Watch Ibrox in this window. Wait to see their “trading strategy” take second place to the quick fix.

You know all that talk we’ve been hearing over the past few months about how the Ibrox club is going to commit itself to a brand new set of policies on signing players? Well, I want you to take very careful note of what happens in this January window and ask yourself if you can see any proof that this is actually going to happen.

These people keep talking about copying Celtic’s transfer strategy, but everywhere you look in the media at the moment, and on their fan forums, and every time you listen to one of their so-called fan media reps talking about this, the same thing comes across over and over again. What they’re actually looking for is a silver bullet solution, a quick fix—something that does the job and makes them harder to beat in the here and now.

Let’s take the big debate over a centre-back.

There was talk that people inside the club had offered the manager the opportunity to bring Johnny Evans from Manchester United on loan. Johnny Evans is 38. There’s also talk about bringing back Nico Kati? on a short-term loan deal or a short-term contract, and that’s even more barking. They freely admit that Kati? has struggled with injury issues for years now, and still, there’s talk of this.

I suspect that there will be an attempt to make at least one blink signing during this window. It’ll be a loan, for sure, no question. They can’t afford to spend big money on a “bling” player, but bringing in someone on loan, along with a couple of battle-hardened veterans to try to get them through a campaign which is already as good as over, is exactly what you’d expect from that club and the short-term way it thinks and acts.

That club is never going to take a long-term approach to signings.

It’s never going to play the same type of game that we play in terms of bringing in young players, blooding them in the first team, and then selling them for a profit. They won’t do that because they won’t give anybody that opportunity when they can just go out and buy what they see as the ready-made player, which they believe gives them a better chance to challenge in the league.

I’m not going to say that our strategy was entirely down to their absence from the top flight, but let’s be honest, when Rangers crashed into the abyss, that gave us an opportunity to do more than just add new titles and trophies to the boards without a realistic challenge.

It gave us a chance to retool the whole club and redesign the way Celtic worked. And we made ample use of that to put in place the transfer strategy that exists to this day.

That was a unique set of circumstances, and by the time the Ibrox club got to the top flight, that policy and that strategy were already bearing fruit year on year. It gave us the wherewithal to go out and make good signings, do good business, and build the modern version of Celtic. No such opportunity is going to present itself to them.

This current Ibrox club is going to find itself permanently chasing Celtic, permanently determining its transfer policy on what will catch us quickest. Their fans have no patience and no tolerance for the idea of buying six or seven young players and watching to see if they turn into a team.

They want to know that they’re bringing in people who can put down a marker and challenge us right away. This is why some of their fans want to give Clement a chance. They see that a strategy of sacking manager after manager simply resets the dial and puts them back to zero.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of those fans to make up a proper season-ticket base. The majority of that club’s supporters are always going to come from the “we want it now” brigade. And those guys will always have the greatest sway.

They’ll always make the most noise, they’ll always stamp their feet, and they’ll always get what they want ahead of the more circumspect supporters who understand how a transfer trading strategy works. If that’s how they’re going to try to rebuild, they’re going to have to be patient.

Would Celtic have been able to adopt its current transfer trading model whilst there was a team called Rangers in the league? I don’t know for sure. I have doubts. Our strategy, in no small way, came out of the death of Rangers, and Sevco’s climb through the leagues gave us enough time and flexibility to get it running and get it running right.

They did have a similar opportunity, and that opportunity was there as they climbed through the leagues.

And at every stage, they wrecked it for themselves. First, they squandered the first two years on the crazy Ally McCoist experiment, where they let him spend money on has-beens rather than developing young talent and bringing it through. Mark Warburton was allowed to raid the lower leagues of England, and he did bring in a couple of players who’ve lasted the course and gone the distance.

But almost everyone of an Ibrox persuasion agrees that some of those players, like Tavernier, should have been sold when their value was highest and there were still clubs dumb enough to think they represented good value for money. But the club did two things wrong: first, it believed its own hype about those players, and second, it set wildly inflated transfer fees because of that belief. As a result, they didn’t get rid of these guys when they could’ve still got cash for them.

Then they allowed Gerrard to go out and spend even more money and bring in more dreck, wasting even more of the club’s valuable time and resources. The same mistake was repeated with van Bronckhorst, and it came to its apex with the crazy decision to let Michael Beale loose with a chequebook, signing a bunch of players with experience but without the requisite talents to form a team capable of challenging for the title.

Any attempt at a sustainable transfer strategy was completely eradicated by the Michael Beale experiment and is only now back in vogue because Clement has gone out and signed a number of young players, only one of whom looks as if he might be worth a damn. And I think the jury is still well and truly out on that one too.

But you watch this window, and you watch the way they go about preparing for the summer. The idea that they’re going to go out and buy five or six young players in their early 20s and try to grow them into a sustainable team? It’s for the birds. That club will never tire of looking for quick fixes. Its fans will never stop hoping for that miracle.

And it is precisely for this reason that they undergo cycles of crisis.

Far from breaking the wheel, they’re going to get busy over January, setting up the next one. As I once wrote in a fictional piece, trouble is never behind these people—simply on the other side of the wheel, waiting to come back around again.

The short-term thinking that dominates everything over there, and in particular the focus of that short-term thinking, which amounts to nothing other than catching Celtic, is precisely the reason why.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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