Celtic fans are aghast as the Ibrox supporters repeat ever mistake they’ve made since 2012.

Way back at the start of the week, when I began writing about the events of 2012—because we had just passed the anniversary of Administration Day—I had no idea what lay in store. I thought I had these five articles planned out and mapped.

I didn’t know that events on Wednesday were about to give Thursday’s article a huge shot in the arm. I didn’t know that what happened on Wednesday would make this article even more relevant to the debate in Scottish football and where we are right now.

But as an example of what I originally intended to sit down and write about, you could not get a clearer or better one than the scenario currently rampaging through their forums. All this talk of an American takeover, and very little of it is grounded in anything like reality. What’s most amazing about it is how little of the discussion expresses any real concern, and that is something I find incredible.

This is a pattern that goes all the way back to before 2012, but the events of that year should have made what is happening right now at Ibrox an absolute impossibility.

Because it doesn’t matter whether these investors have plans that are benign or malignant. It doesn’t matter whether they intend to run the club properly, loot it, or turn it into a superpower.

What matters is that, at the time of writing, nobody even knows which of those scenarios is true—yet they are welcoming these people with open arms anyway.

At least one of those possibilities—and perhaps even two—are dangerous for their club. Running it properly means running it for profit, and that’s something they haven’t done in all the years they’ve existed since crawling out of Rangers’ grave.

To run it at a profit means even more cuts, a business streamlined to break even at best in the short to medium term.

So, they can forget about transfer war chests under that model.

If these people are corporate raiders, then I can’t think of anything worse. Nobody is buying that club to shut it down, sell the ground and training centre, and put a Tesco where Ibrox currently stands.

But, as I pointed out in my Trojan Horse piece earlier today, there are ways of bleeding that club dry over a long period. The Chinese Death by a Thousand Cuts strategy. And those methods would still result in profits for their corporate masters, while the club itself becomes a hollowed-out husk—heavily indebted, mortgaged beyond the hilt, and heading for the Second Death.

That this is even a possibility—and it is a possibility—should scare these people far more than it does.

Instead of indulging in bizarre fantasies—like the one The Daily Record ran today, putting Paris Hilton and Will Ferrell on the Ibrox board (a preposterous, idiotic, moon-howling lunatic asylum of a story that I won’t even dignify by covering in detail)—they should be demanding answers from the people currently running their club. Who the hell is behind this? What are their real intentions?

If reports from south of the border are to be believed, this deal is imminent. It’s right on top of them. And instead of doing some due diligence or demanding that those in charge give them straight answers, they are wheeling the big wooden horse in through the city gates. Every single piece of lunatic speculation on their forums and fan media sites is embarrassing in its lack of scrutiny.

We’ve, in Celtic fan media, have seen it all before.

And that’s what this article was initially going to be about. But you can’t separate the past from the present when the present so closely mirrors the past. You would never think 2012 had happened at all to see the state they are getting into over something with so many unknowns.

The key figures involved have not been properly identified. Their plans have not been submitted for scrutiny. People are seeing only what they want to see, making up scenarios in their heads about how this could go.

I proposed a scenario of my own this morning: that this is the Trojan Horse. That they are letting the enemy through the gates, and the day will come when it wrecks everything from the inside. Just as Trump and his people are doing to the American government right now—if you’re watching that unfolding calamity.

Back in 2011, these same supporters and these same media outlets cheered a guy called Craig Thomas Whyte through the doors of Ibrox. This wasn’t their first major mistake. For years, they indulged David Murray’s bombast and bullshit while the sane and sensible members of his own board warned that his conduct would lead the club into serious financial difficulty.

I’ve said this a million times, so let me say it again: an entire generation of their fans—my generation, people in their 40s—have never seen an Ibrox club run on the basis of what we earn is what we spend.

Every single person in that age group grew up watching a club where someone else paid the bills. Where someone else kept the lights on beyond earnings. They have never seen anything else. They don’t know anything else. They believe this is how football works. That there isn’t any other way to do it.

Except we’ve proven that there is. And that it can be done while sustaining success year after year after year.

So when it became clear that Murray had run out of rope, that he had no more answers, that the banks weren’t going to give him another dime and he wasn’t going to fund the club out of his own pocket, did they tighten their belts? Did they prepare for an era of common sense? No. They went looking for a sugar daddy.

And who answered them? A wheeling, dealing wide-boy with a string of broken companies and creditors left out of pocket behind him. The last kind of person you’d ever want near an institution you love. But he slapped on the gloss. He had an apartment in Monaco and lived in a castle. He was a “billionaire.”

