Ibrox CEO drops spending “bombshell” as Celtic fan media is proved right again.

This has been a landmark weekend for the takeover narrative. It has been a landmark weekend because, for the first time since all this takeover talk began, the Ibrox club has levelled with its own fans about the challenges they’re going to face over the next couple of years—and well into the future.

Newspapers have reported on this as though it’s some kind of bombshell. It is not a bombshell. Palms have gotten all sweaty and jaws have hit the floor as the “stunning” revelation hits home at last: the financial sustainability regulations being imposed by UEFA will actually limit how much that club can spend, and how large a debt it can run up. But the thing is, none of us are surprised by this, because we all knew it already.

Last week, the Ibrox Fan Advisory Board had a sit down with Patrick Stewart, and he laid out the cold, hard facts of life—that the takeover guys cannot and will not simply throw money at every problem the club has. They mentioned UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations as being inherently limiting—which they are—and again, that’s no revelation to those of us who’ve been paying attention.

But a curious thing came up in the discussion. They said that the FSR rules now include areas which have traditionally been excluded—like women’s football and stadium redevelopment. That’s not true at all. There is nothing at all in UEFA’s regulations, or anywhere else, which indicates that such a change has taken place. It would have been a major sports new story, and nobody would have missed that.

Perhaps it’s a misrepresentation of what was actually said at the meeting. We know that FSR is going to affect everything that club does.

What might actually have been said is that there are two strands to the FSR rules; there’s a squad cost strand to the regulations, which limits how much money can be spent on transfers, player wages, coaching salaries and so on. That alone rules out the crazy names they’ve been floating—such as Jose Mourinho—and all that front-loaded “transfer war chest” nonsense.

The other part of the regulations concerns how much debt a club can run up, and it may well be that this is what they mean when they say the club now has to “live fully within its means.” Still, this does not impact on stadium developments and this smells awfully the Ibrox board prepping their fans for bad news on that front. They might have done it a bit better than to allow the release of a wholly fictious claim though.

Whatever the intent behind that statement, it was a clear-cut message to the fans who were at that meeting though: the party is over. It doesn’t matter who sits in the Blue Room. It doesn’t matter how much money the 49ers have sitting in a bank account which they’ve shown to Dave King. They can only spend in relation to what the club earns. If the club is running up debts, that’s a problem. If the club is breaching the 70% squad cost cap, that’s an even bigger one.

One of the common misconceptions on their forums is that the club and its potential new owners will be looking for “workarounds” to beat the regulations; what a stupid idea that is, and I hope they are daft enough to try it.

I know a lot of their fans cling to fantasies about Red Bull shirt sponsorships and suchlike, but if any of them took even two seconds to look into this, they’d discover that any commercial sponsorship deal has to be signed on the basis of what is known in UEFA’s regulations as “fair value.” I know this isn’t something that’s freely discussed—or understood—by our media, so let me break it down.

Say I’m a billionaire who owns a giant conglomerate, and I buy a football club. Say I then sign a sponsorship contract between the conglomerate and that football club and use that sponsorship to artificially inflate the club’s income. UEFA won’t allow it. UEFA will step in and assess the market value of that sponsorship. And they will determine a figure far more in line with reality.

Let me put it another way: if the Ibrox club turns around and signs a sponsorship deal with Red Bull—one which blows every existing Scottish deal to smithereens—UEFA will start asking questions.

First: is there a connection between Red Bull and the club? The answer, through the ownership structure leading back to 49ers Enterprises, is “yes.” UEFA won’t miss that. It’s a little too obvious, especially with the media spelling it out every other day.

They’ll also ask if the deal reflects the market in which it’s being signed—and because this is Scotland, they’re not going to let anyone get away with some mega-inflated figure without ringing a lot of alarm bells. They’ll ask whether the sponsor is getting value for money. That might not sound like it matters, but it’s one of UEFA’s criteria, and they’ll bring in independent scrutineers to assess it. If they determine the deal is overinflated, they’ll treat it accordingly.

Now, UEFA won’t interfere in the transaction—if Red Bull want to pour stupid money into the Ibrox club, that’s their business. But the independent evaluator will come back to UEFA with a figure for what that deal is actually worth and that’s the number UEFA will use when calculating the club’s income.

I am not making this up; it’s in the regulations, in black and white.

It’s ironic to be writing this when they appear to have lied about how FSR will now include stadium upgrades in its calculations, but the fact is that for the first time, their club is being something close to honest with the fans.

And to be blunt, it can’t do anything else. It’s telling them, “Yeah, the faces at the top might change, but there’s no pot of gold here.” People may come in who will professionalise the club. People may come in who will change the way things are done. Undoubtedly. But the sugar-daddy days are now over. The big spending days are over. The club will spend only what it earns. That’s it.

Let me repeat that; the club will spend only what it earns. There’s something else that came out of that meeting which I want to cover in another piece, but the fixed nature of their earnings has been pretty much confirmed by it.

The moment the current directors leave the building, those with an emotional investment in the club will take that emotion with them. If, down the line, the club is struggling to keep the lights on, then off the lights will go—if it means staying within the rules of the FSR. The days when sentimentality or genuine love for the club were the order of business? They’re almost over.

And for the first time, there is someone—Patrick Stewart—who is willing to sit on the other side of the table from the fans and give it to them straight. And if it shocks them? Too bad. If it shocks the media? Hard cheese.

And judging by the responses on some of their forums and in some newspapers, they are shocked. So are the hacks.

But this is exactly what we’ve been saying on these blogs from the very start. These people may have money falling out of every pocket. They may even have billions in the bank, the way Keith Jackson and others seem to believe. They may even be willing to spend it all, although if they were of that mindset someone will have to explain to me how they ever accumulated those fortunes in the first place.

But that money might as well be buried in the back garden for all the good it will do funding the Peepul’s next big fantasy. That is not happening, and for the first time their board is trying to be straight with the fans about it.

Fair play to them for admitting what our sites have been saying all along. I’ll gratefully accept the apologies of every Ibrox fan who has criticised us for it, but I won’t hold my breath waiting to get them.