The Peepul have always been mad. Here are some of the best examples of it.

In the podcast, we talked about how every Ibrox takeover development in the last 13 years has been met with the same euphoria from their supporters and the same dire warnings from ours—that if they embraced it too readily, they were in for a shock.

Now, it’s Celtic sites that have done the due diligence on everything that’s happened over there in recent years.

But we’re not the only ones who’ve warned them. People have been sounding alarm bells to them for a long time and they’ve ignored them all. And you know what else? They like to shoot the messenger.

What I wanted to do here was take a more in-depth look at some of the times they’ve made grandiose claims that we told them were nonsense, or when they did things that we, and others, warned them were foolish.

My Polish friend Paulina—you might have seen her YouTube videos on our Facebook pages—said something to me the other day. She doesn’t know the whole madcap history of the game here. But then, who does? Nobody.

What she means is that she wasn’t following the past stories as they happened and is still unaware of some of them today. So, this is for her and for others who may not remember some of these incidents.

I picked a series of events from the past, major moments where they were given proper warnings and they ignored them.

I could have found many, many more examples, but this is a nice selection of the worst ones—or rather, from our point of view, the best ones.

So, get comfortable, because we’re taking a walk down memory lane. And what happy memories they are now, especially in hindsight.

Let’s start with one they definitely do not want to be reminded about.

Rangers fans ignore warnings from Hugh Adam, their own director

Back in the 1980s, while a lot of people were taking credit for the rebuilding of Ibrox and the club’s growing position, few outside the club realised that much of it was down to a quiet, unassuming Rangers director named Hugh Adam.

Adam had turned Rangers Pools into a multi-million-pound operation and later founded the Rangers Lottery. He was also heavily involved in the Ibrox redevelopment. Crucially, he believed directors had a responsibility to run the club in a sustainable way. That put him in direct conflict with David Murray.

For years, Murray dazzled the media and bewitched the club’s fans with big-money signings, turning Rangers into Scotland’s dominant club while Celtic floundered. But Adam knew it was all built on sand.

He had conducted a worldwide supporters’ survey and found that the so-called global Rangers Family was a complete myth. Instead, he discovered that much of the Scottish diaspora either didn’t care about Rangers or actively disliked them.

The handful of Rangers fans out there—mainly in North America, with small groups in Australia and elsewhere—weren’t interested in “investing” in the club. They knew, as most sensible people did, that putting money into Scottish football was financial madness.

Adam also knew the spending couldn’t last. He could see that debts would rise to unsustainable levels and that, eventually, Rangers would face hard choices if they wanted to avoid collapse.

He saw Murray for what he was—a braggart and a showman. The idea that he was some kind of business genius was something the media simply chose to believe.

Adam was right about everything. But at the time, getting the press to take him seriously and getting the fans to listen at all was like trying to get cats to march in a straight line.

When he passed away on 29 December 2012, even the press admitted he had been right all along. His obituaries made that clear. But by then, it was too late—the club itself had already been liquidated.

Moonbeams from Murray: Casinos, floating pitches … and then reality hits

David Murray was a master of distraction. When things were going badly, he had a way of coming up with grandiose plans to make sure no one was paying attention to the real problems.

In 2005 and again in 2008, he sold Rangers fans on two of the biggest loads of nonsense ever to grace the Scottish sports pages. And that is saying something.

His infamous “moonbeams” were pure fantasy—astronomical flights of fancy, sheer bollocks to use the Glaswegian vernacular.

But for a while, they did their job. They distracted the media from the real issues bubbling under the surface and convinced their supporters that everything was fine.

The first of these schemes came in September 2005.

At the time, Alex McLeish’s Rangers were off to a dreadful start to the season, while Celtic were beginning to find their feet under Gordon Strachan. Debt levels at Ibrox were soaring. Murray needed a distraction.

So, he latched onto an idea contained within the UK government’s Gambling Act 2005—the plan to build a handful of “super casinos” across Britain.

