The Union Brats are no longer seen as credible amongst Ibrox’s own supporters.

That was a terrible week for the Union Brats. The fan group at Ibrox, already humiliated earlier in the season when their walkout protest against the state of their club was met with boos from their own supporters—and no one joined them in the long march to the exits—has endured another bruising spell.

If you’ve been following the North Curve Twitter feed, you’ll have seen that the Union Brats also recently lost some of their equipment. The North Curve Boys had a good laugh at that and even worked it into their latest bit of advertising. If you check their Twitter feed, you’ll see what I mean. They painted a train in our colours and in the colours of the Ibrox club, a very deliberate dig using the Union Brats’ own personal stock. That’s about as pointed as you can get.

But their biggest screw-up was the banner they unveiled at their recent European game. I’ve already written about it, and plenty of other fan sites have been discussing it. More importantly, though, it sparked some fierce debate on their own forums—almost all of it negative.

Now, I’m not here to permanently give their fans a hard time. I’m not here to make them the butt of every joke—only when they are the butt of the joke. And when they are, I’m going to laugh. But I’ll also say this: a whole lot of them are now just as sick of this group as we are.

Let’s be blunt. Some of their own supporters are furious—not just because the banner itself was incomprehensibly stupid, but because of how utterly incoherent the message was. I said in my previous piece that, having seen plenty of protests, demonstrations, and political tracts of all kinds, I genuinely could not work out what the hell they were trying to say.

It was one of the most contradictory, illogical, and incoherent political statements I’ve ever come across. And bear in mind, I’ve spent the last seven or eight years following US politics and Donald Trump.

I mean, I knew there was some kind of Trumpian point behind it—that’s why the word “woke” was mentioned—but even as a Trumpian comment, it made no sense. You don’t put “Defend Europe” and a Donald Trump reference in the same banner. It just highlights how politically illiterate these people actually are.

Some of the backlash is because it was idiotic. But some of their own fans aren’t slamming them for the message itself—just for how embarrassingly jumbled it was. If it had been more straightforward, they might have found more broad agreement. Instead, most people found it childish and low-IQ, an embarrassment.

For a lot of their support, this represents a breaking point. The Union Brats are increasingly seen as juvenile, idiotic, and massively overestimating their own importance. They desperately want to be taken seriously, yet they’re now regarded as a joke. And for a group like that, nothing could be worse. It’s been a week of non-stop humiliation.

I’ve heard two possible explanations for the banner, and both suggest that the Union Brats were actually aiming their ire at their own club. That is astonishing, considering the club is in the latter stages of a takeover bid and needs to at least pretend to be semi-professional.

The first explanation involves a dinner or event hosted at the club, which some saw as outreach to the Muslim community. The event was apparently advertised as an “all welcome” occasion—something that hasn’t stopped a section of their fanbase from throwing a fit over it. The other explanation concerns a flag currently flying at Ibrox—the LGBT flag. That one has really set off the Maniac Brigade, who are furiously stamping their feet and accusing the club of promoting “fringe politics” and “woke-ism.”

This does suggest the banner might have been aimed at the club over these issues. So maybe it wasn’t about one thing, but two.

Even so, the “Defend Europe” part still doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit with the rest of it. That just goes to show how utterly bonkers this banner was—so much so that even the most plausible explanations don’t fully add up.

The Union Brats have been thoroughly humiliated over these last few weeks and months. Whatever support they once had within the wider Ibrox fan community has eroded to the point where they are now virtually irrelevant. And they’re going to have serious problems if they need to act as a bulwark against the wrong kind of owners—if that’s what they end up with.

The way they’ve behaved is ridiculous. It’s scandalous. These people are extremists who have alienated the rest of their fanbase. They have done themselves and their club no favours with this nonsense.