Celtic got through the 90’s because fans believed in our future. Many Ibrox fans no longer do.

Two subjects I’ve always been interested in—ones I’ve tried to study, at least for a while—are physics and chemistry, don’t ask me why.

Sometimes I can make sense of them, and sometimes I even manage to learn something. Other times, though, I make no sense of it whatsoever and only succeed in giving myself a headache trying to wrap my brain around it. I find particular trouble with anything involving physics, because it’s the most grounded in maths.

Still, for a while, I really enjoyed string theory—the idea of all these different strands of reality, all these universes coexisting alongside each other, with different versions of our own world and the infinite possibilities that throws up.

It literally means that somewhere, in some alternate universe, I am the British Prime Minister, and Celtic has won 16 European Cups in a row.

Somewhere in that collection of possibilities, then, there is a scenario where the Celtic board of directors is working on a very bizarre project designed to keep alive the idea that there is still a club called Rangers.

Someone emailed me late last night and said, “You know, you used the word Rangers in the podcast.” Well, I did, but I was speaking from the point of view of a Celtic director. “We’re going to buy Rangers.” That’s how they would say it.

And in the universe where this club was determined to do just that—to prop them up, to make them a competing power—then they might have a chance.

They’d be doing it primarily with our money, and that’s the only thing that would give them a chance. Because, as I’ve said before, for this theory to be accurate, the only way it could be guaranteed to work is if we were writing them very large cheques.

So let’s say that universe exists, where all of this is real. But there’s also a version of that universe which is very much like this one, except that it’s the policy of our club to act in this extraordinarily counterproductive way.

And in that universe, our directors must be the most frustrated people on Earth. Because in spite of their best efforts to drag us backwards and make the Ibrox club competitive, that club simply cannot keep pace with us—no matter what they do. And no matter what we do either.

Because last night was the final proof—if any such proof were still needed—that it’s actually impossible to prop them up with anything other than cold, hard cash. It’s impossible for us to try to strengthen them by going backwards because, no matter how far backwards we go, there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t collapse anyway. There’s no guarantee they’d be able to catch us, regardless.

It would take something terrible—something unbelievable. An act of gross sabotage from inside our own club to blow this historical opportunity now. Because their club is in freefall. It’s in a spiral I can’t see them escaping from.

I went onto the forums last night to see how they were handling the latest calamity, and what I found was really strange—something I didn’t expect to see.

When I wrote the Five Stages of Grief article, I said they were still a long way from acceptance, although some of them were starting to see the necessity of it as a way of moving forward. Well, a lot more of them are closer to that line than I would ever have believed. The general feeling over there is no longer anger but apathy. And nothing is more dangerous than apathy. Nothing is more lethal than that.

I subjected myself to the BBC Sports Scotland podcast last night—something I occasionally do after one of these results—and although it was a panel full of ex-Ibrox men who were absolutely sick to their stomachs, there was something interesting about one of the numbers that got thrown up.

And it’s this number that’s reverberating around their forums right now, like the shockwaves of a nuclear detonation.

Since 2011/12—the year Rangers went into administration and then circled the drain before swirling down the plughole—there have been 42 major honours contested in Scottish football. Of those 42 honours, which have been up for grabs in that time, their club has won just three.

Let that sink in. Let the totality of that defeat, that nightmare, that atrocity of recent history, really settle in.

Yes, they are Newco, and no, they don’t have the cachet of Rangers, and they don’t have access to the kind of funds the old Ibrox club once routinely spent. But this is still a club which, since it crawled out of Rangers’ grave wearing its clothes and bearing its name, has had the second-biggest wage bill in the country and the second-largest transfer spend of any side in this land.

And that’s in every single season—even in those seasons where they were, in fact, spending more than any other club on wages and transfer fees.

We are 13 years on from there. Which means there’s now an entire generation of Ibrox fans—now in their 20s—whose only real memories of following a club based out of that football stadium look like that. They don’t remember because they weren’t around for the so-called glory years. They don’t remember the David Murray Rangers team. They don’t recall an Ibrox nine in a row. They don’t remember a time when they could simply outspend Celtic by a considerable factor.

When David Murray said, “For every fiver Celtic spend, we’ll spend ten,” he was being generous. Because it was often a metric much higher than that.

We now know that was unaffordable folly.

We now know, of course, that it was the key contributing factor to the death of the first Ibrox club. But even if you had lived through all those days of horror, watching your team win all that silverware would at least give you some crumb of comfort in the present time.

