If Jackson sounds fearful of the takeover all of a sudden, The Guardian explained why.

Today, Keith Jackson did a rare reality check. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen because, you see, the one thing about Jackson that I’ve always known — and one of the reasons why he retains a shred of credibility — is that he cares enough about his club to criticise it occasionally.

When he writes fearfully about them because he sees bad things happening, you can actually take that as his most honest assessment of where they are and where they might end up.

There are pro-Ibrox writers in the media who will always reflect the club party line, and one of the things a lot of their fans don’t like about Jackson is that he isn’t one of them. Not really. I mean, he’ll swallow any PR bombast and bluster when needed if people want to get a message out there, or spin a story, but when he writes from his gut, when he doesn’t overthink it, you get honesty. You get a cold-blooded assessment.

Today, he offered exactly that — a very cold-blooded assessment of their chances of winning the title next season. And he’s put those chances somewhere between slim and none.

For a start, he thinks the takeover is happening too slowly, and if it happens at all, it’ll be too late to matter for the next campaign. But more crucially, he just thinks there’s way too much work to do in a single season.

Like many others, he echoes the point that nobody at Ibrox ever gets the time to settle in and build something before the hollering begins for heads to roll. He stops short of asking for patience — because he knows there isn’t going to be any — but at least he grasps that it’s going to take longer than a summer to fix their mess.

For the first time in a long while, I read a Keith Jackson piece without feeling the overwhelming urge to dismantle it.

I’m not going to praise it either — let’s not go daft — but it’s safe to say I think he’s more right than wrong today. And that’s because he’s got his Ibrox fan head on, he’s looking at it properly, and he doesn’t like what he sees. He sees too much to do, too little time to do it, and Celtic just getting stronger.

Now, his article is still devoid of real analysis — but then you don’t expect great analysis from Jackson. You don’t expect him to dig around, bring back facts, and present a full-context picture. For that, you have to go elsewhere in the media.

Which is why I’m going to link his comments to an article that appeared in The Guardian this morning about Leeds.

On one of the recent podcasts, I used a West Wing analogy — an episode with flashbacks to the first administration.

In the early days, when they were picking their first cabinet, they picked a guy for Attorney General who none of the staff really liked. He was an appeal to the “law and order” voters they knew they needed to win a second term. Problem was, he was so far to the right that some of his behaviour was borderline unacceptable. Still, the staff backed the president and went out to sell him.

At one press conference, when the media started tearing into them, the press secretary suggested they go and study the guy’s record.

A week later, when even more hell had broken loose, someone asked what went wrong. Her answer? “They did.” They studied his record — and found out he was even worse than they feared. Every head in the room dropped.

If you want to know what a Leeds-style takeover at Ibrox might look like, all you have to do is look at Leeds right now.

The Guardian’s article today talks about how Paraag Marathe is flying in from San Francisco to have a chat with Daniel Farke, the manager. And you get a sense of why the 49ers haven’t won anything major in a long time — and why Leeds have bobbed up and down between the Championship and Premier League like a bottle at sea.

If I were an Ibrox fan reading that piece, there’s not a single thing in it that would fill me with confidence. It paints a picture of a club wracked with dysfunctionality. A divided boardroom. Major issues about strategy.

Financial sustainability problems. Regulatory complications. Limited flexibility to expand the wage bill. A ground renovation stuck in the mud, only taking Elland Road up to 56,000 seats. And finally, a managerial shortlist which includes a boss Ibrox has already sacked.

And there’s another big problem too.

Their beloved “player trading model” is deeply flawed. Although many people say it’s all the rage — and the only way to go — listen to Brendan Rodgers talk about it and you’ll realise how seriously limited it really is.

The article starts with Marathe flying over to talk to Farke because a lot of people at the club don’t believe he’s the right man to lead them in the Premier League. Their whole plan to turn Leeds into a top-ten Premier League club is supposedly predicated on having the right boss — and there’s big doubt over whether they think Farke is it.

