. Last week, they held their AGM, which delivered staggering—though unsurprising—news: they only got £800,000 in total for all the players who departed in the summer.

As we’ve said on this blog, they brazenly lied to their own fans about this. They completely misled their supporters and the media about how much those deals were worth. Their fans had expected the books to balance. They hadn’t. The club shelled out a lot of money for players and brought in hardly any. It was a fire sale—they just didn’t call it that.

It was an attempt to burn their wage bill to the bedrock. They could have been honest and played it straight with their supporters, but they preferred to lie.

No other club in the country misleads its own fans to this extent.

There is always a price to be paid for it. That price will likely be paid again if, as many expect, Alexandro Bernabei leaves this club in the January window. We have reportedly set a rather high bar for clubs who want to buy him—an £8 million price tag, according to some reports.

I think it is highly unlikely we’d get £8 million, but if we did, can you even imagine the headlines over there? This is a player who can’t get into our team going for a sum that is ten times what they managed to bring in for half a dozen of their best players.

If you want to talk about a killer contrast, that is one for the ages.

That £800,000 is such a paltry sum that if we get even half of what we’re looking for with Bernabei, it will embarrass them. Even better, if we get half of that—from a player who has been little more than a reserve at our club—it will still be more than twice what they managed to bring in for so many members of their first-team squad.

And that contrast, my friends, is a killer. It’s a symptom of the shocking state that club has ended up in. It’s also a symbol of how desperate they must have been over the summer to slash the wage bill and offload as many players as possible to meet UEFA’s financial sustainability rules.

Remember the story from a few years back about them being on a UEFA “watch list”? It turns out it wasn’t just a watch list; they were put on notice that when these new regulations came into force, they’d be in breach. Knowing that explains so much.

Why do you think they splashed so much cash at the start of last season? Why do you think they brought in a manager with virtually no experience and allowed him to assemble such an expensive, underperforming squad? They did it because they had no choice. They knew they had to gamble—gamble big—to try and wrestle the title away from us and secure automatic Champions League qualification. That money would have propped up their shaky empire for another year.

And we all know how that gamble ended. They failed. They lost the automatic qualification spot because Rodgers was just too good, and Michael Beale was just too dreadful. They put their faith in a guy who wasn’t remotely qualified to manage a top team, and they bet everything on him. It’s reckless, yes, but it’s not unusual for that club.

They knew they had just one season to make this work—one last chance before the new regulations kicked in. They understood their foundation was precarious. They also knew that a price would eventually have to be paid, but they bet big anyway.

They believed winning the title could delay that reckoning by securing Champions League cash, which would make them look more stable than they really were.

They understood what this year’s Champions League bounty was worth and pushed all their chips to the centre of the table. But once we left Ibrox with a point in the 3-3 draw, putting ourselves in pole position to retain the title, there must have been people in their camp who knew the gamble had already failed. And they knew what the cost of that failure would be.

With an unsustainable wage bill and no significant transfer sales early in the summer window—or later, for that matter—they were left with one option: cut costs drastically. That’s why their summer business looked like a fire sale.

It’s management on a wing and a prayer.

As we move forward and the full consequences of their disastrous decisions become clear to their fans, the contrast between what they can spend and what we can spend will keep hitting them like a hammer. If this disparity continues to translate into footballing success for us, the gap will grow wider, and the contrast will only become starker.

You could make a strong argument that Celtic’s current period of dominance can be traced directly back to the Dave King coup. But even worse for them is the fallout from hiring Michael Beale, handing him all that money, and allowing him to take such a massive gamble with their future.

Desperate people do desperate things.

And no one in this game is more desperate than they are.