On 21 September, the newspapers breathlessly reported that “planning permission had been granted” for one of these casinos to be built at Ibrox.

According to the grand vision, Ibrox was to be transformed with hotels, shops, and a flood of new revenue streams. There was even a fancy conceptual drawing of what it would all look like.

The media went mad for it. The fans lapped it up. Murray claimed it would rejuvenate the whole area, spinning himself as a social visionary. Only in Scotland could a man planning to put a massive gambling operation in a deprived area be hailed as a hero.

And, of course, it was a joke.

The supposed “planning permission” was contingent on final approval from the UK government, which had to decide which city would get the casino. Glasgow didn’t even make the shortlist. In fact, the entire project was scrapped when Gordon Brown’s government binned the idea.

Even if Glasgow had been chosen, Ibrox was never going to be the location. I confirmed that at the time with a Glasgow City Council insider.

“They never convinced us,” he said. “They had barely convinced themselves.”

But they convinced the media, and the media convinced the fans.

Not content with taking their supporters for a ride once, Murray pulled an even greater trick out of the hat three years later—the ultimate “moonbeam.”

This was the plan for “Blue Heaven,” estimated at £700 million.

I wrote one of my earliest articles on that nonsense under the name Che Timvara. It’s still online—What In Blue Heavens …—and in it, I did something the Scottish media apparently couldn’t: I actually looked at the details and pointed out that the whole thing was a complete fantasy.

And why were they pulling this ridiculous nonsense about floating pitches, retractable roofs, and 10,000 more seats than Celtic Park out of the hat?

Well, Murray was under pressure to sell the club.

The bank was already feeling the first icy fingers of the global financial crisis. Remember, this absurd scheme was being proposed at a time when those fingers were already closing around the throats of investment houses and even governments. Meanwhile, his business empire was leaking red ink everywhere, and the club hadn’t won a trophy in two seasons. They had just parted company with Paul Le Guen.

The whole thing was sheer nonsense. That Murray was able to get the media to run this level of bollocks speaks volumes about the succulent lamb culture. More astonishing still was that the fans seemed to believe it—and many of them still think it had almost come to pass, that they were just unlucky it didn’t.

Some actually believe that without the global financial crash, all of it would have happened. More amazing than that, some of them genuinely think a conspiracy of the “Glasgow Catholic Council” and the Labour government deliberately wrecked it, pointing to the plans for the Commonwealth Games as “proof.”

It just goes to show that you can fool some of the Peepul all of the time.

We called it Moonbeams Park.

A floating pitch, a retractable roof, 7,000 seats more than Celtic Park, all supposedly funded by a club bond scheme. Yes, indeed. The same club that, just a few years later, would be unable to raise any substantial money at all when their very existence was at stake was, at that time, supposedly going to finance a £700 million stadium that would make their current one look like a cheap knockoff.

It shouldn’t even have needed to be said how ridiculous this story was. It should have stood out a mile to anyone with a shred of common sense. But twice in the space of three years, Murray had been able to peddle utter fantasy to his fans and pretend these were viable propositions.

Neither the casino nor Moonbeams Park was ever going to happen.

What those episodes proved, of course, is that there wasn’t just a credulous, compliant media in Scotland—but that no matter how preposterous a story was, if it had a pro-Ibrox slant, they would run it without due diligence. Without checking. Without even doing basic maths, which would have brought both projects crashing down in minutes.

Moonbeams Park was particularly mad because of the cost involved, but the casino deal was no less absurd. Rangers were competing with every other city in the UK. The shortlist was only ever going to have four cities on it.

Because planning permission had been granted to a site in Glasgow, with four or five different organisations vying for the rights, the Ibrox club was just one of many contenders. And yet that was spun into a media fairy tale about how they were on the brink of pulling off the biggest deal in Scottish football history.

There were more obstacles in the way than could ever have been cleared. And yet, Murray sold that story to his media friends, who—for years—believed the only reason it didn’t happen was that the Labour government decided not to build any of the super casinos.