Marathe is fighting for his guy because he promised him the job, but The Guardian reports that the 49ers ownership isn’t some neat group of family and friends, but a collective of over 100 investors — all of whom want a say.

Enough of them aren’t convinced by Farke, and that’s why Marathe is having to fly over and plead the case.

In the context of Ibrox, and supposing these people are really involved, I already wonder how Andrew Kavanaugh and the 49ers group are going to get on when there’s a real disagreement. Who actually calls the shots?

If you think that sounds messy, consider this new fact, that within the 49ers alone, there are all manner of people wanting a say in how things are done.

And when it’s not just about who runs the club but who even picks the manager, you can understand why Leeds — fresh off promotion — are already surrounded by swirling uncertainty. Unnecessary uncertainty, at that.

I don’t know who’s compiling the so-called managerial shortlist for them, but if I were an Ibrox fan looking at the calibre of names Leeds are targeting, I wouldn’t be optimistic about a Marco Rose or a Mourinho sauntering through the Ibrox gates. I’d be terrified.

I’m just going to quote directly from the article:

“The Guardian has been told that initial soundings have been made towards the former (Ibrox) manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst, the former Bayer Leverkusen, PSV and Benfica coach Roger Schmidt and Davide Ancelotti, son of Real Madrid coach Carlo and his assistant at the Bernabéu. The first two are out of work and Ancelotti is expected to leave Real with his father in the summer.”

And then the next paragraph is somehow even worse:

“Another potential issue for Leeds is the owners’ determination to take charge of player recruitment through a data-led approach, which many managers may not accept.”

That’s right: the dreaded Moneyball strategy.

Now, I know Moneyball has its fans. I know it has its defenders.

But what you have to remember is that Moneyball was explicitly designed to give small clubs a fighting chance against the big boys.

The problem is that no one, anywhere, can point to a smaller club that’s achieved tangible success with it. What people can point to are major organisations who have used it alongside other strategies to achieve real, sustained success.

So what I’m saying is that any hope the smaller organisations ever had of using Moneyball successfully has been stolen away by the huge clubs, which now use the same strategies and have the money to spend on bringing in the best analysts, the best data experts, and the best people at the very top of the business. That means if you’re not among that small group of elites, you’re already way behind the curve. Yet so many struggling clubs are still attempting this.

One of the clubs attempting it right here in Scotland is Hearts. They’ve already suffered their first major casualty as a consequence of trying to use data-driven signings and data-driven managers. They finished outside the top six. Their manager’s head has already rolled, and there are people at Hearts who want to see more than just a manager pay with his job.

To some extent, Celtic’s scouting department has been working the Moneyball strategy for a while now, and those are exactly the kinds of players we signed two summers ago — the ones Rodgers looked at and said, “No, none of them are going to do me,” before he switched to more standardised approach.

When we’ve relied on it as our sole guide it’s been a disaster. But we have a good scouting department which augments it, and that’s the difference maker.

In short Rodgers has the right approach which can summarised thus; “I want to watch a player before I sign him. I want to know what his qualities are. I want to sit across the table from him, look him in the eye, and know he can handle this club.”

You’ve seen the results this season.

As Rodgers has said, data is great as a guiding tool, but not as the be-all and end-all, because there are always going to be things that slip through the net. There are always going to be X-factors which aren’t in the numbers.

On top of that, data aside, a good manager can spot whether or not a player has the necessary skill set to fit into his team. Like I keep on saying, a good manager is an architect — every piece has to be crafted to fit his vision.

If a manager says he wants pace and power, those are non-negotiables. It doesn’t matter what someone’s passing stats are, or how many assists they’ve created over the last two seasons at their previous clubs.

You can learn a lot from that stuff. The numbers will tell you part of the story — but only part of it. They won’t tell you whether a player has the mentality for a title race. They won’t tell you whether he has the guts to go in for a 50/50 ball. They won’t tell you how players will respond in a different league, with different weather, a different culture, a different playing style.

This is why players from certain countries don’t tend to succeed in Scotland — there are a lot of factors not in the data.

