The Ibrox club spiralled further into crisis today with their latest tranche of equity confetti.

Even as the dust settles on last night and Celtic take the plaudits all around Europe, we’re once again reminded that, on our doorstep, there is one hell of a mess.

Earlier today, I published my latest piece on 2012, about how Scottish football failed to reform. One of the key areas, of course, in which we failed to reform was in the failure to introduce domestic financial fair play. How ironic that, on the day I posted that piece, news emerged of yet another piece of Ibrox equity confetti.

As we all know, Celtic released its half-yearly interim figures the other day, and they were superb. The money we’ve made this year is going to break records. The new Champions League format is worth something in the region of £40 million—probably much higher when you take into account gate receipts and everything else. It has been a stupendously successful year, both on and off the field.

Across the city, it has been the complete opposite.

That club remains a car crash. It remains the ultimate cautionary tale. If they were running a degree course on how not to run a football club, it would be all about them. As my article today pointed out, had we acted resolutely in 2012—and by “we,” I mean all of Scottish football—their club would never have been allowed to get itself into the state that it has. That would have benefited them as much as it would have benefited everyone else because they would have weaned themselves off this crazy habit of spending money they don’t have.

Some of the media are at great pains to call this latest cash injection a “further investment.” It is no such thing.

It is a director underwriting debt and taking a tranche of shares in return. It is a doomed policy. It is the stuff you do when you run an organisation that is on its knees. And the thing is—regardless of whether UEFA hadn’t imposed some limits on the insanity—those who run the club are no longer willing to take worthless shares in exchange for writing off debt.

Their position is dreadful. Who even knows how big the hole in their accounts is going to be when they publish their next financials?

The situation over there is so bad that even those of us who have spent years writing about this stuff can’t properly comprehend the true size of it. It has to be far worse than anything we know, believe, or have written about.

And we’re the only ones seriously writing about it.

When the Ibrox manager said at a recent press conference that he was told in the summer that the wage bill for the playing staff and coaches would have to be reduced by a third, it barely made any headlines at all—even though that figure is enormous. That’s a devastating change. A massive transformation of their fiscal strategy.

A one-third reduction is not a small thing. It is a huge bite out of what that man has to spend. And this is not a short-term fix. This is probably a permanent state of affairs. That club has already axed its B team, and the media is going out of its way to spin it as a “change in the structure of the academy.” Yes, it’s a change. It’s a massive downsizing, and nobody in the press corps wants to say that out loud.

The signs of severe, savage austerity are everywhere at that club.

As my friend and colleague Joe McHugh said on the recent podcast, a club that cannot even find the modest sum of money—somewhere around £200,000—to bring Lyle Cameron into their ranks this season is a club that has no chance whatsoever of competing with Celtic in the short to medium term.

The biggest sign of all that their finances are floundering? They cannot even afford to sack a manager who has failed them spectacularly. A manager who has presided over one of the worst results in the history of either of the Ibrox clubs. That Queen’s Park defeat at home was a cataclysm that no manager would have survived under normal circumstances and under normal operating conditions.

Some of their fans might suggest that perhaps this is how they’re going to raise the money to fire him. It doesn’t really matter whether it is or isn’t.

At the end of the day, this is not money going into the team to make it better. This is money being used to paper over cracks, to service debts, or something else. But it’s not going to help them buy players. It’s not going to make them stronger. In fact, it’s just further proof of how weak they are.

And they’re only going to get weaker. Those 18 million new shares, representing what some have suggested is around £4 million (though that sounds high to me), have further diluted the value of the average Ibrox share. It’s certainly nowhere near the £18 million figure that so-called “finance expert” Kieran Maguire put on Twitter. I always said I wouldn’t trust that guy to run a kid’s piggy bank.

Whatever the number, their shares were already worth less than toilet paper. I spoofed this not long ago in a piece you can read here.

But that club is now beyond satire.

It has now reached the point where you can’t properly satirise them. No matter how crazy you try to make it, the truth is crazier still. And their fans? They’re about as crazy as you can get. At this moment in time, many of their forums are convulsing with laughter at our last-minute goal concession in Munich last night. And in the meantime, their club continues to rot from the inside.

If they had fan media worth a damn, it would be all over this story today. Real, hard, serious searching questions would be getting asked about their future. And some of them, at least, would be writing the truth—that the club needs to be upended completely. It needs radical, dramatic change. Alterations at every single level. But most importantly, it needs a complete change in mindset.

They have to stop trying to live beyond their means and find a way to do more with less. And there has to be an acceptance, too, of what that is going to mean for at least the next few years—if they’re very lucky.

Not just being second-best to Celtic, but becoming just another struggling SPFL team, vulnerable to the possibility of third-place finishes or worse. That’s a dose of reality. And it’s one they still aren’t ready to face.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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