As Celtic fans mock them, the Ibrox management team proves that they are not serious Peepul.

I thought long and hard about how I wanted to handle writing about Barry Ferguson and his elevation to the big chair at Sevco. There are broadly two ways you can approach this. You can either come at it from the perspective of mockery, or you can try to treat it seriously and do a straightforward analysis.

Because as odd as it’s going to sound, there are actually some compelling reasons why—if you were a fan of that club—you might want an appointment like this.

To the rest of us, it is the stuff of comedy gold, and I am tempted—very strongly tempted—to come at this and just rip the piss out of it. In its own way, that seems like a more rational response than the decision itself. If you’re asking me to write about it soberly and seriously, I can do that, and I’m certainly going to try in this piece.

But if you’re asking me to take it seriously, that’s a different thing entirely. And I can’t. And I don’t. Because it’s not really a serious endeavour. It’s not really something that anybody should be taking with a straight face.

Like I said, there are reasons why this is the kind of appointment that will go down well over there, and reasons why it may even have been necessary. I am sympathetic to certain elements of that argument.

First, they want someone who understands Scottish football properly. But as I’ll get to in the second half of this piece, that doesn’t mean what they think it means. Secondly, they want someone who understands the club, and the same mentality was evident in our hiring of Neil Lennon—not once, but twice. There are tremendous upsides to having someone in charge who “gets it,” but there are tremendous downsides too. And I’ll get to them in the second half of the piece.

Thirdly, this is a cheap, no-frills appointment from people who aren’t coming in to do any more than steady the ship and steer them through what’s left of a shattered campaign. There is a good argument for saying that if you’re going to make an interim appointment, make it a crowd-pleasing one—someone who knows their role, will do it, and then walk away.

When it came to Lennon, I always used to use the example of Cincinnatus.

Cincinnatus was one of the most revered figures in the history of the Roman Republic. He was a former consul and general who had retired when the Senate called him back to deal with an emergency. As they had done many times throughout history, they handed him full dictatorial powers to resolve their problem.

He did this, and then went back to his farm. He gave up the dictatorial power that had been bestowed upon him the moment the emergency ended. And he did this not once, but twice—making it all the more extraordinary. Later, during other times of turmoil, the dictator was not so civically minded.

Lennon could have been Cincinnatus had he come in on one of the two occasions when he did, steadied the ship, and then moved on. But there’s a spark of arrogance and ego in Lennon, and there’s a spark of insanity in our boardroom—where they believed that he had earned the opportunity and he did not simply walk away.

The idea that Ferguson and his little cadre could ever do enough to get those jobs on a permanent basis seems ridiculous. And so, on the surface, the idea that these men have been brought in to do a job in the here and now, and will—like Cincinnatus—return to their ploughs at the end of the emergency seems perfectly valid. But it isn’t valid at all. And I’ll get to that in the second half of the piece too.

For those reasons, I can see it. I can see where there is merit in this call. I can see where it isn’t as crazy as it sounds if you’re looking at it from the point of view of Ibrox directors who themselves may not be around for much longer. The whole temporary appointment thing seems like a perfectly reasonable way to go about their business because if massive change is coming to the club anyway, you don’t want to bring in someone who has any realistic expectation that they’ll be hanging around.

When they talk about people who “know the club,” they envision, I am sure, the “real Rangers men” sweeping into the dressing room and infusing a deep feeling of pride in the players, in where they are, and in the institution and its culture. They envision, perhaps, Ferguson giving these players some kind of inspiration, taken from their surroundings and the history inside those walls.

They’re also thoroughly fed up with the style of football under previous managers and believe that Ferguson and his little group will play front-foot football, which will transform the overall mood of the club. Some may even look at the playing squad he inherits and believe that it is better than all the other squads in the league—perhaps even including ours.

They may ask, how much improvement is necessary in the overall outlook of the team and in its tactical approach to be able to secure 30 points from what remains? And again, on the surface, this doesn’t seem like a gamble.

So that’s the upside. That’s how they see it. But they’re in what I once referred to as a “room of the lost in a hall of mirrors.” Nothing they see represents reality. It’s all distorted. It’s all out of shape. It’s an illusion.

And it’s an illusion based on a certain form of institutional arrogance. Those who’ve made this decision believe that bringing in the staunch brigade will infuse the team with all the right mentalities, mindsets, and ways of thinking. They believe that the old “grab them by the throat and push them against the wall” type of management can still be applied to running a dressing room in 2025.

Ferguson has, in fact, confirmed that this is part of his managerial philosophy. He sat there yesterday at his first interview as boss and said that some players need a hug and others need “a clip round the ear.”

Yeah, cause grown men, adults, professionals who have been elsewhere and seen real man management will respond well to that, won’t they?

On top of that, their arrogance extends to a general dismissal of all the other teams in the league bar one. They think that if they bring in someone who simply goes for the throat against these teams, treats them with no respect, and views them as irritations to be swatted aside, it will transform the fortunes of the team.

And the idea that these guys will only hang around till the end of the season and then walk away may be the most dangerous idea of them all.

Because if Ferguson is smart in the least (I know, I know, so let’s say if his agents are the ones who are smart) he will have done what Lennon did when he agreed to take over from Tony Mowbray in the first place. He told the board that if he got the team playing good football, restored some pride in the playing squad, and got more out of them than Mowbray had managed to do, then he would be entitled to think of himself as a front-runner when it came time to pick the next boss.

