No, Celtic fans are in no way envious of the Ibrox club.

You kind of have to love the Ibrox fans sometimes. Not really, but you have to laugh at them. They are demented. They are deluded. They are deranged. They are as nutty as the proverbial fruitcake. And there are times when that’s kind of funny.

I know I wrote a piece earlier today about them also being bigoted louts, but they are undeniably hilarious at times. And that should not be forgotten.

Take some of the crazy stuff they believe about this takeover.

The takeover is sort of the point of the piece, and so is the European run. But let’s dive a little deeper for a moment into some of the more ridiculous ideas they have in their heads about what this takeover will mean.

For example, there’s this idea that NFL games are going to be played at Ibrox. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were them.

My good friend Paddy Sinat highlighted this nonsense over on Born Celtic with an article about how their fans think this is a way to get around FFP regulations. I mean, it’s not. It’s nuts. If they have extra income coming in from playing NFL games at their ground, then its their own income and they don’t need to “get around” anything.

Presumably this will be done with NFL approval, and they’ll get that organised in time. Presumably, it’ll be done with SFA approval. They’ll get that sorted in time. Presumably, it’ll be done when there are no fixture clashes and no scheduling conflicts. And presumably, they’ll have the fans of whichever NFL teams are supposed to play on board, and on time. Why do I keep saying that? Because, of course, this is all about boosting the summer transfer budget.

As you can see, it’s barmy. It doesn’t seem particularly… realistic.

Not a whole lot of what goes on in their heads is particularly realistic. There is another theory doing the rounds on their forums that, because they’re in the midst of this takeover chatter and still technically in Europe, Celtic fans are looking at their club with envy. Jealousy. And a little bit of fear.

You know, because our squad is in place, our finances are great, we’re very well run, we’ve got only one round of qualifiers to navigate for next year’s Champions League, and we’re on the brink of another domestic treble. So naturally, we are looking enviously and fearfully at some other club which has none of these things.

It makes you wonder. It really does. It makes you wonder how they can be so stupid, how they can believe in such obvious rubbish.

We’re about to celebrate—not confirm, but celebrate—being the biggest club in this country by a country mile. And we’re going to celebrate that by adding another league title to our already swelling list of them and, hopefully, another Scottish Cup. We’re already in front of them in the trophy count, even accounting for The Survival Lie. We’re about to move even further ahead.

They are still in European competition, yes, but does anyone realistically think a Barry Ferguson-led Ibrox club is going to win that?

They inhabit a fantasy world. We live in the real one. The one where we actually are on the brink of a domestic treble. They, on the other hand, are on the brink of yet another short-term managerial appointment.

And the takeover? Come on. How many times do we have to go over this? Whatever happens, I can guarantee one thing—it will not be the Keith Jackson version that comes to pass.

Their fans have been through the wringer with the collapse of a club before. It astonishes me how little they care about their due diligence process over this. All their confident predictions of big money being spent do not reflect what has happened at Leeds, the club they are talking about as the model for what to expect.

Instead, that club was purchased with borrowed cash. The debt was transferred to the club, and they are now utilising every resource they have to pay that debt down. If that’s what they want for their own club, then fine.

But in terms of Celtic fans being envious or afraid? In the absolute worst-case scenario—the one where they get benevolent owners who intend to rebuild the club infrastructure—the only consequence for us is that the people running Celtic will finally have to up their game and turn us into a proper European footballing force.

Do you think any of us who have spent years demanding that Celtic take that next step will shed a tear over it?

They just don’t understand us at all. We don’t want some sugar-daddy owner. We don’t need some sugar-daddy owner.

We just want the people who run this club at the moment to be a little bit better at it, a little bit more ambitious. And anything that pushes them in that direction would suit us just fine. They’re coasting right now, and they’re content to coast.

The day they no longer have that luxury is the day I believe we will finally see Celtic put its best foot forward.

This very week, their club has gone back to that old well of a debt-for-equity switcheroo in order to keep the lights on. And don’t forget that the people running that club right now are the ones who care about it passionately and haven’t had the heart to make the kind of cuts that would make all this debt-for-equity stuff unnecessary.

They’ve also had to borrow money based on future transfer fees as a means of getting some quick capital into the place.

If they think foreign investors are going to run the club on that basis, they’re crazy. The austerity they’re suffering right now is nothing compared to what they might have to endure if these people decide to run the club on a break-even basis. They don’t even realise what that would mean for their own season ticket prices.

Our club is so far in front of them that it would take someone coming in and throwing money around like crazy just to come close to catching us. And that’s in the long term. In the short term, there is nothing they can do to close the gap.

Next season is going to look an awful lot like this one does, regardless of the intentions of the new owners, regardless of what capital they have to spend, and regardless of how they intend to deploy it—because we know they can’t deploy it the way the Ibrox fans expect, signing players as if they were back in the ’90s.

So no, none of us feels envy. None of us feels fear. What there is among Celtic fans when we look at their club is a kind of genuine sense of bafflement. A simple question: how could they be so stupid?

It’s because they never learn. It’s because they have no interest in learning. It’s because the lessons of the past just wash over them.

And even as they scramble around trying to pretend that all is well in their world, in our world—the real one—we’re preparing another title party. A treble party.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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