McGarry’s Herald article is the worst on the Ibrox “takeover” yet. It’s appalling.

In years to come, when our media looks back on the last week, they should do so with a sense of deep shame.

It’s not been a great week for Ibrox fan media either. But that’s to be expected from desperate people clinging to their last vestiges of hope.

They were never going to behave normally, reasonably, or rationally under those circumstances—because they never do anyway.I can excuse them their delusions. But the mainstream media is supposed to be better than this.

This has not been their finest hour. And nothing sums it up better than Graeme McGarry’s piece in The Herald this morning.

For the first time in a while, I’m giving a non-Keith Jackson article the full Jackson treatment—because if any piece ever deserved it, this one does.

Let’s start, as always, with the headline.

Fans right to be excited – 49ers can make (Ibrox) great again

Straight away, we have the first bit of speculative nonsense.

First, it’s not even clear that the 49ers are meaningfully involved in this. Second, how can anyone say the fans are right to be excited when so much of this is up in the air? Who, exactly, have the so-called 49ers made “great” anyway?

They haven’t achieved anything at Leeds United yet, but all week I’ve been hearing about how brilliant this “revolution” has been for that club. Let me repeat the facts: £150-odd million in transfer income this season, and only £30 million spent.

That doesn’t sound like an organisation throwing money around like confetti. And that’s in pursuit of a Premier League place—the ultimate financial prize. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they weren’t even taking that particularly seriously.

As for the 49ers themselves, they bought the franchise after a period of great success. They haven’t won anything major since. So what have they put in the win column?

But let’s get to the article itself. It starts with this:

“Break out the star-spangled banners and the Make Rangers Great Again baseball caps. What’s the point in being a football fan if you can’t get a little bit carried away?”

First off, only a support as utterly debased and deranged as theirs would treat this as an invitation to pay tribute to a stone-cold psychopath—a serial liar, criminal, and abuser who, at this moment, is a bigger threat to Western democracy than the Soviet Union ever was. And if anyone wants to come on here defending him, don’t bother—you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

As for the idea that fans should get “a little carried away”—the people most carried away this week have been journalists like McGarry. And that’s the problem. These people are supposed to be objective, to stand back and offer proper analysis. Instead, we get this fawning nonsense.

(Ibrox) supporters, on the whole, seem to be rather excited about the news of potential American investment into the club, as they look to Paraag Marathe, president of football operations at the San Francisco 49ers and the leader of a consortium looking to take control of the club, to revive their fortunes.

First, the evidence that Marathe is leading this consortium is flimsy at best. Even Keith Jackson—who started all this—hasn’t gone that far. At best, he’s a background player putting up some of the capital. The idea that this is some grand 49ers-led takeover is a fantasy.

And even if we assume it’s true, there’s another glaring assumption: that he wants to take over to “revive the club’s fortunes.” That might not be true at all. But we’ll get to that.

And they are right to be. The (Ibrox) fanbase have been crying out for a development like this to give them a shot at breaking Celtic’s dominance over recent years, and attempt to close the financial gap that is only increasing by dint of their city rivals’ participation in the Champions League and their own poor transfer trading.

Let’s be absolutely clear here. Their fans have zero interest in closing the financial gap in any meaningful sense. That gap exists because Celtic makes more money. It’s a structural reality.

They don’t want to build anything. They want someone to throw money at the first-team squad—money that hasn’t been earned, that hasn’t been generated by the club. They are the footballing equivalent of someone rattling a charity tin outside a train station. They want a handout, a shortcut. They don’t want to endure years of hard graft and intelligent planning.

God knows though that if any support will nevertheless be casting a cynical and scrutinous eye towards any potential investor, it will be the (Ibrox) fanbase.

If McGarry believes that, someone needs to take his email account away before he sends his bank details to a Nigerian prince. The Ibrox fans are not cynical about this. They are euphoric. They have done zero due diligence. They have no intention of doing any. That would burst their little fantasy bubble.

