McCann’s Celtic takeover and the Ibrox fakeover are miles apart in every way.

One of the things that always makes me laugh is when people who think they know what they’re talking about email me nonsensical points in an attempt to punch holes in something I’ve written.

Yesterday was a case in point.

Just after Paulina published her piece on Fergus McCann, an Ibrox fan sent me a message full of abuse and all sorts of personal insults. He pointed out that McCann bought Celtic with 51%, the threshold I’ve said is a dangerous one for any attempted takeover at Ibrox. A threshold at which they don’t have complete control.

It does not surprise me in the least that people misunderstand this, because the Ibrox fans get all their information from the media.

They believe entirely that this is a Fergus-style revolution, one that is going to utterly transform their club. But the reasons why that is not going to happen are so numerous that it would take me all day to lay them out. Instead, here are a few.

First, the 51% that Fergus and his consortium acquired to take control of Celtic was back in 1994, and the regulatory framework was entirely different back then. Furthermore, Fergus was taking over a private company, not a PLC. Completely different rules and regulations governed that process, and under those rules, Fergus—with 51%—pretty much ran the table.

Fergus changed us from being a private company to being a PLC. That was crucial in his attempt to get us on the stock market and allow fans to purchase shares. His 51% shareholding gave him effective control of a board of directors whom he picked himself—from amongst his friends and allies—and who gave him unfettered command, even though his shareholding started to reduce almost from the moment he walked through the door. That’s something a lot of people don’t realise about Fergus.

But as I said, at the time he was dealing with a private company and not one that was publicly traded. Even if he had been dealing with a publicly traded company, the rules and regulations of that time are not the ones the current Ibrox board will have to navigate.

The Financial Services and Markets Act didn’t come into force until the year 2000. Fergus was already gone by then. His five-year plan already executed, our stadium already built, our club back on a fine and firm financial footing. He left with his pockets full of money, having pulled off a brilliantly conceived scheme—planned and executed to perfection.

It wasn’t until 2006 that the Takeover Directive was implemented in UK law, along with the Companies Act of 2006. These pieces of legislation laid out how takeovers had to be structured and run. They also introduced shareholder protections—precisely the kinds of protections I’ve been talking about in the articles, and the very reason why a group might need closer to 75% if they want total control.

Bear in mind there is at least one legal hurdle they have to jump before then: the Takeover Code requires that when they acquire 30%, they must notify the stock market immediately. At that point, they then have to make a mandatory offer to all other shareholders to buy them out at the same price. This is not negotiable. Organisations that violate that rule get caught. Dave King violated it, which saw him hauled in front of the Takeover Panel in the City of London—and blacklisted.

Everything changed with the Companies Act 2006. This stuff can’t be circumvented. These people have to follow the law every step of the way. Every time they reach a new threshold, they must notify the stock market. Everything they want to do depends on hitting certain percentages of shareholding. When Fergus took over Celtic, he didn’t have to follow any of those rules. So, his takeover and this takeover cannot be compared even in a legal sense—in any way, shape, or form.

But way before these talks were known, long before this stuff was in the public domain, I wrote a lengthy article on why a Fergus McCann-style transformation at Ibrox is nearly impossible anyway. Let me give you the basics and the upshot of what that article said, because it really isn’t complicated when you look at it.

Fergus got control of a hollowed-out shell of a company, but one with enormous untapped potential. The problem wasn’t that Celtic lacked a brand; it was that the club was run by people who didn’t know how to maximise the value of it.

It was not run by professional business people who understood how to make the most of the asset under their control. Fergus knew this. He knew that with an all-seater stadium, a strong season ticket base, and everything that flowed from that, Celtic had massive untapped potential as a business.

He also knew that once he had established Celtic’s firm financial footing, he could walk away having made a profit on the club by selling his shares directly to the fans and to other investors who wanted in.

It is difficult to see where the untapped potential is at Ibrox. All the supposed upside seems to depend on three things: increasing the stadium capacity, Champions League football, and being able to sell key players at a profit.

Now, the first of those is incredibly difficult to do without spending even more money, and bear in mind that these are not mugs, these are business people, and they are not simply going to chuck money at everything they think needs fixing. They need to have some chance to get that money back, and you may not see a return on investment in stadium infrastructure for a decade or more.

It’s also—as Ibrox should have learned by now—a logistical nightmare, which probably will involve having to move out of their own stadium for at least a year. And that’s if it’s even financially feasible at all, which some people doubt.

Champions League football isn’t a chicken-and-egg scenario. It’s not a question of which comes first. To get into the Champions League, they have to win the league. They have to beat Celtic. So you don’t depend on Champions League income to get you the money to do that—you need to do that first, before you can access the Champions League money. This is not a complicated issue.

Then there’s the player trading model. We’ve been hearing about it for years. I’m going to do a piece on that later on, especially after Tom English’s comments yesterday about players who could be leaving Ibrox in the summer. It’s all very well wanting these guys to leave, but someone has to be willing to write a cheque and take them off your hands. That’s not going to be as easy as Mr English and others think.

Nothing about this adds up. We keep saying it—Ibrox simply doesn’t have the growth potential that Celtic did when McCann took over. Anyone thinking they can come in and do a “Fergus” is going to find out how difficult that is, especially in the face of a Celtic with money in the bank, some European cachet, and the ability to sell players for profit—consistently. The odds are heavily stacked against success.

I wrote last week about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

And over and over again, these people demonstrate how right I was to use that comparison. They don’t know as much as they think they do. Every time they challenge us on something like this, they prove how ignorant they are.

But I can’t really blame them for that. They’ve spent a lifetime reading the rubbish in The Daily Record and other organs whose only purpose is to tell them that everything will be alright—even when it clearly won’t. You’d think they’d have learned by now who they should listen to. Who tells them the truth.

But that’s us, and they’d rather see another club go out of business than believe anything that we say.