In their arrogance and desperation, the Ibrox fans are ignoring the danger they may be in.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” – Virgil, Aeneid.

“When the fox hears the rabbit scream, he comes running … but not to help.” – Thomas Harris, Hannibal.

The first of my two quotes is from Virgil’s Aeneid, his epic poem about the Trojan War.

It’s one of the best pieces of long-form poetic prose in existence, alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The literal translation of the quote is: “I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.”

It’s a reference to the Trojan Horse, which the armies of Troy’s enemies leave outside the city, supposedly as a mark of respect for its defenders.

Half the Trojan generals, swollen with pride and ego, want to bring it into the city and parade it through the streets as a war trophy. The other half want to burn it immediately, right there, where it stands.

But nobody listens to those killjoys.

And that’s the prevailing attitude across the city.

They only have to hear words like transfer war chest, and all their perfectly legitimate concerns about the potential takeover of their club by mostly unnamed and unknown American investors go right out the window.

The second quote comes from Mason Verger, the brutally disfigured villain of Thomas Harris’ magnificent Gothic masterpiece Hannibal. Verger is trying to catch Hannibal—who, of course, is the one who disfigured him—and his plans for revenge are on the more gruesome side. He intends to feed him to a bunch of specially bred pigs.

But he has to catch him first, and he decides to use Clarice Starling as bait.

His comment reflects his deeply held belief that Hannibal is a true monster, without feelings of any sort except those which derive from his own pleasure. Verger believes that if he can somehow put Starling in a place of suffering, that Lecter will seek her out—not to save her, but to revel in her pain.

It’s not quite as poetic as Virgil’s turn of phrase, but it’s a cautionary tale.

In short, it says that not everyone who comes running when you’re in trouble is coming to save you. As another character from another medium once put it: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

When a football club runs into fraught and difficult circumstances, there are broadly two types of takeover attempts: the turnaround specialists and the vultures.

The turnaround specialists want to rebuild a shattered institution and make it profitable so they can sell it. The vultures want to move in and pick the last remaining scraps off the bones. They see value in a distressed organisation—not because they want to save it, but because they see ways to extract profit from something that’s already broken.

One of the best examples of this, at least in a way that I’ve ever seen properly explained—because I don’t pretend to be a stock market expert or have the first clue about any of that stuff, and I’m not on Twitter promoting myself as a “football finance expert”—comes in the movie Wall Street.

Bud Fox finds out that Gordon Gekko intends to buy Bluestar Airlines not to turn it around as he’s maintained, but to dismantle it piece by piece. One of the insiders on the deal, assuming that Fox already knows what’s going on, lays it all out for him.

First, the company has an enormous pension fund, which they can essentially dilute and distribute amongst the shareholders.

So, in a sense, the deal finances itself. Then there are the hangars and the aeroplanes, which they can just sell to another airline company. The routes that Bluestar owns or licenses are also assets that can be sold.

So these guys have moved in for no other reason than to pick the company clean. They have no real interest in saving jobs or restoring the company to its former glory. They intend to buy it cheap, get in there, and liquidate every bit of it as quickly as they can and for as much money as they can get.

There’s a lot to sell if you’re an asset stripper interested in the Ibrox club.

If you really wanted to, the training ground could go first. The playing staff? You could probably get some millions for them, at a push. The ground itself? Of course, it’s worth something in terms of land value as prime real estate.

But the real money isn’t in that. The real money is in the steady leeching.

Everyone who has ever studied the mob knows that you don’t take a guy for everything he has in one go, you bleed him out over a long period of time. The profits are bigger. The income is steady.

You can sheer a sheep as many times as you want, but you can only skin it once.

A certain type of predatory investor knows this full well.

First, if the Americans are involved, you can be sure that this is a leveraged buyout.

That’s what the consortium is for. I hinted at this yesterday—the consortium is there to bring in the financing. What you do is buy the company with borrowed money and then transfer that debt to the company itself.

