Celtic fan media can stand on its record. Who else out there can say the same?

Dealing with The Peepul is never easy.

It never will be. Because they are about as impervious to logic, to fact, to reality itself, as the average Trump voter. Or a Brexiteer, who believed all that “take back control” rubbish.

They are convinced that a lot of Celtic fan media is running scared of the Big Bad Takeover, and that the attention it’s generating is based on fear. It isn’t.

Speaking only for myself, I’m not in the least bit afraid, because I know the difference between the fantasy that exists in their heads and what the reality will be—even in the event that this thing actually does take place, which is still very much up in the air.

I’ve asked myself what the worst-case scenario is.

And the worst-case scenario is that the operation over there is sufficiently professional that it jerks our board fully awake, and they realise that complacency will no longer cut it—that we have to up our game.

Because of financial sustainability regulations, because of the extreme unlikelihood of them ever being able to do some of the things they allegedly intend to, especially in regard to stadium upgrades, I am comfortable predicting that we will remain far ahead of them, long into the future.

Because unless they can spend funny money—which they can’t do, even if these people are bringing funny money to the table, which I don’t think they are—the gap is almost too wide to bridge. And if we’re sufficiently motivated to keep that gap where it is, or even extend it, we have the capability to do that.

No, I’ll tell you what it is.

We’ve been presented with a scenario that doesn’t make any sense. That so-called investors want to buy that club—a club that has never had a period of sustained success in its short history, that has never posted a profit, that cannot master any of the basics of football club operations.

Yet, we’re to believe these “investors” – a word being used in every discussion about this with the deepest irony imaginable – want to sink £50 million into merely acquiring it, with no prospect of a return, and then invest tens of millions more… with even less chance of recouping what they’ve put in.

This is Scottish football we’re talking about here, with a low ceiling on earnings from TV, advertising, and sponsorship. And they are a parochial West of Scotland club with no obvious growth potential outside their shrinking cultural footprint.

I play strategy games in my spare time. I like to keep my mind occupied.

I like puzzles. I like problems. I like to build things and test out new techniques and strategies. So, my brain is always trying to make sense of what I see in front of me.

To understand where I’m coming from, let me take you back to around 2010.

I was working a university holiday job at the Sainsbury’s distribution warehouse in East Kilbride. For a while, I worked in the factory, until one night I got a phone call asking if I’d cover a night shift in the office.

They needed someone for a boring task that nobody else wanted, and the few poor souls they’d already tried weren’t cutting it.

When I got there, I discovered that their delivery drivers had been dumping their tachograph charts — those little round slips of paper with lie detector squiggles on them — into a bunch of filing cabinets. No system. No order. Just chucking them in a drawer and walking away at the end of their shift.

There were thousands of them. Each with a name, a time, a date, and mileage. That was it. No sorting, no indexing, just chaos. What they needed was someone to bring order to the madness. I immediately saw why others had said “no thanks” — it was tedious, it was messy, and it was going to take forever.

But it was also a challenge. And I love a challenge.

So I said yes.

I spent the first hour coming up with a system. Over the next three 12-hour night shifts, I steadily chipped away at the mountain of paper, turning that chaos into something structured and usable.

At the end of it, I thought I’d done a good job. Management thought I’d done an excellent job. So much so that they offered me the second part.

And, of course, I said yes again.

Each of those drivers had also submitted a timesheet and a mileage sheet that matched the tachographs. None were in order. They were all mixed with one another, and I was asked to sort them all out, then put them all back together and match them up. So, they gave me a wee office and asked me to come in for 12-hour day shifts.

For the next two weeks, I went through box after box, matching the data from those three sources. Timesheets, mileage logs, tachographs. All in perfect sync.

Now, I cheated a little. I brought in one of those early-gen portable DVD players. Every day, I’d stick on a couple of films — just background noise to help pass the time. Management would pop their heads in, eye the DVD player, and ask how things were going. When they saw the progress, they were happy enough.

Once I’d completed that mammoth task, I thought that’d be it. It wasn’t.

Next, they asked me to go back through everything again — the tachographs, the timesheets, the mileage logs — and create a fully indexed filing system where every driver got his own file and all his data was kept in it.

On top of that, I was to calculate the total mileage per driver over all their weeks and months, and compare it against the company’s own records. This was going to take a while. So I asked for three weeks and as many workdays as they could give me, since I was doing mainly sporadic shift patterns.

Two weeks in, I was nearly done. Management offered me a permanent job. I turned it down — I had a degree to finish.

