If the Ibrox marketing department wants an easy win, there’s an obvious one everybody would embrace.

If you’re a regular reader of fiction, especially series fiction, you’ve probably experienced this: you’re midway through a book series that wasn’t originally meant to be one, and suddenly it hits you. The writer must have realized they were telling a much bigger story than they had initially intended.

Two examples immediately come to mind. The first is the Harry Potter series. I think J.K. Rowling must have figured out by the second book that she was crafting something far larger—a sprawling, modern mythology. It’s around the end of The Chamber of Secrets that the story starts to get really dark, and from there, it stays that way.

At some point, she must have understood she wasn’t just writing a piece of young adult fiction anymore. She was building a crossover series with broad appeal, one that grew increasingly thematic, complex, and violent as the narrative progressed.

The second example is the Game of Thrones series (A Song of Ice and Fire for the purists), which remains unfinished. Thank you, George R.R. Martin, for keeping us waiting all these years. He initially planned it as a trilogy, then it became four books, then five, and by the end of the third, he seemed to realize it had spiralled into something else entirely. That’s when talk of a six-book series began. We’ve since got a seventh title, A Dream of Spring, but only five books are out. Many readers doubt we’ll see a sixth, and virtually nobody expects the seventh to ever materialize.

I imagine Martin started with a relatively simple idea: a straightforward narrative with clear arcs. He often speaks of knowing each character’s journey, but it’s evident that as the books grew, so did the story’s complexity, until it became this behemoth that nobody—least of all Martin—could wrangle.

This morning, I read a piece in The Guardian about Plymouth Argyle scrapping their planned season-long documentary on Wayne Rooney’s management of the club. His sacking threw a wrench into what must have seemed like a solid concept. As The Guardian noted, this kind of project is becoming so common in England that fans are starting to find them tiresome.

Only a few of these shows have really hit the mark. The All or Nothing series managed a couple of standout entries, while Welcome to Wrexham was conceived from the start as a “phoenix from the ashes” story. That’s akin to writing a six-book series with every character arc and narrative beat planned out in advance.

Yes, it’s had its ups and downs, but the filmmakers and those behind the project knew exactly where they were going from the beginning. It’s a masterpiece of club building as much as it is of storytelling.

For me, though, the gold standard is Sunderland ‘Til I Die.

What sets it apart, as The Guardian rightly observed—and as I wrote in my own review of the show on this site—is that it began as a phoenix-from-the-ashes tale, only to turn into a chronicle of complete and utter unravelling. The most remarkable thing about it isn’t that it was greenlit in the first place, but that the filmmakers didn’t abandon it halfway through when it became clear what the project had become. That took courage—and it made for fantastic television.

Much like the literary examples, there must have been a moment, probably early on, when the filmmakers realized they’d started one project but were actually working on something completely different.

The filmmakers are Sunderland fans, which adds another layer to this. At some point, they had to sit down and make a cold-blooded decision: do we continue? Do we pull no punches? Do we show this calamity for what it is?

In doing so, they turned a documentary into a disaster movie—and made one of the most gripping pieces of football storytelling ever filmed, and I know there was a point where they considered the impact. “Do we really want to see this thing through? And will people watch it?”

The answer to both of those questions was yes. Because sometimes, when a project starts one way and grows beyond its original scope, the result can be something much better than anyone anticipated. And yet, I can’t help thinking there’s a commercial opportunity here that’s being completely overlooked.

What if your club was a disaster zone, and you brought in a documentary crew specifically to capture that chaos? What if the intention, right from the start, was to film utter bedlam? To document the disintegration of fans’ hopes and dreams over the course of a season? What if that was the whole point?

I even have the perfect name for such a show: Ibrox: Everything Is Awful.

I’ve long believed they’re missing a trick. Imagine if they brought in a film crew for just one season and filmed everything. All the chaos, the mayhem. Interviews with fans, raw behind-the-scenes footage—it would be a masterpiece. Everyone would watch it. People would be horrified, disgusted, stunned by what they saw. And yet, nobody would be able to look away.

Picture it. Go back in time.

Imagine a documentary that started with the Van Bronckhorst collapse. You could kick off on the night of the Europa League final and those penalty kicks, then chart the complete unravelling of the following season.

Watching it all unfold from the inside would have been a million times more hilarious—and more fascinating—than seeing it from the outside, where the rest of us could only laugh. And then there’s the eight-month reign of The Mooch. That alone would have made phenomenal television.

Can you imagine it? Watching the Mooch’s team talks? Watching Van Bronckhorst start to flounder? Seeing Clement trying to motivate a dressing room, with the cameras catching every eye-roll and sigh from players who can’t believe what they’re hearing? Interviews with prominent fans as the season collapses around them?

Provided it didn’t make them too much money, this would special.

Their marketing department is really missing a golden opportunity. People would love to watch the Ibrox version of Sunderland ‘Til I Die. A club tearing itself apart, locked in a perpetual crisis. It’s the greatest soap opera in Scottish football—no, in European football. And we’ve loved every second of the Banter Years. Imagine if someone had captured even a fraction of that madness in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It would have been absolutely incredible.

I’ve always been grateful that Celtic never did this. I mean, we did our own version last season, but it didn’t go deep. It didn’t cover the negatives as well as the positives. It was all positive. It was all upside.

That’s because we’re a success.

But how do you get “upside” out of a club that has no upside? How do you make a documentary about a club pulling itself up when, for every step forward, it takes two steps back? Well, you don’t.

You have to know what project you’re working on. You have to understand the basic arc. You have to know you’re creating a documentary record of a disaster—and you have to embrace that fact from the start. That has to be the purpose. And if you do it, you’ll create a masterpiece.

I’m not saying I’d pay to watch it, but I’d definitely watch it.

And I think we all would.

So come on, Patrick Stewart, let the cameras inside the training ground. Let them inside the stadium. Let them into the boardroom and the dressing room. Give them full access. Tell them nothing is off-limits and let the editors have full control over the final cut. And then let us see the result.

Must-see television. No doubt about it. Sevco: The Movie.

Photo by Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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