The newspapers bought every word of it. They helped Craig Whyte sell that image of himself, that impression of himself, to the most gullible football fans on Earth. Those fans—desperate for their sugar daddy, desperate for the next mug to pay the bills—thought they had found their man.

And all the adulation they’re pouring on these latest mystery investors? They poured it on Craig Thomas Whyte back then too.

Almost from the minute this guy appeared on the scene, people in Celtic cyberspace were doing their due diligence. Three websites were crucially important in the day-to-day evaluation of who this guy was.

The first was Celtic Quick News (CQN), where I was a regular poster and contributor. A year later, alongside Paul Brennan and Dave Faulds—now of The Celtic Star—I would help found their digital magazine, which would eventually cover the collapse of that club in detail.

The second site was the phenomenal Rangers Tax Case blog, which broke down in every single minute detail not only of the pressures facing the club itself but, over months, through both its writer and the comments section, it became required reading. It dissected the character of Craig Whyte and exposed him for what he was long before the Scottish mainstream media ever caught up.

The work that the RTC site did was phenomenal.

In its own way, the work that The Scottish Football Monitor did was just as impressive. A group of amateur sleuths and online investigators got very busy indeed. Over weeks and months, they too completely dismantled the lies the media told about who Craig Thomas Whyte really was.

I was a regular contributor on that site at the same time I was posting regularly on CQN. And it was on CQN that I first put the findings of my own initial research into Whyte, which I conducted on the very day his name first appeared in the papers as the Motherwell-born billionaire.

I figured that if he really was a guy with that level of net worth, then The Sunday Times Rich List would have him prominently featured.

That publication uses all sorts of weird and wonderful methods to assess the net worth of every high-value individual in the country, and it publishes that information every year. It even includes financial details about hardcore gangsters.

These people go out and dig through tax returns, property records—everything they can find. If necessary, they bring in professionals and forensic accountants to make their list as accurate as possible.

And let’s be blunt: that list is like a league table for high-net-worth individuals, and everyone on it wants to be there. So, most even co-operate to some degree. The idea that a billionaire from Motherwell wouldn’t be on that list—if he truly had that much capital—is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t be taken seriously in any way, shape, or form.

And, for my sins, because I am a hopeless geek when it comes to this stuff, I started to go through The Sunday Times Rich List that year—over 1,000 names—line by line, looking for the man.

I started at the top, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there because the people at the top have net worths in the high billions. But if you’re looking for a legitimate, bona fide billionaire, you don’t want to skip over anything just in case.

That year’s Rich List went all the way down to people with net worths in the tens of millions. So you had the billionaires at the top, and by the time you got to the bottom, you were looking at B-list celebrities, sportspeople, and those who had made a modest fortune from start-ups and stuff like that.

And after going through that list until my eyes were red and my head was sore, I was able to conclude—after several hours—that Craig Thomas Whyte was not on the list. Not anywhere. The Motherwell-born billionaire had a net worth lower than your average Premier League footballer … if he had net worth at all.

Yet this was the guy we were being told was going to buy an entire football club and throw money at all of its problems.

From that moment on, I did not take seriously a single word that I read about that man or his alleged plans for Rangers. Not one. That was due diligence that anybody in the media could have done. Anybody who cared about their club would have done it. But nobody wanted to burst the bubble.

The newspapers had copies to sell. The fans had fantasies they wanted to indulge in. So why ruin it all with something as inconvenient as cold, hard fact?

The Daily Record has had an absolute bonanza over the last couple of days pushing the story about this latest takeover. How much of it is true?

How much of it is speculation?

How much of it is fantasy?

Today, they even ran a story about Paris Hilton being on the Ibrox board. That story is so fantastical and preposterous that the editor should have laughed the writer out of the room for even suggesting it.

And yet, it’s trending on NewsNow. That nonsense is generating tens of thousands of hits from Ibrox fans getting overexcited about an idea that has no more basis in reality than the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Nobody wants to deal with reality. Nobody wants to look past the fairy-tale possibilities. Nobody wants to consider that there are some very grim alternatives lurking beneath all the hype—alternatives that are not only plausible but more likely than any of the optimistic scenarios being spun.

All this talk about the 49ers being behind the bid, all this talk about high-net-worth individuals whose names we don’t know—it could be nothing but window dressing.

Without knowing who is involved, without knowing what the plan is, without knowing how it’s financed or structured, this is dangerous territory. And they don’t seem to care. Not the fans, not the press.

And after everything Craig Whyte did—after seeing the damage that man was able to inflict simply by spinning a few stories and working the PR machine—how can these people be so stupid?

How can they be so gullible?

How can they be so willing to accept all of this without question?

They’ve done it all before, and they never, ever learn.