I’ve done my own research, and I can assure you, there are no hard questions being asked over there. Just look at their reaction. The star-spangled banners, the MARGA hats—these people are already sold. They will roll out the red carpet for these investors, no matter who they are. That is a stone-cold fact.

They have been burned before by the empty promises of supposedly mega-rich money men, after all, so no matter their desperation to end the current cycle of failure they are stuck in on the pitch, they will not tolerate a return to the days when ‘spivs’ and chancers roamed the Ibrox boardroom in their ill-gotten club ties.

That paragraph is extraordinary.

I laid all this out in detail on Friday. Their fans are the sole people to blame for everything that has happened since 2012. Every “spiv” and “chancer” was cheered into that boardroom. Every single one of them was exposed beforehand—not by their own fans, but by ours, and in one of the greatest ironies in football history, here they go again.

And they won’t tolerate it? If these people turn out to be what I think they are—vulture capitalists in it to make as much as they can, regardless of what the club has to endure during their little reign—then what exactly will the Ibrox fans do about it?

If these people buy the club in a leveraged takeover, dump the debt onto its shoulders, start charging it money to use its own stadium, turn it into a feeder organisation for Leeds, and slowly but surely bleed it of everything it has …

Are they going to protest? Let me tell you about their soon-to-be corporate masters. These people live in gated communities surrounded by private security.

If you want to shift them, you’re going to have to do better than scrawling some words on a bed sheet. Because these people—if you give them power over your club and they turn out not to be your sort of people—can turn the lights out and plough the place under without a second thought.

Man United fans, after a campaign lasting years, have not moved the Glazers an inch. Arsenal fans have not budged Kroenke one inch. So, what exactly are these people going to do? The people who couldn’t even save their first club and who can’t even bring themselves to do the due diligence that might just prevent another disaster here?

If they don’t stop these people before they’re through the gates, there’s no telling what damage they’ll do once they’re inside the walls.

And no fan movement is going to stop them.

This approach, though, seems a world away from the sort of fly-by-night monorail salesmen who once stalked Rangers in the dim and distant past. But it is not necessarily the money these people undoubtedly have behind them that should have the Ibrox support rejoicing over the potential involvement of this consortium.

Well, you don’t know what this approach is, so you don’t know that it’s a world away from that.

The best on-screen depiction of the monorail salesman type was actually done in The Simpsons in the episode Marge vs. the Monorail, where Springfield came into some money. Instead of spending it on fixing the roads, they were conned by a confident chance called Lyle Lanley.

I’ve used the analogy in articles about Ibrox before, specifically about King.

And you know how Lanley did it? With some vague talk and a song. It’s one of the great satires of the modern age. And because it had a catchy tune and he made the idea sound so sweet, the people of Springfield ate it up.

Anybody who knows anything about the confidence trick business—and I’ve got a fascination with it, so I’ve read a couple of books and watched every movie about confidence tricks that I can find—knows that it’s always presented as a deal that’s too good to be true.

And there’s a saying in that world: you can’t cheat an honest man.

It’s not true, of course.

But there’s a core of truth in it … because dishonest people make the best “marks.”

The reason for that is that some major confidence tricks depend, to a certain extent, on a certain willingness to break the rules, to look for shortcuts, to chase easy money, even if it’s a little dangerous. They depend on greed. And because an honest person wouldn’t take those shortcuts or chase that kind of cash or do something immoral or even illegal in pursuit of it, they make the worst targets for a certain type of scam.

McGarry comes across like a babe in the woods; let me clue him in. There are people out there who make a living calling others on the phone and pretending they work for Sky and they don’t care if you’re a little old lady living on her own with only a few quid in savings or a City of London trader with cash on the hip.

They are remorseless if you give them the slightest opening … I get calls from these folk once a month and I enjoy shredding them in the most vicious language, because I know that almost all of them have, at some point, taken some pensioner for his entire bank roll. This is the world we live in. The wise person always keeps that in mind.

As to the rest, what have I said about that club time and time again? They’re desperate. And desperate people do desperate things. And you don’t get more desperate than something like this. And let me tell you who else is desperate—their directors.