When I finished the final mileage audit, there was a couple of hundred mile discrepancy between my total and the company’s. They weren’t concerned — a few hundred miles over thousands didn’t matter to them. But it bothered me. I wanted to know what I’d missed. So, I went back through everything. Twice.

Took a couple of extra days. Checked it all again.

Still hundreds of miles missing.

By now, I was helping in the office with tracking drivers and logging trips. But this mystery kept gnawing at me. So, on my lunch breaks, I combed through the paperwork again. For three days straight. No sausage roll. Just data.

Management told me to let it go. “It’s done,” they said. “Don’t worry about it.”

But I couldn’t let it go. I wanted the answer. I wanted to know where those miles were and how the Hell I had missed so many of them. I knew there was an answer; there had to be. So, I came in on a day off to try and crack it.

They thought I was daft. But I did crack it.

It was a pure fluke too. I overheard two guys talking about taking vehicles in for servicing. One mentioned a test drive afterwards.

So, I asked, “How far do they drive it?” He replied, “Few miles. Just enough to check everything’s working.”

And then I asked how often vehicles are serviced. I asked how many vehicles are in for a service at any given time. I got out the calculator. It wasn’t an exact match, but it was close enough that I knew I’d got the answer.

Those tiny test runs weren’t logged by the drivers — but they were recorded by the company. That was where most of the missing hundreds of miles were. Spread across dozens of service days with multiple vehicles. Mystery solved.

I highlight the story, and in that much detail, because that’s who I am. That’s a perfect distillation of my character and personality. I like to solve problems. I like to dig into things and see if I can find an answer.

On the podcast the other night, I talked about how I’ve tried pulling this takeover apart from every angle. That doesn’t mean, as some yahoos across the city seem to think, that I casually dismissed it out of hand. Quite the opposite as I thought was blatantly obvious. What it means is I’ve tried to figure out how it makes sense.

And I’m still trying—because it doesn’t.

I don’t feel anything particularly strong about it, emotionally.

Because I know what’s feasible and what isn’t. I know that even if it happens, it won’t happen in the way the media and their fanbase expect. I suspect, in fact, that if it does happen, there will be a rather nasty sting or two in the tail.

I’ve talked about the Trojan Horse. And they won’t know whether this is the Trojan Horse or not until they wheel it into the city. And by then, it’s too late.

I’m treating it as I would any other puzzle that I want to solve. That’s all it is. Anything that forces our club to behave in a more professional, forward-thinking, and aggressive manner is good for us. We’re not trying to poke holes in this story—we’re pointing out that there are holes. Big ones.

One of those holes comes in the form of the story itself—and who was fed that story. Now, I know that people like Chris Jack are now all over it, claiming to have been on it from the start. But it was handed to Keith Jackson.

And the one thing we know for certain about Keith Jackson is that he is a moron with a hard-earned reputation for swallowing anything.

We know the Ibrox fan media sites are going to cheer this story to the rafters. We know they’ll indulge in every fantasy that suits their tiny brains. We know this because they’ve done it before, and before, and before.

And here’s the thing they all want to forget: we in the Celtic blogosphere can stand on our records. They cannot. Because their record, when it comes to this sort of thing, is every bit as atrocious as ours has been on the money.

In 2009, there were a handful of us in the Celtic blogosphere—Paul Brennan at CQN, the lads at E-Tims, and Phil Mac Giolla Bhain—who could see the writing on the wall.

The global financial crash had smashed banking, finance, real estate—industries David Murray was involved in—like a wrecking ball, and since it was obvious that debt financing was paying for everything going on at Rangers, it was just as obvious that he would be feeling the squeeze, and the club with him.

Predicting their demise was one of the safest bets we could ever have made.

Years later, when I saw The Big Short—that movie about the handful of American investors who bet against the housing market because they knew the bubble was going to burst—I thought about us.

About how it had become increasingly clear to us, around the time that bubble did burst, that it would have an outsized impact on our rivals, and might even destroy them.

Those guys who bet against the housing bubble didn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking. I read the book, by Michael Lewis (the guy who wrote Moneyball) a couple of years back, and they all say in the book that the evidence was there for anyone and everyone else to see; all they did was to put aside all the assumptions others based their “judgement” on and look at the evidence.

They looked at it from every angle. They saw that none of it made sense. Michael Burry and others spotted the trends. From those trends, and just plain common sense, they predicted the disaster. And people in the UK—some even in politics, like former Lib Dem leader Vince Cable—were shouting the same warnings, even as everyone else told them to pipe down and stop being hysterical.