Before the ink was even dry on the liquidation paperwork, all the same pats on the back that Whyte received were being given to a guy called Charles Green—who, again, had a very interesting history. A history that was all too easy to find.

Some parts of it were so dark that they’ve still never appeared in the mainstream media—for fear that Green might sue. But the Celtic forums uncovered them, bit by bit, in the time between his arrival and his takeover of the club.

And how seriously was our research on Charles Green taken?

Incredibly, it wasn’t. Which part of “we were right last time” didn’t they get?

Remember, Celtic fan sites had dismantled all the lies about Whyte in a matter of weeks. They even published the first pictures of his “takeover headquarters” in the British Virgin Islands; a cheap portacabin in a field of cows. The Record would later slap that picture on its front page and claim a scoop. The cheek of them. Every one of us who knew better pissed ourselves laughing at that.

Yet when we did the same with Green nobody took it seriously. The media didn’t write about it. They didn’t care. Ibrox fans spent a year watching one club liquidate at the hands of a charlatan—and then practically handed its assets to another one.

That happened within 18 months. That club’s assets changed hands twice in that period, and both buyers were wide-boys who took them for a ride. They cheer-led the pair of them through the front door anyway.

Mr “Big Yorkshire Hands” didn’t even hide what he was there to do; he freely admitted that those big hands were for “grabbing money.” No-one amongst the Ibrox support even stopped to consider that he was obviously talking about theirs.

And it didn’t stop with Charles Green.

Every single thing that is being said about the Americans today was being said the last time a billionaire with an English football club took a stake in theirs, and this is the one they really don’t want you to think too much about.

This is the one they really don’t want you digging into.

But you could do a line-by-line substitution of every article they wrote yesterday and swap just two names, the chairman of Leeds and Mike Ashley, and you would not be able to tell the difference. You wouldn’t know which was being written now and which was being written then.

And we all know how that story ended.

Every single argument about why this deal might be attractive to the Americans was being deployed at the time about him. Regular access to European football? That’s what Ashley wants. That’s where the money is.

But when he already had a club playing in a league where the television contracts for finishing last were higher than the complete earnings for the team that wins the Champions League, why would he care about that?

Every one of the Celtic fan sites—every single one—pointed out this glaring flaw in the argument at the time. He didn’t need European football income. He owned a Premier League football club.

Then we were told it was all about improving his global branding. The global branding of a Premier League football club wasn’t enough for him? He needed a West of Scotland football club to really crack America and Asia? A side in the most watched league in the world didn’t offer him the right profile?

Then it was the merchandising he was after. That one, which was the key to collapsing their relationship with him, was the funniest of them all. The guy who owned a gigantic sporting goods empire wanted their club for their merchandising?

As if he needed that to pay his bills.

Not a single one of them seemed to consider that Newcastle fans detested Ashley and the way he ran their club. Not a single one of them actually looked at his record there. There was just a lot of talk about throwing money Ibrox’s way, about transfer war chests and all the rest of it—none of which he’d done with his blue-chip asset in the EPL, none of which he was ever going to see a return on.

Now, the same Ibrox fans who are cheering these guys through the doors will tell you one of the problems they had with Ashley was that he squeezed them until the pips squeaked. It’s never dawned on them that these guys might do the same. Some of them look back on the Ashley era with disgust at becoming effectively a feeder club for Newcastle United, which is all he ever really did want them for.

But even in the most benign scenario—one where these guys aren’t in it to loot the club and one where they aren’t using the club as a conduit for money laundering to get around financial fair play—the most likely scenario by far is that this is Ashley Mark II. They’re going to become nothing more than a feeder club for Leeds. When even Simon Jordan can see it, then it really must be obvious to everyone but them.

Today, in The Express—a newspaper I usually forget even exists because it is so far removed from any version of the world in which I live—the oddly appropriately named Douglas Dickie says that once the deal goes through, £20 million will immediately be made available to the Ibrox boss to spend on transfers.

Which is actually on the lower end of the scale compared to some of the other mad fantasies the media is writing about.

But how likely is that to be true?

Just as we did with Ashley, let’s have a look at what the 49ers group have actually done at Leeds. Ignore all the glitzy, glamorous stories about how they have them at the top of the English Championship and let’s analyse just what they did.

They brought in £157 million in transfer income over the summer and winter transfer windows. Do you know how much of that money went back out again in pursuit of reaching the English Premier League—a jump that, if it happens, will take their company from a £176 million market capitalization to a valuation that is three times the size of that? They spent a grand total of £30 million.