Their current board of directors is being hounded out of a club they care about, one they’ve financed out of their own pockets, by fans who are ungrateful—if we’re being generous with the terminology. And so, I have a sneaking suspicion that they wouldn’t mind selling out, even if it meant those fans got their fingers burned.

If I were in their shoes, I might be tempted to do something I didn’t altogether trust, just because those people had behaved so abysmally toward me.

How does this McGarry think the monorail salesmen of the world manage to part people from their money so readily, over and over again?

Does he think they wear cheap suits, carry tattered briefcases, and don’t properly polish their shoes? These people look and sound slick. They present the right image. And because McGarry sounds just as gullible and willing to believe in the bona fides of people he knows nothing about as the average Ibrox fan, he proves exactly this point.

There’s a phrase often wrongly ascribed to P.T. Barnum that says, “there’s a fool born every minute.” There’s an addendum to that, which I believe originated in poker: “and there are two to take them.”

Meaning, for every fool in the world, there are two people who can spot them a mile away and are more than happy to part them from their money.

The current Ibrox board, and the generosity many of them have shown towards their club—both in terms of financial investment and their time—will not soon be forgotten by the fans.

Absolute nonsense from start to finish, that paragraph.

Because the fans don’t care what sacrifices these people have made. As I said in the previous section, they’re ungrateful, and they’ve shown that ingratitude over and over again. They don’t understand the sacrifices that have been made. They don’t get that these people have subjected themselves to mockery and stress. Some of them have suffered emotionally, mentally, and physically because of it, and they’ve all certainly been hurt in the pocketbook.

And these selfish supporters couldn’t care less.

The way they’re running the club right now? It’s the only way a club should be run. They’re trying, after years, to restore sanity. Years of overspending, and they’re reigning it in—to make that club stand on its own two feet at last.

And that is the one thing they were never going to be allowed to do. They were never going to be allowed to put that club on a stable footing. And no matter what McGarry says here, no matter what he appears to believe, that’s not what the Ibrox fans want.

People keep talking about how they want to emulate the Celtic model. That is the Celtic model—to run on a sustainable basis. But that doesn’t interest these people at all.

A wealthy Rangers man steering the ship would always be the ideal option, of course. But alas, one with the expertise to revolutionise the way the club is being run and bring an end to the annual sequence of losses doesn’t seem to be out there.

You notice the emphasis on wealthy there, right? And you’ll notice I left the word Rangers intact because this is an appropriate use for it.

Because that’s what these people are all about. They haven’t learned a damn thing from 2012. The fact that they still call themselves by that name proves it. The fact that they’re still looking for a sugar daddy who believes what they believe proves it.

And it doesn’t take a revolution to change the way a club like them is run. It simply takes common sense and a little fiscal sanity.

In case this clown hasn’t spotted this, what most of these Peepul, including some in his own business, are advocating, and what he is advocating himself whether he realises it or not, is not an end to the sequence of losses at all.

That’s what the current board is trying to do. What he and others are asking for is someone to underwrite even greater losses. They can deflect and deny all they want, but that’s exactly what they’re hoping for.

It’s not that they haven’t spent money, after all. It’s just been spent poorly. And besides, any potential investor would not be able to artificially raise the transfer outlay all that significantly in any case due to financial sustainability rules.

Okay, so a little bit of common sense has been injected into the piece with that paragraph. But here’s the question that naturally arises from such a statement: if the potential investor can’t raise transfer funds and can’t throw money at the problem, is it really worth the risk? Is selling to such an investor a sensible move when you don’t know their true motives or what their plan is? It seems like a huge gamble, just to make yourself feel a little bit better come season ticket renewal time.

What the club badly needs, more than anything, is an injection of energy and expertise from someone with a background in reviving underperforming sporting institutions. Someone to get their house in order on both a commercial and sporting footing and increase the amount they can invest in the team over time by growing turnover and profit.

See, this is where you lose me, McGarry. This is where you really lose me. An injection of energy and expertise? I get those things. But expertise in what? Because unless it’s turning water into wine, I don’t really know what more that club can do.