This is what Kroenke did at Arsenal. This is what the Glazers did at Manchester United. It’s also, by the way, exactly what the York family did at Leeds— and they are the very people the press say are behind this thing.

So it costs them nothing to do this.

All the cash needed for the purchase gets turned into debt, which the company then assumes.

Then the directors go to work, little by little, trying to find the so-called profit centres.

If you look carefully at what’s going on here, you’ll realise that process is already underway; the so-called “independent review” is not, as Stewart claimed, being carried out on behalf of the club.

It’s being carried out on behalf of the Americans.

The links between the company doing the review, Sportsology, and those named as being behind the takeover bid have already been explored by a couple of Ibrox fan sites … they’ve found crucial pieces of the jigsaw and still can’t put it together.

The Americans have sent their own people into the club to catalogue it all, and to find out where they can make money .. and where they can make savings.

Once again, the Ibrox fans have been blatantly lied to and the implications of that haven’t even started to sink in yet. And that brings me to another interesting point, and answers a question I posed earlier; does Stewart know what’s going on here?

Clearly, he does, and he’s not talking about massive investment and game-changing financing; he sat in front of the club’s own in-house channel and talked about hard times ahead.

And this is a guy who has already told the manager he’s going to have to adhere to the board’s plan and he can like it or lump it and has told the fans he intends to back the manager for now and they have the same choice.

In short, these people are on a different level to what the Ibrox fans have dealt with before.

These people are not going to play nice or pander to the lunatic fringe. This blog has long said that the lunatics will continue to run the asylum. Believe me, there are worse outcomes for their club than that. This could be one of them.

And at Ibrox, there are two obvious profit centres to explore.

There’s what you can bring in from player sales, which, in this case, isn’t much. And there’s the season ticket base. That’s where the real money is.

And once you’ve sussed that, the next move is simple. You take the stadium and trade it—handing it over to the members of your consortium who helped finance the deal. Then you use the stadium itself to pay off some of the club’s debt. You can do the same with the training ground, by the way, just to add to the fun.

Now bear in mind, none of this costs you a penny.

The club assumes that debt.

So what happens is that the members of your consortium put up the cash in the first place to get the stadium. In exchange for that money, the rest of the debt stays with the club, and the club then pays rent to the consortium members who own the stadium. Sale and lease-back is common in these deals.

That’s one way you make the money back.

You set up a 25-year leaseback. You charge extortionately for it. And there’s your profit.

There’s your pot of gold.

If you even charge the club £5 million a year, that’s job done. At the end of the 25 years, you offer the shareholders the opportunity to buy back the stadium at a reasonable price.

But that’s just the cherry on top of the sundae.

You’ve net £125 million on the stadium lease alone, which is to say nothing for the remainder of the debt which generates its own profits on an annual basis.

What do I mean by that?

Well, watch Sunderland Til I Die again, and listen to Charlie Methven tell the Sunderland staff that in prior years every penny they made on season ticket money was going back out of the club to service not the debts but the interest on the debts … that could be the Ibrox club’s future.

And that’s just one way of getting your money back.

And it’s not even particularly creative.

That’s just the most obvious means of doing it. And what I’m saying is that there is no law, no regulation, nothing at all that would prevent any club from being bought by owners with that intention. In fact, if you look at English football and its history of dodgy ownership, it’s rife with stories just like that.

They’re getting a regulator who will give the fans power in a situation like that. The SFA decided recently that Scottish football doesn’t need one of those.

Remember this too; you’re trading away owners who have sunk their own money into paying down the club’s debts and keeping the lights on for over half a dozen years—for what?

It sounds to me like corporate American drones with no loyalty to the club at all, no genuine interest in the fans whatsoever, and who are there only to realise a return on their investment.

There’s no emotional stake in the game.

And if you think these people can be shamed or pressured in any way, shape, or form, you better look south of the border at the Manchester United fan movement against the Glazers, which has been trying in vain to shift them for years now.

The vultures count on one thing only, but it’s the easiest thing to count on—human nature. The loyalty of fans. Their desire to keep on supporting the team, even if the club itself is working at cross purposes to that.

