The Ibrox club is in serious danger from the Myth of Barry Ferguson.

There’s an oft-spoken truism on the fringes of public relations and politics: the myth is more dangerous than the lie. Because the lie can be challenged and disproved. The lie never happened. The lie isn’t real.

But the myth? It often contains just enough truth to be nearly impossible to challenge … and if it’s amplified and broadcast enough times, it can enter the public consciousness as something that is as hard to contest as if it were a piece of the firmament.

Who remembers the Winter of Discontent? Who has grown up hearing about it? How the bins weren’t emptied, the dead weren’t buried, the hospitals turned patients away and how the unions brought the country to a standstill? And in the midst of it all, James Callaghan, the Labour leader, coming back from sunning himself on the beach to a freezing Britain saying, “Crisis? What crisis?”

That’s the myth, anyway. But how much of it is true?

Well, it’s true that unions did go on strike, but most of them were local unions. This wasn’t a national crisis. It was a crisis that affected certain parts of the country more than others. Most of the country ran just fine. Most of the country wasn’t experiencing any of the turbulence that was blasted all over the front pages of national newspapers—especially those on the right. Now, if you lived in one of those areas, it would have been easy for you to believe the world was ending. But for most people, that wasn’t true at all.

As for Callaghan’s comments, he never actually made them. What did happen was that he was at a summit meeting—the Guadeloupe Conference—which was discussing, amongst other things, the spiralling crisis in Iran where the Shah was teetering on the brink. Prior to it, he had allowed himself to be photographed swimming and seeming like he was on a jolly. But this wasn’t Boris Johnson taking his missus off to Chequers in the middle of COVID; he was there on critical government business, meeting with other heads of state including the US President and the German Chancellor.

Upon his return to the UK—which was freezing in the worst weather in over a decade—he foolishly gave a press conference when the best thing to do would have been to return to Downing Street and get on with his work. The media was trying to pin him to a negative narrative and, after a question about the state of Britain, he gave the following response: “I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.” The right-wing media loved that.

The Sun ran with the invented quote on its front page alongside pictures of piles of rubbish. The image was seared into the public consciousness. The lie—that Callaghan never uttered those words—was bad. The myth—that he had come back from his holidays and dismissed the notion of a country coming apart—was worse. It would haunt British politics for more than a generation.

For Ibrox fans, this is the season of discontent, but towards the end of it a very dangerous myth has started to take root: the myth of Barry Ferguson. And I’ve warned these guys right from day one—when they were saying that he was an interim appointment and that there was no chance, no chance at all, of him getting the job on a full-time basis—that it was more than possible. That he might do just enough. Just enough to suggest that he had more to offer, but not quite enough to save anything from the season except a little bit of pride.

If you’ve been following this blog and the blogs at Video Celts and Read Celtic—the two sites that, along with my own, make up the Trinity Tim’s Podcast—you’ll know that Video Celts, Read Celtic and ourselves all believe the takeover is not all that the media is claiming it is. In fact, we’ve all now taken to calling it the “fakeover”, because in a sense, that’s what it is—and the media’s narrative of what it’s going to be is by now almost completely fantastical.

And one of the things that The Record is pushing over and over again is this idea that the Ibrox club will bring in a high-profile manager. That they’ll go for some big name who will rally the whole club and rejuvenate it. But this is largely ignorant of the way a lot of these people work. For a while at least, they’re going to want some continuity. They’re going to want someone who’s been in the building, who understands what’s going on in there and can articulate a vision for what he wants to do.

For a start, nobody is considering the timeframe.

Even if these guys are in by the end of the month, they have a power of work to do. And finding a new manager seems to me like something that will be some way down the line in terms of priorities. On top of that is the inconvenient fact that the search for a new manager could take weeks—and then they will need a new team in place for the guy. New signings, all before the Champions League qualifiers start.

It’s a lot to do in a very short time. And if the transfer budget is going to be limited—as I strongly suspect it is—then why not just leave the interim boss in charge? Why not just throw him the scraps, on the proviso that he has a year to prove himself whilst they get the rest of the pieces in place?

You know, if the interim boss is knowledgeable about the place, has a fair idea of the kind of players he wants to bring in, and he’s willing to do it on the cheap … then why wouldn’t you give him his opportunity? The only circumstances under which you would not do it would be if his time in charge had been a complete disaster.

And there’s an argument that says it hasn’t been a disaster.

According to the Ferguson myth, he’s restored passion and pride to a team that had none. Forget all those games where they’ve been two-nil down before they’ve started to play. How many of those games have they actually mounted comebacks in? How many of those games have they managed to get results from adversity?

The Bilbao result at home with only ten men is followed at the weekend with a game where they go two-nil down, then lose a man, and still get something from the game. And that denies Celtic a title for another fortnight. He’s also come to Celtic Park and beaten Brendan Rodgers. He’s gone to Turkey and beaten José Mourinho.

Tell me this might not happen. I still don’t think it will, this one. I still think that, as lucky as we sometimes get, we’re not going to get that lucky. But I’ve been studying the way myths can change public perception for years—I’ve been studying the way the myth can become bigger than the reality.

And the Ferguson myth, when you look at it from a certain angle, is strong. It might even be stronger than the truth—which is that he’s actually floundering terribly.

But there is a core of the Ibrox fanbase that believes he has shown something. That he has the team, at least, fighting again. And that with a summer under his belt and some signings of his own, he might be worth keeping around. There are certainly people in the media who are amplifying this every bit as much as “Crisis? What crisis?” was blasted from the front pages of the right-wing press.

There’s a narrative building around Ferguson that is going to be very hard for his critics to contain. And that narrative may just hold enough weight that any future takeover leadership—especially if they don’t know the lie of the land—may just think that leaving in place a guy who has support in the stands and in the media is going to be enough, at least in the short term. One season, maybe more if he does well.

See the problem? Those saying it was impossible to imagine him getting it have never been able to counter the idea that Ferguson didn’t actually have to do that much to be considered a success. The bar for success for a temporary manager is often set so low that it takes a complete cataclysm before he fails to do enough to be part of the conversation. And Ferguson has definitely done enough.

And I don’t think it’s going to take much for that myth to grow to gargantuan proportions and become virtually unstoppable. A defeat on Thursday night is not something anyone will be surprised by, and so he won’t be judged on that. He’s got brownie points in the bag from Fenerbahçe in the first leg, and for holding on with ten men at home in the first leg of this tie. So what does that leave? Five league games.

So Ferguson does have a chance, and the media tomorrow will be amplifying that myth to even greater heights because his team has gotten a draw at Pittodrie. His half-time tactical changes will be hailed as masterstrokes. His late substitutions will be hailed as the miraculous ones that turned the game.

You can see how this narrative will play out.

And for being able to deny Celtic the title for another fortnight? Yeah. For a lot of the media, that will be enough. They’ll casually ignore the fact that it was their defeat last week which put us on the brink of the title in the first place.

If I were an Ibrox fan who could see clearly all the mistakes that Ferguson is making and has made, I would be terrified that he’s going to get the gig. The bar was set low and it’s just not clear that he’s failed to clear it.

He will think he has a chance. He will think he can make a case. And without any of the people in our media having the first clue whether or not any prospective new owners will want to make a change, I think you’d have to be crazy to rule out the prospect that they may just let him have it. He certainly has the myth on his side.

That’s the danger the Ibrox club is in.