They play in Scotland. That puts a ceiling on any commercial contract they could ever hope to sign. It limits how much broadcasting revenue they’ll ever bring in.

And because they are, in fact, just a tiny West of Scotland institution—not the global player they seem to think they are—that forever restricts how many shirts they’ll sell and who’ll want to buy them. And this MARGA stuff will go over like a lead weight amongst San Francisco fans who live in a state which deplores Trump.

And what is this “background in reviving underperforming sporting institutions” all about? Because even the most cursory examination of the facts reveals a couple of things.

First, the 49ers were a highly functioning, high-performing sporting institution once upon a time. That was before the present owners bought them. Since then, they’ve been underperforming. So, if you’re looking at their recent history under this ownership, the opposite is actually true.

And the Leeds United story has only just started, so it’s way too early to call it a momentous success. They currently sit top of the English Championship, but that’s a topsy-turvy league. We’ve seen a lot of clubs win it unexpectedly and a lot of clubs that were expected to win it fall short.

Also, Leeds United are not some phoenix rising from the ashes. They are a Premier League-level club, the proverbial sleeping giant, and it’s long overdue that they were restored to the top flight on a permanent basis.

It’s not going to take a miracle worker to get them there. Leeds is a huge club, but like many others, it has been run by people who lacked a clue. And in case the penny hasn’t dropped here, the current ownership has been sitting around that boardroom table for a lot of years already, including during some very bad ones.

As I said, these people are so ambitious for that club that they spent less in the transfer market this year than Celtic did—despite taking in three times as much in transfer income. That doesn’t sound like they’re throwing money at the problem. It sounds to me like they’re running Leeds as a for-profit venture and hoping they hit the jackpot at the same time. They’re doing well right now, but this season ain’t over yet. And getting a team to the Premier League and keeping them there is no easy job.

Now, this “getting their house in order on a commercial footing” claim—what does it even mean? It’s just words. If someone can tell me how they’re going to break the glass ceiling that hems them in right now—and hems us in too—I’d love to know. Because if they’ve found some trapdoor that we’ve missed, we can exploit it as well.

If there’s some magic bullet that Celtic’s own commercial department hasn’t thought of, I’ll be very surprised indeed. We’ve had some phenomenal marketing people working for us. And, you know what? The Ibrox club had a pretty good one working for them too.

It’s not exactly fashionable to praise James Bisgrove, but the Saudis didn’t hire him for nothing. They think he knows what he’s doing. He signed commercial contracts at a rapid clip over there—turning their shirt into a Formula One car is just one example of it.

I cannot say this enough times: they are operating at their peak, or close to it. There is no miracle solution. No breakthrough waiting to happen. They are a West of Scotland football club that the rest of the world does not care about.

And in case it hasn’t dawned on McGarry—or anyone else—there’s only one way to increase profits in the short term, and that is to cut costs. Because right now, they are a loss-making company. Short of pulling rabbits out of hats, I don’t know what these people are going to do in the short-to-medium term to change that—unless they slash spending dramatically.

That could almost be the mission statement of 49ers Investments, the investment wing of NFL outfit the San Francisco 49ers. And apparently, they have “previous” to prove it.

Where have they proved it? Show me the evidence. That’s a bold statement to make—so prove it. If they have “previous” to prove it, then it should be easy to demonstrate. So where is it?

Marathe is also the chairman of Leeds United, with his group taking an initial 15 percent stake in 2018, before upping that to 44 percent in 2021. They eventually completed a £170m deal to take overall control of the club two years ago.

See? It’s exactly as I said earlier—I did my homework too. They’ve been sitting around the boardroom table at Leeds for the last seven years. So, where’s the great revolution been in that time? What are all these great changes? Or were these minority shareholders withholding all their key information and transformative skills until they had a greater shareholding?

Well, they got that in 2021. That was four years ago. And what did they do with it? Continued to withhold all that relevant information and all those transformative changes?

What’s the record been in the last two years? Where are the great innovations? What transformative procedures and policies have they introduced at Leeds? I’m not saying they haven’t, but give the Ibrox fans more than just talk—demonstrate some proof. Produce some data. Show me what they are.