And if you believed in the Survival Lie, you might even convince yourself that the glory days would come back.

But what if this was your only memory of your football club? What if this was your grounding as a fan? What if these were your days, and all that fabled history was just filling up space on your bookcase—memories contained in video footage, in club biographies, in the words of ex-players and ex-managers?

How long would you subject yourself to days like yesterday? A couple of years? Or would you already be deeply, bitterly regretting that your dad didn’t just take you to the picture when you were a kid instead of dragging you to Ibrox every second week?

I tell people that I grew up watching two things: Tories winning elections and Rangers winning trophies. But I was born in 1976, and I saw Celtic win titles when I was growing up—I remember two of them vividly. I remember Love Street. I remember the Centenary double. It was another nine years before we won another title.

But there were two Scottish Cups in between those years. And from 1994, when Fergus McCann’s revolution swept to power, you always had the impression that we were on the up, that we were moving in the right direction.

I’ve said before that Fergus took over an operation that needed modernisation and fresh thinking. There was room for growth. There was potential for Celtic to expand its horizons and make swift progress.

The idea of a modern-day Fergus McCann coming to save the current Ibrox operation? There’s just no way. No way to transform their fortunes to the extent that Fergus transformed ours. Because theirs is a club already operating at almost peak capacity. And the only problem with that is that even at peak capacity, they’re still miles behind us. The door to any investment strategy that simply throws money at the problem has been firmly closed by UEFA and their financial sustainability regulations.

So what I went through as a fan watching my team in the 90s bears no resemblance to what they’re going through right now. Because from about 1992 onwards, when takeover talks started at Celtic, there was always hope in the air. You always knew that change might just be around the corner, that it could be positive and transformational, and that our club would never look back from it.

They have no such hope. They have no reason to believe it will ever be like that for them. Because there’s something else too; even in the darkest of those years, we always had the sense that Ibrox’s success wasn’t real.

And that’s something a lot of their fans still struggle to understand. Without Murray’s money, they would have spent a lot more years in Celtic’s shadow than just the present Newco era. Without financial doping, Rangers would never have caught us—not from the moment Fergus finished building the stadium and restoring Celtic to its strength.

On some level, some of us had confidence back then because we knew what they were doing wasn’t real, and we knew it couldn’t possibly last forever. Nobody’s pockets were that deep. Running up all that debt simply wasn’t sustainable. And we now know there was an Ibrox director—Hugh Adam—who was telling everyone who would listen (and a lot of people who wouldn’t) that their club was going to go out of business acting the way it was, and that Murray would ultimately be responsible for it.

Whatever differences of opinion exist between some of us and Michael Nicholson, Peter Lawwell, and the rest of the board, there’s no prospect whatsoever of our club taking risks like that. There’s no chance of us being endangered by that kind of corporate vandalism. Our success exists because we undertook a sustainable strategy, and we paid the price for that. There were years in which we didn’t win things.

There were years when we had to watch the club across the city—the club called Rangers—winning titles and trophies.

I can still hold our club accountable for some of those titles and trophies, because we made some mistakes along the way, and without those, especially in the latter years, they would have gone out of business long before they did.

But the simple fact is, it was our sustainable strategy—and the way that strategy works—that has made us the formidable club we are today. And it has put us so far ahead of them that it’s impossible to imagine them catching us. Because this is not built on sand. Our club is structurally solid in a way that Rangers never was, and in a way that the Newco never can be.

And I’m not going to tell you that all of their fans have grasped this yet—that they understand it on that deep level you need to understand something before you can start to prepare yourself to deal with it. But enough of them are getting there now. And that means the trouble they’re in is only multiplying.

Because if they lose this generation of supporters, then there is no way back. That’s a club in a death spiral. If their season ticket base starts to shrink? They’re dead. If the money they have coming in at the moment ever drops below a certain point? They’re dead. And the fans who are left will be watching a third version of Rangers. They can call it Rangers if they like. But it won’t be any more than this one is.

And you don’t need to imagine parallel universes to glimpse that possible future—to see that version of reality. All you have to do is go onto their forums right now and look at the number of their fans saying that their feelings at full-time yesterday weren’t anger, but a weary kind of resignation.

That this is who they are now.

This is the club they follow.

This is the world they inhabit.

Nothing is more dangerous to them than that. And even if we wanted to, we could not hope to keep them afloat if they start drifting in that particular direction.

Let me tell you something; they’re starting to.

Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images

Last night we put up our latest podcast. Recorded just after they went crashing out of the cup, we called it They’re Simply Depressed.