The Ibrox AGM was nothing but smoke and mirrors. A neat facade to hide a disaster zone.

I spent the last couple of days in London, and I followed the Ibrox AGM from afar. Naturally, there were headline stories that came out of it. The whole thing was a kind of weird illusion. I didn’t expect there to be fireworks, and there really weren’t any. I thought that if the board was sensible, they would front up with the fans and give them some truth. They gave them a little of it, but not the full picture. At Ibrox, you never get the full picture.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the word façade. It has two separate meanings. It means the front of a building, but it also means a misleading appearance.

Ibrox has always had an impressive façade. They boast about that brickwork, those wrought iron gates, how fancy it all looks, and the marble staircase. But underneath it all, there’s rot. The Ibrox façade has always had two different meanings. All that impressive exterior hides a multitude of problems and defects, and that has been true for the last 20 or 30 years.

It’s a trick that Ibrox thinks it has perfected, but it hasn’t really ever perfected anything. All the evidence you need to see that the two Ibrox clubs operate on the basis of illusion, bluff, and bullshit has been there for anyone who has ever wanted to look.

I mentioned on the podcast that one of my earliest Celtic social media articles was on E-Tims in 2009. It was called The End of Rangers?, in which I suggested that because they were funded by the Murray Empire, anything that harmed the Murray Empire was ultimately going to harm them. I wrote it with the cold wind of the banking crisis flowing through world financial markets.

I knew they had a problem. We were still a year out from discovering EBTs and the true scale of the danger they were in.

But it was an obvious enough conclusion to draw even in 2009 that the way they were behaving couldn’t be sustained, and that they were leaving themselves with some enormous hostages to fortune. It was to be less than a year before Lloyds took over the account after taking over the bank that Rangers was closely tied to.

The moment Lloyds did that, they did what any sensible company that wanted its money back would do. They put one of their own troubleshooters on the Ibrox board and told him to recover their cash by whatever means possible.

And still, that club continued behaving recklessly and spending money it didn’t have.

Ibrox has always operated on the premise that an unsuccessful salesman doesn’t stop eating in fancy restaurants and wearing expensive suits; he doubles down on all that.

He offers the appearance of success—the façade of success—in the hope that it will impress clients and bring money to his door. It’s a risky strategy because if it goes wrong, you find yourself in a deeper hole than you otherwise would have been.

And this strategy works in the little things. The best example of it at their shambles of an AGM was the parading of the three trophies.

To outside appearances, that looks impressive. It looks like something worth bragging about.

There was an urban myth about our club that in 1967 when we completed the Quadruple that we also won Quiz Ball. We didn’t win Quiz Ball until 1969-70.

But if we had won it in that most special year in the club’s history, do you think we would have taken the trophy to the next AGM and put it alongside the European Cup?

I’m not knocking the women’s cup or under-19 cups or anything like that, but it’s a flat-out embarrassment to put those trophies next to the League Cup and pretend that it constitutes a success. Everyone in that hall and everyone outside it who knew what they were looking at and understood the context knows it was not.

But so much of what happens at that club is built on deception. It is built on illusion. It is a façade. And that picture of the three trophies up there on the stage is the ultimate expression of an outward appearance that hides a sobering truth. And the sobering truth it hides is that the club is in crisis, and that crisis is deeper than they made their fans aware.

It’s not just the trophies. It’s the admission that they raised a mere £800,000 from the sales of all those players in the summer.

And you know what that confession has done?

It’s exposed the club once again as liars. In their dealings with the media and their dealings with their own supporters, everyone knows that they lied.

There are hacks who wrote about Cantwell fetching a multi-million-pound fee, about Lammers and a multi-million-pound fee. The one that makes me laugh the most is Connor Goldson, who they claimed at the time—and who the media claimed at the time—had gone for over a million pounds. When you look at the club who signed him and the money that they traditionally spend, I said at the time quite openly that it was a barefaced lie that they’d got anywhere near that for him.

And it turns out that I was right.

And again, this takes no special powers. I’ve seen fire sales like this before. I’ve seen clubs drastically cutting wage bills and having no other choice. I recognise it. And the offloading of all those players was designed to do nothing other than cut the wage bill. It didn’t matter if they were getting transfer fees for them or not. Cutting costs means you’re not worried about what you recoup; you just need to get people out the door as quickly as possible. And it was outright lunacy that they ever got there in the first place. It’s completely their own fault.

Do you remember how last season they boasted about having the biggest wage bill in the country? Well, who knew that was going to end in disaster?

Except, you know, all of us who said it at the time.

The idea that a club that makes far less than we do was going to outspend us—and that this was somehow going to be sustainable and was somehow going to fly in the face of UEFA’s new regulations, which have only been known about for about two years—is a clear demonstration of how insane the people over there actually have been over the last period of time.

That’s why there was audible shock in the arena when they confirmed that £800,000 figure. That was certainly not in keeping with what they led their fans to believe and what they wanted the media to believe. And again, I’m struck by how often they do this, how often they feed misinformation to a press that swallows it whole and never seems to realise that it was used as a conduit for misinformation in order to mislead the club’s own fans.

And it kind of begs the question as to who they think benefited from those efforts. The fans were always going to find this stuff out because it has to appear in the numbers. The official accounts can’t hide this stuff. So, they were always going to get rumbled, but it got them through the summer. And that was all they cared about. They probably didn’t suspect that they’d be caught in the swirl of crisis at this moment in time when they needed to deliver some good news. All they could deliver was another piece of staggering negativity.

Nothing over there is ever what it seems. And certainly, nothing over there is ever what they try to convince the media and their own supporters that it is.

There is probably no other institution in this country that so routinely misleads the media and lies to its own customer base. And I can tell you that if any club in England treated its local media the way they treat this one up here, there would be fury at every press conference. Journalists traditionally haven’t liked being taken for fools, and they haven’t liked it when they’ve written lies on behalf of people they’re supposed to hold to account and then found out about it.

And they only get away with these kinds of lies because the media lets them, because the media doesn’t pull them up for it, because it doesn’t hold them to account for doing it.

This is why some of us don’t believe the stories about James Bisgrove. He seems just too easy a scapegoat. He is so obviously a put-up job, a phantom that they’ve created so they can dump all the blame for everything that’s ever gone wrong on him.

So much of what was said was designed to further mislead people. Look at the talk about joining a multi-club ownership model. That’s been spun as the Ibrox club trying to do something revolutionary, something game-changing. If you read the reports, you would think they were going to be running a multi-club stable. But what they’re actually talking about is joining one in the way Hibs, Hearts, and other clubs in Scotland are considering doing. And the one they’re banging the drum about most, and the media is covering, is the Manchester City model.

But in that equation, and in the context of what’s actually being discussed here, their club’s not going to be the Manchester City of that structure.

They’re going to be the affiliate club. They’ll be on the third rung of the ladder. In short, their club is going to be subsumed into a larger structure. It is not going to have any kind of individual identity anymore. Its future will be decided somewhere else, by people the Ibrox fans couldn’t pick out of a police lineup.

That club is in so much trouble, and if it’s resorting to seeking that kind of “investment,” then the people there are admitting they are finished as a major force. To become some feeder club? Is that what their fans want? Do they understand that’s what’s being talked about? Or have they been conned again, seduced by another façade?

Whatever works. That board is capable of anything in an effort to get themselves out of this hole. They don’t even care that they might be digging a bigger one. That club is an absolute shambles.