Because right now, all of this sounds like PR fluff being regurgitated over and over again. Where’s the hard evidence?

Their stewardship of the Elland Road club is generally viewed favourably by their fanbase, with Leeds looking likely to gain promotion back to the English Premier League this season, while Marathe has quelled concerns over the sale of a minority stake in the club to Red Bull.

Ah, now we arrive at something interesting. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, this claim that they are generally viewed favourably by the fanbase—well, I happen to know some Leeds fans, and they’re more ambivalent than you might think. A lot of them are still in wait-and-see mode. Others are unimpressed. And you know who found that out to his cost the other day? Keith Jackson. One of his media colleagues actually spoke to some Leeds fans and got a very different impression.

And embarrassingly for McGarry, so did Matt Lindsay from his own paper. And he got the same answer that Jackson did on Saturday. Lindsay, of all the mainstream hacks I’ve read this week, is the only one who deserves praise for his take on these matters. It is far more sober, serious and sensible than the rest of it, and even then the real weight in one of the articles is when he talks to former Celtic investor David Low.

There’s nothing beats going to a Celtic fan for the answers, is there?

Also, yes, Leeds United fans are concerned about the club’s sale to Red Bull. What’s going on there? Are their owners maybe not quite as “expert” as they make out and are looking to bring in further expertise? Or are they considering a full-on partnership with Red Bull, which would make Leeds a small cog in their big wheel?

If that’s the case, where does that leave the Ibrox club? Third in the food chain? The feeder club for the feeder club?

As another proud, traditional British footballing institution, the fans of Leeds United are as unlikely as Ibrox supporters to accept becoming a minor piece in a corporate empire. They are even less likely to accept a rebrand in the style of RB Leipzig or Red Bull Salzburg.

But let me ask again—what exactly would the Leeds fans do if they suddenly found out they’d been absorbed into the Red Bull machine and were about to undergo such a transformation?

How would they fight back against the faceless billionaire colossus that bought the club with borrowed millions and dumped that debt onto its books?

Unless Leeds fans have a spare £175 million lying around, they might struggle to do much about it. If the owners want to change things, or if they’ve already made up their minds, there won’t be much that can stop them.

The 49ers group now own Leeds United lock, stock, and barrel—everything from the lightning rods on the stadium roof to the balls in the kit room. And they can pretty much do whatever they want with it. The last thing they’re going to let stop them from running things their way is the working-class fans of a club that has seen better days.

“By joining the 49ers stable, they will benefit from access to their talent identification networks and infrastructure, while retaining their status as a separate entity.”

That’s just meaningless corporate buzzword bullshit.

Strip it back and ask: How exactly does a football club benefit from the talent identification network of an American football team or vice versa?

If it’s about analytics, every club has access to analytics. You can hire analytics companies, and if you’re willing to pay top rates, you can get the best in the world. You don’t need to partner up with anyone for that. And analytics isn’t new—it’s been in football for 15 years. I’ll tell you what, though: you can still spot an Endrick a mile away, whether you’re using analytics or not.

And as for infrastructure, sure, Leeds and Red Bull might be able to use better facilities, and the 49er’s themselves might like the idea, but the infrastructure for all three organisations is located some distance away from that of the others. So how exactly does that help them? How will it help the Ibrox club?

Are they going to pop over to use the 49ers’ training ground when it’s empty? That sounds like an expensive trip for not much return. What is this magical “infrastructure” he’s on about?

Let me say it again: these are two different sports. American football infrastructure is built specifically for that game. So how the hell does a football club from industrial England or Scotland benefit from it? McGarry is doing what so many in his profession do—he’s heard some interesting-sounding words and is repeating them without thinking about their actual meaning.

“They’re another set of eyes and ears—pretty darn keen and expert eyes and ears—in seeing other players in other leagues,” Marathe explained last year.

That’s the Leeds chairman talking about the Red Bull link-up. But if the 49ers have all this incredible infrastructure, data, scouting expertise, and professionalism, why do they need Red Bull to piggyback off?

