Celtic is an oasis of sanity in a game gone mad. The Craig Gordon story proves it.

A week or so ago, I was recommended the Vladimir Romanov story that the BBC is doing on its podcast. The former chairman of Hearts is certainly a fascinating guy, and he definitely has a story to tell.

There are also lessons to learn from it, which are the most important thing to take from the whole affair. So of course, it’s those very lessons that the Scottish mainstream media has absolutely failed to take seriously or learn from.

I saw some stories towards the end of last week about how Romanov had offered Craig Gordon a blank cheque not to sign for Celtic.

This is in keeping with some of the other stories about Romanov at Hearts, stories which almost glorify what he’s done, and seek to present it as some kind of missed opportunity for the club, some tantalising glimpse of a better future that either Romanov couldn’t realise or which was otherwise snatched away from them.

What makes me crazy about the story—what makes the whole thing crazy—is that nobody writing these reports seems to realise, or remember, or want to acknowledge that Romanov’s time at Hearts was a period of insanity.

It was a time when that club sought to ape the worst excesses that were going on at Ibrox under David Murray at Rangers. Handing a footballer a blank cheque and telling him to write his own number on it was exactly the kind of stunt Murray would have pulled in his pomp.

The Romanov era wasn’t a time of great possibility at Hearts. It was a spell when that club flirted with existential peril.

It was a period where they tried to be bigger than they actually were. There was no attempt to grow organically. There was no effort to maximise their potential. They tried to buy success. There was no real plan for developing into a better club.

Had Romanov spent that money wisely and properly, Hearts may indeed have become a bigger and better club—both then and now.

Our media prefers the fairy-tale version, of course—the version where this was a guy who came in to shake up Scottish football and make Hearts the top team in the country. It doesn’t matter that the money to do it was largely illusory, as Hearts found out to their cost after he decided to go.

People might want to forget, even some Hearts fans, that their club almost went out of business because of the Romanov period, and it was exactly because they experimented with craziness—exemplified by the Gordon story—that they entered dangerous waters from which they barely escaped.

My concern is that too many people want to paint this guy as some sort of colourful character who came in and gave Scottish football a shot in the arm. That’s not true. He typifies the kind of madness that was all too apparent at that time and which had been sparked by Murray’s revolution at Rangers—a madness that placed several Scottish clubs, not just Hearts, in a period of deep crisis.

Look at what almost happened at Dundee. Look at what almost happened later at Hibs and Motherwell and other clubs like that. Gretna went out of business. Rangers went out of business.

Romanov was not some colourful joker. He was a dangerous lunatic who almost destroyed one of our clubs in the same way that David Murray was a dangerous egotist who did destroy one. Giving Craig Gordon a blank cheque was insane and reckless. It is not something to boast about. The fact that so many media outlets ran a version of that story which seemed to paint him as some kind of disrupter figure who sought to break the paradigm… they just don’t get it.

We shouldn’t be surprised that they just don’t get it. These are the same people who think that the answer to Ibrox’s current problems is for another bunch of people to come in and throw money at the club that it otherwise couldn’t spend. These people live in a fantasy world where the only solution for football clubs to improve is for them to be bankrolled by sugar daddies or mysterious little cabals who operate in the shadows and get their money from God knows where.

This idea is dangerous to the game. Promotion of this kind of idea is dangerous to clubs. Trying to find some romantic story out of how a chairman gave a player a blank cheque to stop him signing for another club is to encourage people to believe that this is an appropriate, normal, and sensible way to go about your business. It isn’t. It’s proof only of stupidity being rampant in Scottish football.

The thing I always find completely unacceptable about this is that it’s obvious to me that the promotion of this particular brand of Scottish football lunacy is done in order to present the choices Ibrox has made—and continues to make—as the result of some rational process instead of being driven by egotism and arrogance and a desire to be better than Celtic.

There is no rational basis for some of the decisions that club has made and continues to make. So what the media tries to do is paint Ibrox’s peculiar form of madness as something that afflicts the game here as a whole.

Actually, Ibrox’s problems are unique to that club. Celtic is the living proof that clubs do not have to operate in such a fashion to be successful. The media would rather live with a fairy tale than deal with the reality.