The Record is pushing Ibrox austerity as a strategic choice and their fan media is going along with it.

Today, an article in The Daily Record caught my eye, a truly dreadful one which was attempting to dress up the Ibrox austerity drive as a positive. I read it just after I had read a similarly deranged piece from an Ibrox fan media site.

What a desperate bunch some of the Ibrox fan sites are.

I mean, seriously, there’s one of them called Rangers News, which trots out a non-stop, never-ending stream of utter banality, stupidity, and occasional insanity, although not quite on the level of Ibrox News, which I sometimes mistake for Ibrox Noise based on some of the lunacy which appears on there.

Their latest gem is an absolute peach: a claim that their club can trump the Jota deal by signing Ryan Kent on a free transfer.

This is just one of the many bizarre fantasies these sites churn out. The Ibrox fan media blogosphere is practically a goldmine for this kind of stuff. These same websites have been peddling crazy transfer stories throughout this window. At least this one involves a player who’s available for nothing.

Ibrox fan media’s previous “greatest hits” from January started to roll down the conveyor belt the very second the window opened, with talk of spending big before the penny dropped that they weren’t going to splash the cash. There was the Morgan Whittaker fantasy, which would’ve cost £10 million to get underway and the whole thing ended farcically, and, hilariously, with the suggestion of getting Marcus Rashford on loan—a fantasy that has now corrupted some Celtic sites, where it’s just as ludicrous.

The days of competing with Celtic for headlines are long gone for that club. Back when they could compete, they occasionally pulled off a big-name signing, a bit of bling to dangle for the fans, during these windows.

Those days are over now. Even so, Scott McDermott of the Daily Record posted an atrocious piece this afternoon about the new “transfer policy” at Ibrox, praising them for signing some of their younger players to long-term contracts.

What makes McDermott’s article truly appalling is the attempt to dress this up as some kind of revolution at Ibrox which has been signed off on by Clement as part of a strategic pivot. He claims, in fact, that this is what Philippe Clement has wanted all along, which is pure, unadulterated nonsense.

Clement didn’t come to Ibrox to be a youth development manager, and any suggestion to the contrary is laughable.

The article contains this absolute howler: “Because there’s been a shift in Clement’s thinking over the last few months. It’s unclear what triggered it exactly. But when, out of nowhere, he revealed that young midfielder Bailey Rice would now be part of the first-team set-up, it felt significant.”

It’s unclear what triggered it? Really? A national journalist writing for a mainstream title doesn’t know what happened here?

Let me help him out here, since this blog and others have been pointing it out for weeks. The shift came after Patrick Stewart told Clement he’d get a maximum of two signings in this window, and he could like it or lump it.

They’re skint. That’s it. There’s no grand strategy. No pivot to youth development. Clement has no choice. His squad will end this window weaker than it started, and that’s only if they manage to offload the players they’re desperate to get rid of. In those circumstances, his already threadbare team will need to be augmented from the academy, and that’s probably not just a short term change.

And yet, McDermott also writes this: “While the likes of Rice and Nsiala were pushed to the fore, he decided Kieran Dowell, Rabbi Matondo and Tom Lawrence weren’t part of the plan.” Everyone knows that’s garbage. Clement didn’t make that call; the club did. He was told to cut costs.

Despite the writing being on the wall over there in letters so high they can be seen by Hugh Keevins without his glasses on, McDermott concludes his article with this absolute beauty: “And if they do it right? In a few years’ time, THEY might be the cash-rich champions dipping into their pockets for a £9m January buy.”

No wonder the Ibrox fan sites are so deranged. They look at the mainstream media and see people like this writing utter drivel, then take their cue from it. It’s no wonder they churn out content that’s just as bad, if not worse. If a mainstream outlet is producing pro-Ibrox propaganda like that, why shouldn’t they? Why not play cheerleader for dressing up austerity as if it’s part of some master plan?

All these people have lived in the same bubble for so long they can’t break out of it. They look at their club’s predicament and try to spin it as a strategic pivot instead of what it is: an overdue recognition of reality. Their new status is clear. They’re just another club trying to keep the lights on.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

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