“Forget even about Red Bull players. They have extra eyeballs on a lot of players. As we evaluate and do the work for this window and future windows, we can say, ‘What do you think of this player?’”

Can you believe you just read that? This is the Leeds United chairman—the guy the Scottish media keeps hyping as some kind of genius—talking about asking Red Bull for advice on who to sign. And what happens when Red Bull says, “We wouldn’t sign him?”

Do Leeds take a pass? And if this is a player Red Bull want for themselves, why in the name of God would they share that info with Leeds?

“There are things we can learn that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to learn. In terms of an official interplay between the clubs, there’s not one.”

So let’s get this straight—if these guys need Red Bull’s expertise just to operate, wouldn’t Leeds have been better off in Red Bull’s hands in the first place? Because from the way he’s talking, Red Bull is the valuable partner here.

“This deal then has the potential to revolutionise and modernise the way (Ibrox) operates. And for all that the current Ibrox hierarchy may have reached the end of the road in terms of where they can take the club, fans disgruntled by their track record over the last few seasons will no doubt concede that they would not sell on their shares in unison to anyone they felt could not take (the club) forward.”

Let’s take that last claim first. If the Ibrox board is as hopeless as their fans and the media claim, why should anyone trust them to vet the new owners properly? These are the same people the fans want gone. Yet now we’re supposed to believe they’re capable of deciding the club’s future with some great wisdom?

And do they even care at this point?

If these investors sound even halfway credible, that’s enough for the current owners to cash out and move on without the stress of appeasing their eternally disgruntled fanbase. I bet they’ll jump at the chance. They might trust that these people have some expertise, but probably based on the same PR spin the media is swallowing whole.

And as for this talk about “revolutionising” the club, the same logic that applies to Leeds applies to Ibrox. If Red Bull spots a top prospect, why wouldn’t they just sign him? If they don’t sign him, Leeds probably will.

So, what exactly does the Ibrox club get out of this?

The third-choice players? The fourth-choice? The fifth-choice? Because the bigger clubs in this arrangement aren’t just going to stand around letting them scoop up the gems while they play with their footballs.

Few will remain once the deal goes through, as a professionalisation of the club will inevitably ensue. American John Halstead, who has been reported as a key figure in these negotiations, may well remain in situ. But as my colleague Chris Jack has also reported in the Rangers Review, beyond the newly appointed chief executive Patrick Stewart and chairman Fraser Thornton, this would be a new broom sweeping through the corridors of power.

Well, of course, it will. If these guys are coming in with a radical agenda, they don’t want anyone on the board questioning it. And why should they? If they put up the money, it’s their ball to play with. But what does he even mean by “professionalisation”? If he means the club will be run like a business, fair enough—that’s inevitable. But how is that different from the way it’s being run now?

They’re miles away from transforming the club financially. The only way they can make it break even—far less turn a profit—is to start cutting costs drastically. And I’m not sure a lot of people have fully grasped that yet.

The big question that remains is whether or not Philippe Clement is the best man to carry forward this new strategy from the dugout, and it will likely be the first major call for the new sporting director (they) are currently looking to appoint.

That is, hands down, the most embarrassing paragraph in the entire piece. If this guy seriously thinks that is the biggest question here, he’s delusional. If this were happening to Celtic, the future of the manager wouldn’t even make my top 50 concerns.

Clement is a joke, and everyone knows it. He won’t last much longer. But that isn’t even close to the most pressing issue if your club is about to be taken over without fan consultation, without transparency, and without anyone being allowed to ask a single serious question before the ink is dry on the contract. Who cares about the manager? It’s the future of the club that should be on their minds.

The only way this succeeds — and the only way any investor has a prayer of seeing a return, to answer the question about their motives — is if this project is run sensibly and sustainably, with revenue growth to match.

Again, that’s just empty jargon. If he thinks that’s an answer to the question about their motives, he’s mistaken.