What I’m saying is, we did nothing special. We did what those guys did. We looked at what was going on in the wider world. We looked at what was going on at their club. And it was obvious what was going to happen. What had to happen. And it was clear that their club might not survive the outcome.

That was the first time we got it right. And nobody knew we got it right until three years later. But in the meantime, a lot of us were writing every day about the crisis at Ibrox. About how the bank had taken control. How they were trying to enforce cuts. How Murray was desperate to sell.

Until finally, he found a fool—or so he thought—who’d take it off his hands. Either not knowing the fool had a plan of his own and saw him as the fool … or by that point, maybe Murray just didn’t care.

I know that at every stage in which we were predicting the collapse of Rangers, we were told we were crazy. Right up until the moment Alistair Johnston nodded in response to a question about whether the Big Tax Case could wipe them out—sparking an on-air barney between two BBC Scotland journalists, people didn’t take us seriously. People didn’t take the idea seriously.

After that day a handful of people started to seriously think about it and for a while there was a flurry of chatter in the media. Then Whyte came along, with his “billions” and it seemed that he would save the day. Ha!

Ibrox fans cheered Craig Whyte through the front door—although by the time he bought the club for a quid, as if it were a bankrupt, hollowed-out shell of a financial institution, routed by debt like so many were during that crash—we had already charted his untrustworthiness. We’d proved he was a multiple bankrupt. We’d proved he didn’t have the fabulous wealth that Keith Jackson and others had trumpeted.

We knew from the early stages of Whyte’s Ibrox Revolution that he wasn’t paying bills and was sticking every invoice in a drawer.

We said so at the time and were laughed at. It wasn’t the Daily Record, as Jackson now claims, but Celtic fans—on a fan forum—who broke the story that Craig Whyte had paid off the bank by mortgaging the club’s season tickets to the company Ticketus, introduced to him by none other than David Murray.

That story too was derided and mocked.

When the BBC finally caught up and Mark Daly did his exposé—one which, to his credit, uncovered even more than we had—how did the Ibrox support react?

Cast your mind back. They picketed the BBC! For telling them the truth! For telling them they had a charlatan in charge of their club. A guy who made Del Trotter look like a legitimate businessman. Whilst there was still time for them to come together, start to lobby for his removal, to give themselves a chance. Did they do it? No, they preferred to shoot the messenger than hear the message.

(It would have done no good by that point; what’s notable is that they didn’t even try. They made no effort to force him out and protect what was left.)

At the time I thought it was nice that the media had finally caught up with us. The Ibrox support didn’t, though, not yet. Their delusions ran out of road on 14 February 2012. Happy Valentine’s Day, boys and girls.

Happy Administration Day.

During the liquidation crisis, the media kept insisting that the club would get a CVA, that HMRC would accept pennies in the pound. That heroes on white chargers were on their way. That the club would be saved, that no real harm would be done. It was the Celtic fan media that repeatedly pointed out what was stated clearly on HMRC’s own website—that in cases of demonstrable withholding of money and deliberate non-compliance, they would not accept any such arrangement.

What we didn’t know at the time—but which emerged later—was even worse. The Ibrox club had already been through an extensive audit, and they had lied to the investigators. They had assured them that the side letters and such didn’t exist—when HMRC already had the proof in their possession.

We did, however, know and highlight that there was a political angle to this. That they were being used as a test case because HMRC wanted to go after bigger fish—Premier League fish. They knew that stringing the Ibrox club up like a side of beef would make clubs down south far more likely to settle their own debts.

Through it all, we were told that we were seeing what we wanted to see—even as we warned them not to only hear what they wanted to hear. But you can’t tell these Peepul anything. They certainly don’t want to hear it from us.

When someone did eventually ride up on a shining steed to “save the day,” all the Celtic sites that had scrutinised Whyte turned their attention to scrutinising Green. Charles Green already had one failed football project behind him before he even climbed the marble staircase. And this was public knowledge. He had been run out of Sheffield by fans who couldn’t stand the sight of him.

But the Ibrox fans loved him. Because he spoke their language. He boasted about treating everyone else with contempt. He talked of settling scores and bringing in new money. He babbled about US sporting link-ups and 500 million Ibrox fans worldwide. We laughed—because it was obvious Moon Howling nonsense.