I don’t know what will represent success for Ferguson. But improved domestic performances and having the fans purring about attacking football and treating the rest of Scottish football with contempt may well be enough.

People forget that Lennon took over from Mowbray and was expected to win the Scottish Cup. We didn’t. We went out in humiliating fashion, and for most people, that erased any thought that Lennon could possibly get the gig. The board gave it to him anyway, although I always believed he failed in what should have been a relatively straightforward task.

No one expects Ferguson’s team to win at Celtic Park. No one expects them to win the Europa League. So what would represent success in that scenario? A draw against us at Ibrox, perhaps, and beating everyone else? If he managed that with a certain amount of style, are Ibrox fans really ready to believe he won’t get the gig?

The Americans are watching, after all. And it may well be that Ferguson does enough to sufficiently convince those guys, especially if they don’t want further upheaval. And what happens if they see something they like? If they see enough signs of tangible progress in a guy willing to work on a budget, just for the privilege of having the job? Are Ibrox fans 100% sure that won’t happen?

And that appointment, of course, could do a lot of damage even in the short term. A lot of their fans assume they have a chance against Fenerbahçe in the Europa League and that they could win that game to reach the quarter-finals. Most journalists now agree that they’ve essentially written that tie off because you cannot expect that managerial team to go head-to-head with Mourinho and come out anything other than second best.

There are also players in that squad they’re trying to develop and turn into better footballers. Anyone who remembers the performance that Ferguson’s Alloa team gave against us when he was managing there will know that these are not guys who are going to do development. These are not coaches who will make players better so they can be handed over to the next manager. Some of these guys will go backwards under a coaching team like this.

That contempt I talked about for the rest of the Scottish teams is likely to blow up in their faces, as all such casual disregard does.

One of the reasons Celtic is so successful and so consistent is that we do not take that attitude. Brendan Rodgers would never allow anyone at Celtic to take that attitude. Respecting the opposition means you’re ready and prepared for them. Believing you only have to show up is how disaster strikes.

And when Ferguson and his defenders talk about “knowing the Scottish game,” that’s what they’re referring to. They think they know what their club’s status is within Scottish football. And based on that belief, they underestimate everyone else. It’s one of the reasons this is such a ludicrous appointment—because it betrays a certain amount of contempt for everyone else.

And this stuff about the club’s culture—bringing in people who “understand it” to try to infuse that kind of belief in everyone else—is a terrible, terrible idea.

If you have a guy like Callum McGregor taking a new signing on a tour of the stadium and the trophy room, talking about the passion of the fans, that’s how you sell the club. You let the place, the trophies, and the history speak for themselves. You don’t ram it down someone’s throat.

The last people you want in a job like this are zealots because they always sound crazy to outsiders. They always sound deranged, even delusional. And when you’re telling everyone what a fantastic club this is and how success is “built in with the bricks,” when you’ve won one title in 14 years, when your club has won three trophies over the same period, then you are going to sound crazy to people who can only judge based on what they see in the here and now.

The idea that some of these players, brought in from all over the world, are going to seriously buy into all that cultural nonsense is simply wrong.

It’s far more likely that many of them will look around and think they’re in an insane asylum—one where the lunatics have been handed the keys, the controls, and are now walking around in the staff uniforms.

Not a single person in that dressing room is going to have any respect for what Ferguson did as a player. They will look at his managerial record at clubs like Clyde and Alloa and wonder to themselves, “What is this guy doing here?”

They’ll look at the rest of the coaching team, who have had similarly unimpressive careers. Not a single one of these people will, on their own, be able to command the kind of respect from the dressing room that is necessary to pick up a club in the manner these guys need to.

This is more likely to inspire derision and contempt from players who thought they had signed for a serious football club than it is to suddenly make them want to run through walls for the shirt, the fans, the culture, and the institution. These are grown men who signed up for professional reasons. They are not inductees into a cult. And I don’t think professional footballers will do well in that environment.

The people who believe in this kind of stuff are the same ones who thought that when the world’s most famous kitman shuffled off his mortal coil and they dismantled his shrine, the club lost its soul.

You have to build a club mentality around excellence, ambition, and the here and now—because the past is useless as inspiration without a vision for the present and future.

Even to a lot of their own fans, this looks like the last gasp of a desperate board of directors that has run out of ideas.

There is no footballing justification for appointments like these. Neil McCann and Billy Dodds have spent the last few years in TV studios talking about the game instead of being on the sharp end of it, and Ferguson has been out for even longer. These people are pundits. Their managerial track records are train wrecks.

Even if you’re only looking to mark off days on the calendar, this is an appointment that sends all the wrong messages to people outside the club. And the moment Ferguson and others start all this culture war nonsense, the club itself becomes even more toxic to anyone on the outside looking in.

It’s not just amateur hour. It is much worse than that. And although there is a risk that these guys will sufficiently impress American owners who don’t know any better, the much greater risk is that the people inside the club right now, under the guise of an external review, will see things that so appall them over the next month or so that they walk away altogether.

To paraphrase a very famous TV character: these are not serious people. This is not a serious appointment.

It’s like the last joke from a bad end-of-pier comedian. And their fans had better hope that it is the last joke—because if it’s not, then what comes next will be even worse. Although, how it gets much worse, I’m at a complete loss to say.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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