That, of course, could have been part of the same conspiracy that derailed Moonbeams Park four years later. The same one that, four years after that, brought down their club.

The Unseen Fenian Hand has always been very busy.

The Bank That Liked To Say Yes Says “Piss Off”

In October 2009, Walter Smith spoke to the media ahead of a Rangers game and told a shell-shocked Chick Young what a number of Celtic websites and writers had been saying for months—something the club had denied all along.

Lloyds Bank had put one of its representatives on the board, and they were effectively running the club.

We had been alert to this possibility the moment HBOS was bought by the Lloyds Banking Group. It was common knowledge that, inside HBOS, a tiny cabal had been handing money to their mates like Willy Wonka handing out chocolate. Nobody believed Lloyds would continue the same reckless practice.

So, when an innocuous press release announced that Donald Muir, one of Lloyds’ corporate trouble-shooters, had been appointed to the Rangers board, the writing was on the wall.

Rangers’ fans reacted first with disbelief, then with bafflement when David Murray Jr. spoke to the media the next day and “clarified” Smith’s remarks.

Nobody was fooled.

The bank was in charge, and everyone knew it.

From that moment, Lloyds started squeezing the club to make cuts. Smith and others inside Ibrox resisted. At the height of it, their supporters finally realised the state they were in—and they began lobbying the bank to stop interfering.

With the financial crisis battering every bank in the UK, it was hardly surprising that Lloyds refused to carry on funding Rangers’ excesses. What was astonishing was that Rangers fans were too dumb to realise that the only reason the club hadn’t already gone under was that Muir was trying to make the necessary cuts to avoid that outcome.

Their supporters didn’t want to hear it, no matter how many times people tried to tell them.

They organised protests. They closed their accounts. They harassed Lloyds bank branches. Politicians even waded in, criticising the bank for daring to ask Rangers to pay back their loans.

In the end, Lloyds told Murray he had to sell the moment a buyer came along. They insisted. They wanted out. And one of the conditions of any sale was that they got paid what they were owed so they could wash their hands of the mess.

That’s where the Ticketus deal came in—but we’ll talk about that later.

For months, the papers were filled with takeover rumours—linking everyone from Russian gangsters to Ulster Loyalists with buying the club. In the end, it was a guy called Craig Whyte who emerged.

Although his bona fides weren’t confirmed, and despite doubts even inside Rangers that he had the money to take the club forward, Donald Muir and his people were plainly done with the whole thing.

For all we know, they might even have lent Whyte the quid.

The rest, as they say, is history. And their intolerant behaviour towards the very people keeping the lights on is a big reason why Sevco can’t find a bank willing to extend them a line of credit anywhere in the UK—even today.

Ibrox Fans Protest The BBC … For Telling Them The Truth About Whyte

If there’s a better example of Ibrox fan stupidity and intolerance, I don’t know what it is.

For years, we’ve heard how they were “victims” in the Craig Whyte saga. But as most Celtic fans know, and as I wrote about last week, many of them bought into Whyte’s fantasy completely—even when a mountain of evidence suggested he was leading them into an epochal, un-survivable disaster.

And that disaster duly arrived.

I understand why they didn’t want to believe what was being written on Celtic fan forums. The brutal truth is hard enough to take when it’s not being delivered by people wearing party hats, grinning like Halloween lanterns, and offering you a bowl of jelly and ice cream to celebrate your demise.

But what’s harder to understand is why they refused to listen to the national broadcaster.

Three times, BBC reporter Mark Daly dug for the truth—the kind of stuff the rest of the Scottish media wouldn’t touch. Up until then, only the Bampots had written about it.

What he uncovered should have united the Rangers support behind one goal: removing Craig Whyte from Ibrox by any legal means necessary.

Instead, it united them in fury … against Daly and the BBC.