But the media swallowed it. And Ibrox fans, many of whom now deny they ever liked the guy, paid homage to him online. They claimed we were running scared because Green had a plan. They were going to become a global brand, and money would rain down from the heavens.

He talked about his “big Yorkshire hands” being made for “grabbing money.” We told them it would be their money. They didn’t believe a word of it.

Even after that Christmas message—that utterly surreal and unintentionally hilarious trainwreck of a speech, which I’ll remember vividly on my deathbed—they still thought he was brilliant. Some of them thought it was genius. Many of those same people deny it now, like Peter denying Christ.

And oh, how we laughed. And oh, how they laughed—at us. Running scared, they said. We were too convulsed with mirth to run anywhere.

Green brought in Mike Ashley.

And although they don’t want to admit it now, they said every single thing about Ashley that they’re now saying about these guys from Leeds. They offered every single same explanation for why an English billionaire would want to buy their club—European prestige, global reach, Champions League exposure.

The media repeated it all verbatim, although we suggested that there were one or two holes in the theory. Why would he do, at Ibrox, what he had never done at Newcastle, the club he owned outright?

Ashley wanted a few advertising boards and a merchandising deal. That’s what we told them. He wanted a place to dump Newcastle’s reserves. He already had a global audience—it was called the Premier League.

They said we were mad. We laughed again. We laughed at their fantasies of a game-changing moment. They laughed at us.

Who was laughing by the end? What happened to Ashley? They ran him out of town. And again, we laughed. Because they chased off the one guy who actually brought something useful to the table.

That link with Newcastle, that merchandising empire—it could’ve benefitted them. The so-called “erroneous contracts” weren’t worse than the ones they eventually signed, for less money, than what Celtic was getting.

But again—you can’t tell these Peepul anything. They don’t want to hear it, especially not from us. Shoot the messenger. Ignore the message.

We all told them King was a disaster. We all said not to trust him. That he’d bring nothing but trouble. Every time we said the pieces didn’t fit—that the picture in their heads bore no resemblance to reality—we were told we were running scared.

So once again, they embraced the saviour. Big changes were coming. And that was their stupidest mistake of all.

They put their faith in the glib and shameless liar. The South African tax cheat. The man now trying to sell his shares to drive the next takeover. Does he care who buys them or what their plans are? Not a bit. He just wants his cash and a way out.

His revolution was supposed to be the one that buried Celtic. You know what’s happened since then? Five trebles. A wheelbarrow full of doubles on top. And now it’s King and his people being railroaded out so the next bunch can roll right in.

We’re the only ones – the only people – who dare to ask questions. They are questions they won’t ask. Questions they didn’t ask before. Questions they ought to be asking, if for no other reason than to prove they’ve learned something.

Instead, we’re told we’re wrong. We’re scared.

But I know whose record I’d rather run on. And it’s not theirs.

No-one is saying these new people will be a disaster if they do get control. No-one’s saying they’re crooks. They don’t have to be to shatter the dreams of these stupid, stupid Peepul. Not even close. In fact, the smarter they are the more damage they might do. I am amazed that’s not dawned on these morons yet.

I actually think they’ll run the club well and professionally.

But why should we be afraid of that? Because the only way to run that club properly is to run it as a profit-making business. That means savage cuts. That means no big spending. That means, at some point, trying to come to terms with the scum in the stands who love being “up to their knees in Fenian blood.”

The guys being pushed out loved the club. They kept the lights on with their own money. I don’t doubt that if they’d had another £100 million, they’d have spent it.

But no-one can tell me what the Americans get out of this deal. I know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt though: they’re not doing it for love. And no-one seems remotely curious how—if profit’s the motive—that profit is ever meant to materialise. Those questions don’t seem to matter.

In the end, they are the only ones which will matter.

So, we’re presented with a puzzle. A situation that makes no real sense. And all we’re doing is sifting through the hype and the hysteria and looking for some hitherto undiscovered fact which makes sense of it.

Our amazement at the lack of scrutiny comes from all those previous examples. Our certainty that this won’t end how they expect it to come from our lengthy experience—and from good old fashioned common sense.

From what we know of Scottish football. From what we know about its tiny commercial ecosystem. From what we know about the difficulties of redeveloping stadiums on time or on budget and the logistical nightmare. From what we know about FSR regulations which will stop them simply throwing money at every problem.

So the Ibrox fans really only have one question to ask themselves; how sure are they that they’re right and we’re wrong?

Are they ever? Are we ever?

Whose record would you want to bet on?