The Scottish media continues to push its Idiot Plot. No wonder Celtic fans laugh at them.

Another week folks, and more contrived rubbish about the Ibrox takeover, this time courtesy of Alan Hutton and the Daily Record. They’re pushing his latest remarks as some sort of grand vision in which the Ibrox club’s potential new owners might just throw money at the team and ignore UEFA regulations.

Or at least, I think that’s what they’re suggesting. Their argument is so bizarre that I may have misunderstood it.

Or maybe I’ve understood it perfectly, because they’re still referring to this as the “Graham Souness Plan”—and we’ve already covered that in detail. There was never a plan, just a lot of jumbled, random nonsense pouring out of that clown’s mouth. Talk about how the team needs £50 million spent on it, followed by the suggestion that the Americans are exactly what the doctor ordered to make it happen.

One of my favourite websites to read for my own amusement is TV Tropes. As a movie lover, a literature fan, and an occasional writer of fiction, I find it fascinating. It’s packed with lessons about what not to do in storytelling, and some of them are hilarious.

There’s a trope on there called the Idiot Ball. It describes a moment in a piece of work where a normally competent character suddenly acts completely out of sync with their intelligence or experience. They latch onto a stupid idea and run with it, or they behave in a way that makes no sense.

This is known as “picking up the idiot ball.”

It’s a plot contrivance. If you’ve created a character who is supposed to be smart but then make them act in the most idiotic way imaginable, nine times out of ten, it’s because you need them to act that way for the sake of the story. It’s bad writing. It’s unrealistic. And when you encounter it in fiction, it has a habit of snapping you right out of the world you’re immersed in.

I’m often tempted to accuse our journalists of picking up the idiot ball when they write about this takeover nonsense. But that would be unfair—because picking up the idiot ball assumes someone is normally intelligent enough that they shouldn’t be acting like a fool.

The Scottish mainstream media, however, is largely made up of fools. So does the concept even apply here? I think not.

Instead, what we’re living through is what the late, great critic Roger Ebert called the Idiot Plot: this is how he put it. “The Idiot Plot … is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot.”

And since everyone in this story is an idiot—or at least most of the mainstream media and a good chunk of the Ibrox fanbase are—I have to conclude that what we’re witnessing is some version of the Idiot Plot. Because all of this nonsense would be resolved in five minutes if people weren’t so unbelievably dumb.

To those outside looking in, none of this is particularly complicated. UEFA regulations prevent clubs from spending more than they earn. It’s that simple. Even if there was evidence that the Americans were willing to plough £50 million into the squad—money they haven’t invested in Leeds—it wouldn’t be allowed.

If people took just two minutes out of their fantasy world to embrace reality, this story would never be written again. No one would still be talking about some mythical “Souness plan.” There is no plan, and even if there was, they have no way of executing it.

It’s like wishing you had magical powers. It’s fun to discuss what you’d do if you actually had them, but pretending it has real-life applications is pointless—because it doesn’t. It’s like hoping your magic beans will grow into an actual beanstalk so you can climb it and find buried treasure.

These people are already spending that imaginary buried treasure—without a hint of irony. This whole saga is the Idiot Plot.

The thing is, there must be an audience for this stupidity.

There simply has to be. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many bad movies, bad books, and—of course—so much bad journalism. The idea that Hutton has made a serious, grounded suggestion is laughable. That the Record and other outlets are touting this nonsense as the “Souness Plan”—when it’s neither a plan nor even a coherent thought—is even more ridiculous.

I wrote earlier in the week that the mad media talk is leading Ibrox fans down a crazy path. But as dumb as some of them are, even most of them aren’t willing to go this far. Their forums show that the majority understand the limitations here. They know the club has to operate within UEFA’s rules, and they realise that breaking them would invite disaster.

Even more importantly, the people inside Ibrox definitely understand the regulations. That’s why they’ve spent the last year making drastic cuts across the board—because they know they’re dangerously close to crossing UEFA’s financial fair play line.

They aren’t going to let anything happen that drags them over it. And if the future owners have even a shred of sense, they’ll realise that UEFA is one organisation they cannot screw around with.

Still, the media indulges in its Idiot Plot. They continue to push these absurd ideas. It’s like discussing what you’d do if gravity didn’t exist—without acknowledging that gravity does exist, and that’s why your ideas are nonsense.

Some people say we shouldn’t get worked up about this stuff. But the truth is, there is plenty of reason to be angry. The media is a joke. Its traditional role—educating and informing—has been completely abandoned.

That’s why I keep bringing up books, TV shows, and movies. That’s why I’ve mentioned TV Tropes. Because none of this is reality-based.

And when something that isn’t reality-based is being published and presented as if it is, there’s only one word for it.

Fiction. Bad fiction at that.

The latest Trinity Tims podcast is out now.