The ingratitude of The Peepul is staggering. Any investor would do well to consider that.

Yesterday, I watched an outstanding podcast featuring the Celtic Exchange and David Low.

Now, I love David. I think he’s one of the real superstars of Celtic social media—a big personality, a big player at the club at one point, and a guy who cares passionately about us.

He brings a level of expertise to any discussion regarding the club, especially on the financial side.

One of the comments he made in the podcast was about how the Celtic board has disrespected the shareholders and the paying customers. They take out without putting in, and I couldn’t agree more with that.

But I don’t know a single Celtic fan who genuinely focuses on that aspect of it. I agree completely with him on the disrespect. I agree that these guys don’t contribute anything financially—that’s left to the rest of us.

But then, I’ve never wanted them to put their hands in their pockets.

You have to love how excited the mainstream media gets, and how excited the Ibrox fans get, at the prospect of billionaire owners.

We’ve had a billionaire as our largest shareholder for more than 20 years now, and that man has never once put his own hands in his pocket to fund this club. I don’t resent that. I’m proud that everything this club has was built by the supporters. I’m proud that we run on a break-even basis and that we don’t spend money we don’t bring in ourselves.

But I know football, and I know football fans. If Dermot Desmond was bankrolling Celtic, he’d be even more appreciated than he is now. And a lot of fans do appreciate Dermot’s contribution to this club.

If he and our directors weren’t very good at bringing in cash but were funding the club out of their own pockets, my respect for them would be through the roof. That might sound paradoxical, and if you give me one of the two scenarios, I take this one all day, every day. But if we were in desperate straits, and these guys were keeping the lights on, how could you not appreciate that?

And that’s what amazes me most about the attitudes of our rival supporters—their gross ingratitude, their utter selfishness. That selfishness is reflected in a lot of the mainstream media coverage that the club across the city gets.

The people who’ve kept the lights on, who’ve made sure there were transfer funds available to every manager over there—are they appreciated for it? No, they’re not. And nothing speaks more about that support and its sense of entitlement, a sense of entitlement shared by some in the media, than that does.

I think it’s disgusting—the level of abuse and hatred now being aimed at the people who have made sure that club can even function. I don’t think they are great leaders. I don’t think they are great strategists. I don’t think they are very competent. But I’ve levelled some of those same charges at our own board of directors. The difference is we’re winning, and they’re not.

But one charge I won’t lay against our directors is incompetence, because they are very, very competent men within their sphere of knowledge. They are in a different league to the guys over at Ibrox. And they are not zealots. They are not in thrall to the lunatic fringe. Not that we have a lunatic fringe in the way the Ibrox club has, but you know what I mean. They run this club in a very professional manner.

So yeah, the Ibrox board has made mistakes our board wouldn’t have made. They have made decisions our board wouldn’t have made. Their decision to overfund certain managers has proved catastrophic for the club as a whole. But without those contributions, where would that club be?

That ungrateful, permanently enraged Ibrox support thinks second place is bad? Take last year’s £17 million of losses out of that playing squad, and they’d be lucky to be sitting in fourth place this year. Take the millions spent the year before, which contributed to their debt, out of the playing squad, and they’d be a mid-table team trying to stay in the top six and qualify for Europe.

I’ve said this before, and I cannot emphasise this point enough—if their club is forced to spend only what it earns, they are in more trouble than they are in right now. They’re in a deeper hole than they are in right now. They’re in a worse footballing place than they are in right now.

One of the things David talked about on the podcast was what he called the “two cheque strategy,” common in American business when a takeover is in play. I’ll describe it exactly as he did:

The guy leading the takeover writes one big cheque to get the deal done. He then hires some MBA accountancy type to run the whole operation, and his remit is very simple—don’t give me any reason to have to write another big cheque. Run this on a break-even basis and, ideally, in profitability, but make sure that what’s already been spent doesn’t have to be spent again. Don’t make me sign that second cheque.

There are Ibrox websites talking about how they now have the money to sign Vaclav Cerny for £8 million in the summer. That’s the level of fantastical nonsense some of them are peddling. You have people like Keith Jackson pushing, like a drug, the idea that the manager is going to get a fortune to spend. These people live in a parallel reality. None of that is going to happen.

Nothing is going to change over there. And even if everything changes, nothing will. This is still a club whose supporters are permanently locked into a cycle of spending money they don’t have. And if this takeover doesn’t happen—or even if it does, and the club is run on a break-even basis—it won’t be long before they’re screaming from the rafters at the new board and looking for someone else to give them a handout of free money.