That makes our board of directors seem more than generous; it makes them look as free with the spending as a newly minted lottery winner buying round after round in his local. And let’s put it in even greater context. Let’s put it in a language that not even the thickest member of the Scottish media or the thickest member of the Ibrox support could fail to recognise instantly.

From a transfer take of around £50 million, we’ve spent more than £40 million buying players. In case they can’t do the sums, let me help them out with that. That’s £10 million more than Leeds United’s owners allowed their club to spend trying to reach the English Premier League.

So how is it possible? How is it at all possible that their supporters can believe their club is about to undergo a radical transformation, with this American consortium showering money on them like confetti, when every single available piece of hard data suggests that will not happen? That it can’t happen?

When every single piece of research into past promises made shows how many of them were absolute rubbish—fantastical speculation dreamed up by the worst football media in the world?

And it didn’t even stop with Mike Ashley.

Once they realised—belatedly, after years—that Ashley wasn’t going to spend lavishly on their club any more than he had on Newcastle, what did they do? They drummed him out of the club. And to do what? To fall into the warm embrace of a man with over 80 convictions for tax fraud in South Africa. A guy who a South African judge had called a glib and shameless liar.

A glib and shameless liar whose every word was taken as gospel by a fan base that has been slapped around so many times and has never learned a thing. The same glib and shameless liar who saw them dragged into court more times than his players ever took a winner’s podium. The guy who thought that one title was all it would take for Celtic to collapse like a house of cards. A proven genius, right there.

These people have bought spin, disinformation, misinformation, exaggeration, and lies in every single day of the new club’s existence. If they exist in a parallel universe to us, if they exist in an alternative reality, it is because their own club has gaslit them so many times—and the media has misled and misrepresented situations like this to them so often—that they can no longer tell fantasy from reality at all.

They are, in their own way, very much like the American voters who believed that Trump would make their lives better, when everything he has done in office so far echoes everything he did in office before. He dismantled basic safeguards and protections, insulted America’s allies, emboldened America’s enemies, and thus has made them poorer, weaker, and fundamentally more unsafe. You can only blame the media environment which has fed them his lies up to a point.

But people have free will and agency.

They can find out the facts if they want them. They can make up their minds, and they can act based on the truth. No one keeps them imprisoned in the bubble of misinformation and lies. No one but themselves.

And I can tell you when it all became inevitable.

I can tell you when the path for that club was laid out in front of it, and they took the step towards where they are right now—where they don’t even know what’s around the corner but are celebrating it like a victory anyway.

Because there was a time when lessons might have been learned. When changes might have been made. When these people had an opportunity to grow into something else, to see their club move in another direction.

It happened on 11 August 2012, on the day they played their first-ever game against Peterhead away in the Scottish 3rd Division—a match that they drew 2-2, courtesy of an Andy Little equaliser in the final minute.

It happened before a ball had even been kicked that day. It happened when Charles Green stood on the touchline and gave his media interview in which he claimed that the club had been relegated, not liquidated, and that bigotry, envy, and spite had been at the heart of that decision.

In denying the reality of what had actually happened and presenting the Ibrox fans with an alternative version of the facts, he allowed them to tell themselves that none of it had—and therefore, there were no lessons to learn.

Their club hadn’t died at all. Their club had been victimised. Their club hadn’t made mistakes, but the rest of the game had punished it for its success.

Their whole modern existence—the current club they support, the current team they follow—was built on a foundation of lies, a foundation of fantasy.

Anything they could have learned from the liquidation of Rangers depended on acknowledging that event and all the circumstances surrounding it, including their own role in it. Their own role in blindly cheerleading through the doors a guy with no bona fides to speak of, no money to his name, who probably borrowed the quid he paid David Murray to take the assets off his hands.

They refused to do so. They chose to embrace the lie. And they’ve been living that lie ever since. Every single bad thing that has befallen that club in the 13 years of its existence—they deserved it all.

Those fans who think they’ve suffered, and that their suffering has been at the hands of others, whether through corruption, cheating, or whatever else, deserved it all. They are the true architects of the collapse and the death of Rangers. They are the true architects of the shambles their club is presently in.

And nothing has changed in that regard.

None of those mistakes, none of those disasters, has in any way given them the tools to analyse this current situation properly. And so, if this is a gigantic con job, they’re walking into it with their eyes wide open. If it’s a subsistence-level existence as the plaything of a Premier League side—which is exactly what I think it is—they can have no complaints when the reality of that dawns on them.

This is the club they created, the circumstances they chose.

Every calamity that befalls these people is on them. Every disaster inflicted upon their world is on their shoulders, their cross to bear.

No matter how much they want to blame someone else, the guilty party is staring back at them in the mirror every single day.

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