So yeah, this could be the Trojan Horse.

And there are only two options to consider here.

You can burn it now and risk causing offence to wannabe investors who may have good intentions. Or you can bring it inside the city walls and gloat over the victory you’ve won.

The problem with the second option is that you’re not going to know who these people are, what they want, or what they’re doing until you do that, and if it turns out you’re wrong—if it turns out you misjudged the situation, if it turns out that those feet you hear stamping through the forest, running in your general direction, are not coming to save you, but are in fact the scavengers coming to pick off your bones—well, the chances are that it’s going to be too late to run.

It’s going to be too late to do anything but wait for the flames to reach you or the swordsmen to find you.

Because I’ll tell you this right now—the SFA will not do due diligence on your behalf.

The Scottish media is more interested in promoting the idea that this is a glorious revolution at the end of which Ibrox will be showered in riches than they are in actually thinking through the potential effects if this is something else.

The lesson of the Trojan Horse is that the Greeks relied on the Trojan’s arrogance to sell it.

It was their way of saying, “You guys are the superior soldiers.”

And so, of course, generals who were pleased with their own performances and had bought into their own BS believed what they wanted to believe.

They wanted to believe they were brilliant. They wanted to believe they were the bravest and the strongest and that the Greeks had seen the light and gone home. And it was that arrogance and that short-sightedness that the Greeks had counted on. They knew nobody was burning that thing in front of the city.

I have, for a long time now, been writing about the possibility of a takeover at the Ibrox club.

And what have I consistently said on this subject?

That they aren’t just ripe for one—their fans have virtually been begging for one for years.

And so anyone who wanted to take over that club to loot it is pushing on an open door. All associated with that club are desperate, and desperate people do desperate and risky things.

It’s their belief in their own exceptionalism that blinds them to the possibility that other people don’t see it that way—that other people just see an asset they can strip for spare parts.

And it’s not as if this lesson hasn’t been learned over there before.

Charles Green came in to do exactly that, boasted about it beforehand and still did it successfully, and walked away with his own pockets full of their money.

And still, the Peepul believe in the lies and the rubbish and the nonsense.

And I’m not saying that’s what these people intend to do. I’m not saying that’s the plan that’s being followed here. But nobody’s going to stop to ask that question before they roll the red carpet out.

The media isn’t going to stop and ask, “What have previous American owners down south done with their clubs? What’s the history of long-term, sustained investment?” They’re not even asking why any American owner would want to buy a team in the SPL in the first place. They believe what they want to believe.

They’re convinced that European football income and sales from transfers justify the investment and the greater the level of investment the more unlikely that is.

For the shareholders to get anything, the club has to be turning a profit. And in all the years that club across the city has been in existence, it hasn’t managed to do that.

So even the most simple and basic act—which is to look at the story and say, “Does what we’re writing actually make any sense?”—has already proven to be beyond these people.

I’ll tell you what I do know about American corporate owners.

I’ll tell you what I do know about American-led consortiums buying a distressed organisation.

They expect a return. They’re not coming in to throw money into the black hole of the Ibrox fans’ deepest fantasy. Every penny they spend, they will want to recoup.

These aren’t people on an ego trip. These aren’t people throwing good money after bad. And straight away, that would worry me if these people were interested in Celtic.

But that’s the real difference between them and us. We know our history.

We’ve read our history.

And we’d be concerned about the Trojan Horse.

And some of us would rather burn that thing outside the city than bring it one step nearer to being inside the walls. But then, we’re coming at this from a position of success and strength. And they’re weak and impoverished and scared, and in dire need.

But they’re also arrogant, elitist, and stupid.

And you just know that there must have been a Greek general who sat at the planning meeting and asked, “Do you really think they’ll fall for this? A big hollow wooden horse, left as a parting gift?” only to be told by his colleagues, who knew that the Trojans had arrogance and elitism in spades, “Hell yes, they’ll fall for it.”

I suspect that if you were interested in buying that club to loot it, those are the very qualities you’d be banking on.

Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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