Oh, the club has to be run sustainably? That’s as obvious as it gets. And that’s exactly what the people currently at the club have been trying to do. That’s why they didn’t splash the cash in this transfer window. That’s why the manager is constantly complaining about being outspent by Celtic. It’s why they are hated.

So, taking into account Marathe’s track record, the current situation at (Ibrox) and the potential benefits this investment may bring, do they really have any choice?

Well, the fans don’t, because they’re not being consulted on this. They’re not being asked for their opinion. But if you look at the forums, you can get a sense of what they think.

And the answer to the question, of course, is yes, they do have a choice.

If the people running the club genuinely want to act in its best interests, and they can’t see the potential benefits after looking beyond all the smoke and mirrors, they’ll find themselves scratching their heads, wondering what will really change in the way the club is run. If they’re concerned about risks like a leveraged buyout that could saddle the club with unmanageable debt, then yes, they have a choice.

Or they should have a choice. But it’s the very choice the mainstream media will make sure they don’t have, because if you ask people like McGarry, they’ve already made up their minds. They’ve heard the monorail song, and they’re going along for the ride. The idea of demanding a proper, written plan, one that’s charted, costed, and thoroughly thought through, is apparently just not important enough when people can distract themselves with fantasies, it seems.

And that takes me back to the great confidence tricks. A great con will always show you exactly what you expect to see.

As Maria Konnikova said in her fabulous book, The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Always Fall For It, “If the audience isn’t convinced, the magician is doing something wrong.”

Whenever I think about it, I can’t help but think of the movie Nuremberg.

It’s a brilliant dramatization of the war crimes trial, with Brian Cox at his best as Hermann Göring, and Alec Baldwin playing the American prosecutor, whose job is to secure guilty verdicts against the defendants.

One of the prosecution strategies involves hiring a psychologist to talk to each of the defendants. When Albert Speer is asked why he went along with everything, he says he felt like a man who had been under a spell.

That spell has broken, and he realizes that everything Hitler said, the beliefs that held him, were just empty platitudes.

Speer was an intelligent and accomplished man. When asked how someone like him could fall so deeply under the spell of empty rhetoric, he explained that it’s easy because the whole point of an empty platitude is that it’s something you can interpret however you want.

You hear exactly what you want to hear in it. You hear the broad strokes, and your own imagination does the rest.

It’s the basis of every great confidence trick. They show you just enough for you to fill in the gaps yourself. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.

So yes, of course the club has a choice. Those who run it have a choice. But I don’t think the mainstream media or the Ibrox fans are going to let them make any other choice.

The definition of madness, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. The current setup at Ibrox gives the club virtually no chance of turning the Scottish Premiership into a two-horse race again.

I have to admit, this is the one paragraph in his entire article that genuinely made me burst out laughing.

“The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.” I could’ve used that quote myself (I have used it, many times, in relation to the Gullabillys over the road) and stuck it in my 2012 piece about how the fans are to blame for all of this.

Craig Whyte sold himself as a Motherwell-born billionaire, and they bought it.

Charles Green sold himself as a serious businessman, morally offended by what had happened to their club, wanting to be their avenger and secure justice on their behalf and they bought that too.

Then they convinced themselves that a genuine billionaire, with a Premier League club of his own, would throw money at them that he hadn’t thrown at his blue-chip investment. They told themselves all sorts of lies about how he would transform their fortunes. And when it became clear how wrong they were, they ran him out of town.

The next guy they embraced was a South African convicted tax criminal who made virtually the same promises Green had. And they bought into that as well.

Now, they’re all aboard this particular bus, with no idea who’s driving it, where it’s going, or how it’s going to get there.

That’s close to the definition of madness, in my book.

The fans have stars and stripes in their eyes and see a brighter future for the club at last. The takeover may not be quite signed, sealed, and delivered yet, but for the first time in a long time, the Ibrox support is cautiously optimistic.

It would suit them better to be just cautious, but they’re not.

They’re hysterical. And if I’m being brutally honest, McGarry, you sound pretty hysterical yourself. But don’t pretend what you’ve written is journalism.

Keith Jackson could’ve written that article, and that’s why I treated it as if he had.

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