They talk endlessly about copying Celtic, but they have no intention of doing so and no interest in trying to emulate us.

They are permanently on the lookout for a sugar daddy—that’s all they focus on. If the new board isn’t coming in to splash the cash, then what’s the point of having them? If these people aren’t willing to put their hands in their pockets and fund the next great Ibrox playing squad, then why even bother selling in the first place? They simply don’t understand that this is not how it’s going to work.

If I were involved in that takeover, I’d be looking at three key things. The first is the strength of our potential rival, and in this case, that’s Celtic—whose strength is immense. We currently have more money in the bank than it will cost these people to mount their takeover bid.

In other words, if someone out there is looking to buy the Ibrox club, Celtic could do it with the surplus we have in the bank right now.

The structural advantage of 10,000 more seats is one they aren’t going to close, except at the cost of tens of millions of pounds, which just about makes it not worth their while. That’s a task that will take years and would require them to decant to Hampden while the work gets done—costing them even more money.

I’ve read a lot about how these people will invest in all this infrastructure. They haven’t done it at Leeds so far, and the idea that they’re going to do it the way the 49ers have allegedly spent money on infrastructure in the U.S. betrays an appalling lack of understanding of how things work over there.

I don’t know what work has been done on the 49ers’ stadium. What I do know is that when that stuff happens in the States, the state itself usually ends up paying a large chunk of the cost. John Oliver, the English-born comedian who hosts the HBO smash hit Last Week Tonight, did an episode on stadiums a couple of years back, and it’s mind-blowing how much public money goes toward major sports franchise infrastructure. It’s the government that builds the infrastructure over there—not the clubs.

And I can assure everyone that the Scottish Parliament is not putting its hands into our pockets to pay for any renovations to Ibrox. Not a chance in hell. So, if these people really are going to invest heavily in that kind of infrastructure project, they’re going to have to do it in a way that has never been done in the U.S.

All these mega sponsorship deals that the 49ers allegedly have? They’re actually negotiated by the NFL itself, which is the sole body responsible for bringing in sponsorship and ad revenue, which is then divided between the teams.

Sure, there may be some opportunity for crossover promotion, but I’m telling you now, nobody is going to go to the 49ers’ stadium in a newly minted Ibrox kit—not when they have their own merchandise to buy. And especially not when that club’s in competition with an English Premier League side like Leeds. All of this is just nonsensical.

In the meantime, their own club’s directors—the guys who are currently there—get pilloried. They get abuse, they get hate poured on them every week now. And all these guys have done is keep the club alive all these years.

Yet the Ibrox fans still haven’t twigged that these guys are so sick of it now that they’ll sell up to anybody who offers them money for their shares. “Let this be someone else’s problem”—that’s the prevailing attitude. Dave King called it “investor fatigue.” I call it just being sick to death of the scorn and fury poured upon them because they don’t have deeper pockets.

Like I said about a week ago when this story first broke—if the Ibrox fans are waiting for someone else to do the due diligence for them, nobody will. The SFA waved these guys in through the gates without even knowing who they are, without knowing their plan, without knowing what strategy they intend to follow.

And that is shameful enough. But the media are even worse.

The excitement is palpable, imaginations are running riot. These people are very good at spending other folks’ money. And although nobody in this alleged consortium has uttered a single word in public, you have people like Keith Jackson running around making promises on their behalf.

If I were them, I would consider the two things other things on my list of three key considerations. I would consider the media environment here, and I would be worried about that. But more than that, I would consider the fanbase and its ultra-unrealistic level of expectation. I would consider their culture. I would consider their hatred and their ingratitude. Because who needs that in their lives?

And yes, these people might not care—living at a great remove from all this in their walled mansions and gated communities. They may not give a damn about the foot-stamping frustrations and fury of The Peepul. But they need to consider what happens to their investment if they can’t deliver.

If I were these guys, I would be very, very careful. And I would seriously be considering other options. David Low thinks they will be, and I agree with him. But I must admit—I’m pretty keen to see this go ahead. If for no other reason than so I can see Keith Jackson and others calling for these people’s heads within 12 months and being shocked when it all plays out exactly the way some of us have said it will.

As I keep saying—that club’s supporters deserve everything they get.

And there are so many potential downsides to this scenario that I want to see them end up with every last one of them.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

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