They shrieked. They howled. They erupted in a childish tantrum like kids who’d just been told there was no Santa Claus.

They organised protests.

They marched on the BBC Scotland building like a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants protesting their liege lord for imposing a goat tax.

Their websites were filled with petitions and demands for Daly’s head.

What exactly had he done to them to make them so furious?

Even now, they’ve never answered that question, and whenever they make a list of their grievances against the BBC, they always throw Mark Daly’s name in there, as if he’d peed on their lawn furniture instead of trying to inform and educate them about what the man running their club was all about.

Their ingratitude is second only to their sheer idiocy. This was their last chance to push this guy towards the exit before the roof fell in, and they blamed the news organisation that made that necessary. Barmy.

The Downfall of Charlie “Chuckles” Green

Aaaah. You know something? I miss Charles Green.

From the very day he took over the assets of Rangers and formed Sevco, this man was one of my favourite people ever to hold office at a Scottish football club. Charles Green was sheer entertainment—the kind of guy a writer dreams about—because he was a headline-making machine of barmy statements and eccentric utterances, completely devoid of self-awareness.

He was part clown, part bigot, part stand-up comedian, and part Del Trotter.

He was the creator of what came to be known as the “Trigger’s Broom” theory of Rangers’ survival, the shameless snake oil salesman who put together a share issue that ended up the subject of a fraud case, and the author of a “strategic review” that still makes me laugh today.

And their fans, and the media, initially loved him!

They loved him even though Celtic websites and online writers were calling this guy bad news right from the off. They loved him even though Sheffield United fans had despised his high-handed attitude and dismissal of their views.

They loved him even though he’d made it abundantly clear what his intentions were early in the game when he pointed out that his “big Yorkshire hands” were “made for grabbing up lots of money.” I mean, whose money did they think he meant?

Green lasted less than a year at Ibrox. From the euphoria of those early days until the inevitable collapse, not even 12 months elapsed.

So, when did their supporters start to wake up to the dire, dire state they were in and question the sanity of the man in charge? It’s easy to see when it ought to have been—24 December 2012, the night he released his “Christmas Message.”

I cannot remember ever watching an “official club message” quite so barking. He sounded unhinged that night, like a guy who had forgotten to take his anti-psychotic meds. Scottish football fans reacted to that statement in many different ways.

Some thought it was the moment Green went from being a rabble-rouser to being genuinely dangerous to the sport. Others thought it was just playing to the gallery. A lot of people, myself included, thought it was hilarious because, in that moment, the club crawled completely up its own arse, and any chance they had of becoming a major threat vanished in an instant.

But, incredible as it seems today, their supporters loved it.

The acclaim was nearly universal. You really have to Google it and read the response on the forums to fully comprehend how overjoyed they were with what they had heard and read (he posted the full text on the official site too).

No one amongst them thought to say that it was an embarrassment, that it reduced the status of a guy whose office should have made him a serious player in the game to that of a third-rate, end-of-the-pier comic—and their club with him—although that was patently obvious to most others.

It took another television interview, months later, when many of them had already spent their money on season tickets and new shares, to destroy any remaining illusions. Peter Smith of STV absolutely dismantled him live, exposing numerous exaggerated claims and outright lies and nailing him on his conduct.

Even then, some of their supporters accused Smith of having an agenda. He did. It was to do what so many of his colleagues had failed to do—get to the truth.

Nevertheless, so thoroughly did Smith destroy him, and so exposed was the Sevco CEO for incidents such as referring to Imran Ahmed as “my little Paki friend,” that Green was soon gone from Ibrox and from Scottish football.

The real revisionism—where everyone who was anyone in their support and the media claimed to have known what he was all along—started shortly thereafter. They really make me laugh, but not as much as he did.

Mike Ashley buys into the club and the fans initially greet it with joy.

If ever there was a set of circumstances that qualifies the Ibrox support as the Kings of Wishful Thinking it was, and remains, the Mike Ashley saga. Nothing, up until the current takeover stories, so reveals their base gullibility and penchant for fantasy.