If you read a little bit of fear in Jackson’s recent articles — about how he worries that the next owners might pick the next manager based on data and algorithms — then you can understand, finally, why he was concerned, because it sounds an awful lot like that’s exactly what they’re going to try to do. You only need to look at what has just happened at Hearts to see what the results of that might be.

These aren’t the only scary aspects of the Guardian piece.

There are a lot of people who’ve asked me over the last few weeks: how do I know their project at Ibrox is going to fail, at least in terms of its commercial side? Because this is one of the things people in our media, and in the Ibrox support, have just assumed will change for the better — that suddenly they’ll start posting profits. Yet no-one has explained how that will happen.

They certainly aren’t posting profits at Leeds — and this is what the Guardian had to say about that, and it should genuinely make some people at Ibrox afraid:

“Leeds’ managerial plans are complicated by financial restrictions that have left them with little profitability and sustainability headroom and a limited budget to make changes. The club have posted combined losses of £94.5m over the past two seasons, and their permitted loss for the next three-year reporting cycle will be £61m after two seasons in the Championship.”

Right there, you can see that Leeds are a club with serious problems before they even get to the Premier League.

They’re not going to be able to make a lot of signings or spend a lot of money because they’ve already put themselves in a bad position with debt. On top of that, the financial sustainability regulations for Europe are extremely harsh and unforgiving — and UEFA will not accept any breaches without sanctioning clubs severely.

You have to wonder what the Ibrox club’s so-called headroom is when it comes to that. They were already very close to breaching it, and they may even have breached it over the last two years. This year will simply be about getting it back under control, so the three-year average doesn’t subject them to UEFA fines.

But just reading that, you can see that the strategy at Leeds has hardly been predicated on building something sustainable.

They’ve spent way more money than they should have, and they’re already paying the price for it. Sure, they’ll have more money to spend by virtue of getting to the Premier League, but they are way over the line and desperately need to make profits in the coming campaign just to break even on the FSR regulations.

And why do I doubt that’ll happen at a club trying to stay in that league?

Do not be at all surprised if there are financial investigations into Leeds at Premier League level before the end of next season. What that will automatically do, of course, is shine a light on how they’re running the Ibrox club — if indeed they are. People will be interested in that. People at UEFA.

There was literally nothing in the Guardian article today that their fans are going to enjoy seeing reflected in their own club, should this come about.

For many, many months now, the media has been deluding itself about what the likely shape of the club following such a takeover would be. Those delusions are falling away fast. Jackson has a sense now for what the club will look like under these people, and that’s why he’s concerned.

He’s concerned about a manager being chosen on the wrong basis. He’s concerned that the signings aren’t going to be up to snuff. He’s concerned that key work that has to be done, and key machinery that needs to be put in place before these people can even start to have an effect, will not be there — not anywhere near on time. He’s probably worrying about where the money is coming from to properly fund a rebuild of the club. And now he knows that maybe there won’t be any.

The Guardian has laid bare the situation at Leeds in a way that is pretty uncompromising and pretty unspinnable.

They got to the Premier League, but they got there with a side largely made up of players who were in the Premier League and who were expected by most to return. They sold a number of key players last summer for huge sums of money. But even that wasn’t enough to return them to profitability.

So you have to wonder: what on Earth is going on at that club? And how do its investors ever expect to get returns?

Those questions are even more pertinent at Ibrox, where the losses could be higher by comparison to what’s been put in, and where the club’s position could, in a couple of years’ time, be even more precarious than it is now — if they’re run on a crazy basis. And there is considerable doubt as to where the leadership at the top of the house is even supposed to come from.

It’s yet another element of all this that doesn’t make sense. These people want control of the club, but the chairman was here before them. The CEO was here before them. And now the director of football is here before them; all of them are expected to stay in post, but … without any real authority?

But nobody says it has to make sense. This is Ibrox we’re talking about, and since when did things make sense over there?

All I know is that Jackson is suddenly not convinced that this will save them — and reading the Guardian’s piece, it’s not difficult to understand why.

We discussed these subjects and a bunch of others tonight on the latest podcast, entitled Champions! You can watch it here.