It took Celtic years, and pain, to get here. No-one at Ibrox gets that, or is prepared to go through the same.

Tom English is not, as we know, a genius.

He’s another desperate BBC hack, one who is just as prone to swallowing Ibrox propaganda and spin as anyone in the mainstream press. But what makes English frustrating, above and beyond a lot of the others, is that he actually has a spark of talent—or so I’ve always believed.

Anyway, he’s capable of being a good writer. He’s capable of decent analysis, but only when he chooses to be.

His recent revelation that the club from Ibrox wants to be us should come as no surprise to anyone. This blog has said much the same thing countless times. And the more they talk about transfer trading strategies and all sorts of other things, the clearer it becomes—not only are we the club they aspire to be, but we’re bigger than David Murray ever wanted Rangers to be.

Albeit, he also thought that he could have European trophies as well. But in terms of domestic success, even at his pomp, he couldn’t do what we can.

It’s nice to have aspirations. It’s nice to look at someone else and hold them up as your role model. But I’m not going to be Stephen King, no matter how much I want to be. And the skill set required to become as good as someone else may not be a skill set that you possess. It may not be something that can be taught, trained, learned, or something you can easily grow into.

So yeah, it’s perfectly valid for them to want to be us, but in order to genuinely move in the direction of becoming us, I think it’s imperative that they understand us a little bit—that they recognise who we are and what it is that we do that makes us successful. And let’s be honest here—they don’t.

What’s worse is that they ascribe what we did partly to luck. And as long as they’re looking at it through that lens, they’re never going to catch us. They’re never going to replicate what it is that we’ve done. They refuse to accept that for us to get here, it took sacrifice. It took our club willingly deciding to give things up in the short term in order to get it right over a longer period of time.

And this is one of the real problems over there—because they don’t have the stomach for any kind of long-term thinking. And I’m not sure that bringing in these new people is going to do all that much good.

I’ll get to Barry Ferguson and the so-called Real Rangers Men Revolution later on today because it’s worth covering. But for the moment, it’s worth noting that no matter who is sitting in that boardroom, or the dugout, there will be a pervading sense around the club, and especially in the stands, that the surest way to catch us is to spend huge sums of money—even if that is unlikely, verging on impossible.

The notion that sometimes you have to go back to go forward is one that doesn’t even dawn on these people. The idea that you may have to voluntarily set aside ambitions and goals for a period of time until you can construct something new doesn’t register with them at all. They just don’t get any of it.

We came out of the Europa League final in Seville having made losses, and the story goes that a year or two later, on the back of a defeat in Donetsk in the Champions League, our board of directors sat around, looked at the financial figures, and said, “We’re drifting dangerously close to a place where our debts are going to start to cause us problems.” And as a club, we needed to decide what to do about that.

And what we decided to do, of course, was slash the wage bill and make savage cuts across the board. And from that moment on, we ran this club on a sustainable basis.

We knew that would come with costs. We knew that we would be giving up trophies—maybe even titles, maybe even a lot of trophies and titles—in pursuit of that overall goal. But we also made a vow that if we were going to give the manager less to work with, we would have to revolutionise certain aspects of the club in order to make what he had to spend go further. And by and large, that has worked reasonably well.

But the biggest fight was to get those costs under control. The biggest fight that we had wasn’t on the pitch—it was off the pitch. It was stabilising the club, putting us into profit, and then little by little, inching forward. And it was not quick. And it was, at times, horrible to watch. And we didn’t get every major decision right. But we got enough of them right to be sitting where we are right now.

Because we were run on a profitable basis and because we had money in the bank, that allowed us, when the time came, to go and bring in someone like Rodgers in the first place—and to put us on a much better footing.

I keep on saying this—Brendan has not had money to spend in the traditional sense of the word. If he was given a transfer budget at the start of last season, he didn’t spend it. If he was given one at the start of this season, he didn’t spend that either. Every signing we have made has come from sales first.

Last season’s team was built on the money from selling Jota. And we know that a lot of it was wasted, but that was fine because when you’re in a good position, as we are in, you can afford to get some things wrong. You have wiggle room for that. This season’s team was built on the sale of Matt O’Riley.

But the fact that we reinvested £40 million of our transfer take over the summer back into the squad—more money than the people the press is telling you are going to rebuild the Ibrox club by lavishing them with riches spent on Leeds on a transfer income three time as big as ours and with an even greater prize at the end of it—is telling. Only a strong, healthy club is in a position to do that.

And Ibrox looks at that and thinks, “Well, the only reason they’re in this position is that they sold Jota in one season and O’Riley in the other.”

And they miss the point completely. It’s not an accident that we had two blue-chip players like that on the books in the first place, and they have to be regularly big players, capable of stepping up, to get that money anyway. You can’t just sign a bunch of dross, pretend they’re world-beating players, slap huge transfer fees on their heads, and then wait for the money to roll in.

It’s not enough to say, “We think (based on what Celtic gets for players) that Igamane could be worth £25 million someday, so when interest in him comes, we’re going to tell the interested club that that’s how much we want.”

That’s not how it works. It’s not what we did. We didn’t invent the valuations of players like Van Dijk and Jota and O’Riley in the first place; the market decided their worth, not some crazy internal decision at Celtic to shoot for the moon.

And the first thing they need to do, if they’re going to even try to do what we do, is understand what it is that we do—and start acting in a way that is responsible, reasonable, and rational.

And they can’t. And so they won’t.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And so, yeah, we should probably be flattered that they want to be us. We should probably be flattered that they’re going to try to be. But they won’t even reach the standard of a halfway decent tribute band—because they fundamentally do not know what it is that we do. And they don’t have the stomach for long-term thinking.

Now, I grant you that the Americans might.

The Americans may just come in with a plan to run sustainably, and based on that, try to put the club in a place where it has an opportunity to progress. But they’re going to have to sell that as a long-term goal. And when Patrick Stewart sat the other day and said that there would be a lot of pain in front of them, he spoke as a guy who knows that this takeover thing is happening, or is in the process of being done.

And the media is smarting about that already. They’re angry about it. The Ibrox fan forums are angry about it. “Pain? Why are we being told there will be more pain? It’s an end to the pain that we want,” is the overall feeling.

But you have to go through the pain if you want to come out the other side. There’s no pain-free way to do this.

And in order to get to where Celtic are now, that’s what’s needed. That’s what’s necessary. And they’ve never properly diagnosed their own ills, far less understood the source of our strength. And until they do, how can they ever be expected to be us? How can they ever be expected to catch us?

Photo by Jan Kruger – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images

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