More than the Craig Whyte situation and the Charles Green reign of error, it is the quintessential example of how their supporters can be made to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden in a total denial of reality even when there is a mountain of evidence running contrary to their expectations.

Nobody who knew anything about Mike Ashley took seriously, for a minute, the idea that he could be attempting a hostile takeover of Sevco to turn the club into serious contenders on the European stage.

This was the guy who ran Newcastle United, with all the wealth that comes with being a Premiership team, on what amounted to a “for profit” basis.

Some said “he needs our club for Champions League exposure.”

When it was pointed out to them that EPL had a larger global television audience they ignored it. They said he just wanted Sports Direct’s logo beamed all over Europe. When they were reminded that on Champions League nights any in-stadium advertising would have to go, and official sponsors ad boards put there instead they pretended not to hear it. When they were asked to consider that actually sponsoring a Champions League club’s jerseys would be a more cost-effective way of getting the brand out to that audience than actually buying a club and spending tens of millions on players … well, that went in one ear and came out the other.

“He only makes money if the club makes money,” they said next. Which wasn’t true for a start; there were plenty of ways to bleed that club where he didn’t increase revenues at all, and they may soon find this out at the hands of the Americans. But for him it didn’t matter whether they were making money, or even winning games; just so long as the fans continued to buy tickets, shirts and other items.

It took a while for that particular penny to drop, and for the deadly truth, that Ashley was only ever interested in protecting his deals, to dawn on them. When it did, the response was less than dramatic. In fact, it was hilarious.

First their fans mounted their banner and social media “Spivs Out” campaign. It did a lot of good. Before long, everyone else had run for the hills, leaving Ashley as the only means of keeping the club’s lights on. He duly gave them loans, and tightened his grip.

Then the fans tried to force him out by protesting Sports Direct shops. When that didn’t work they came up with the tragi-comic “£1 protest”, which amounted to their supporters going into Sports Direct shops, taking tons of stuff up to the counter, waiting until it was rung up and then offering a quid for it, a tactic which worked for Craig Whyte but was never going to shift the man who’d built a retail empire worth billions.

As time went on, the fan’s strategy became even more sophisticated; one variant involved a proposal to buy Sport Direct shares and give them away for free, to crash the share price of the company. That it would have taken about a hundred years and cost roughly £2.6 billion, to no viable gain except to make Sports Direct execs piss themselves laughing, bothered some people not one bit.

Look out for that getting resurrected if they ever need to buy out the 49ers.

In the meantime, his grip tightened and Sevco served notice that it wanted to sever the link and terminate the deal, but Ashley didn’t lose sleep over that as the termination period was a storming seven years.

Fan boycotts reduced the number of shirts that Sports Direct were able to sell, but he offset that with a piece of brilliance which no-one saw coming; a clause in the retail deal which meant leftover stock had to be purchased by the club itself … at retail prices! A masterpiece of “Screw You!” that actually resulted in fans boycotting him costing the club itself an absolute fortune.

We know how the story ended. Ashley grew bored with it all, and when he saw that he could keep his contracts, sell his shares and put the club in the rearview mirror he sold to King and his consortium who told brazen lies about having “seen him off” when in fact he was still dug in. That’s why years of court cases followed, with the Glib and Shameless one being defeated time and time again.

Many suspect that Ashley had his revenge by dropping a dime to the City of London Takeover Panel, who opened an investigation into the share purchase and eventually concluded that King and his people represented a “concert party” which they had flatly denied. He became one of the few people ever to be blacklisted from doing business in the City, which had knock-on effects for his club.

Which brings us to the present day. King’s revolution was a disaster, the current board is a shambles and everyone is excited over a takeover that should probably scare them to death instead. But they have a long history of embracing lunacy and believing in moonbeams, starting with Murray’s casinos and floating pitches and stretching all the way to the present day.

And they never seem to learn.

Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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