Denialism is hardwired into the Ibrox support. No Celtic blogger will change that.

Earlier this week, the lights went out in Spain and Portugal.

It was a weird, freakish, weather-related phenomenon. Another indication that we’re heading down a very bad road in terms of our climate and the effects we’re having on it. That’s not something a lot of people like to think about, and those of us who do think about it regularly grow more worried with every day that passes about the general apathy around the subject than we are about the subject itself.

There’s something about human beings that makes us incredibly resilient, but also incredibly vulnerable. It’s that we don’t overthink the possibility of catastrophe—because if we allowed our minds to dwell on it too much, we wouldn’t be able to function in any meaningful way.

That we might be setting ourselves up for a situation where nothing can function in any meaningful way doesn’t seem to sink in.

The power cuts in Spain and Portugal got me thinking about Programme Yarrow, the UK government’s 2021 strategy for dealing with grid failure.

It was an exercise into how the government would cope with a nationwide blackout lasting a week. When I first read that, I laughed out loud.

Because that’s about the extent of our capacity—for imagination and, more importantly, the limit of what government is willing to plan for or admit to.

That’s an “emergency scenario” that becomes more about when you’ll get to charge your iPhone than about matters of life and death.

Back when I was fascinated by nuclear war, I came across the details of the UK government’s huge 1980s exercise entitled Square Leg.

To this day, it remains the largest simulation the UK has ever undertaken into nuclear war and its aftermath. The scenario begins in January 1980 and the “pre-war phase” lasts until August, and the bombs themselves fall on 19 September.

In contrast, the so-called “survival phase” lasts until 1 October, and the laughably entitled “recovery phase” ends abruptly on 4 October.

And there’s a reason why it ends so quickly—and it’s the same reason Yarrow only focuses on a blackout lasting a week.

It’s because those are the only timeframes in which the government can still pretend to itself that these are short-term problems with immediate fixes, and that the damage might somehow be contained.

Most experts know the truth: if the bombs drops we’re all done, and if the power goes out, it’s likely to be for a lot longer than a week.

And beyond that window, societal breakdown happens fast—so fast that even attempting to wargame it becomes an exercise in futility.

And that’s what I mean about our own inability to see beyond a certain level of crisis or scale of disaster. We retreat to denialism. We retreat to what’s familiar.

And we cling, with all our might, to hope—even when, deep down, we know it’s wildly unrealistic and perhaps even harmful to do so.

This explains a lot about what we’re seeing in the media and from the fanbase across the city. The idea that this takeover will bring major rewards—that great things will fall from the sky—is a much more soothing scenario than one where the new owners come in and immediately instigate an austerity drive that makes the last few years look like high times.

Or that they buy the club, assume control, and then dump the debts run up in the purchase onto the club itself.

There are dozens of ways this could all end badly. Literally dozens. And the media, which keeps banging on about the miracle of Leeds, refuses point-blank to look at what’s actually happening at Leeds beyond a certain limit.

As The Guardian pointed out the other day, their survival in the Premier League has to be seriously questioned before they even get there. Because with allowable debts of £64 million over a three-year period, they’ve already exceeded that by over £30 million in the last two years. That’s not the sign of a club being particularly well run. The kerfuffle over their manager is another indication that there’s some discontent behind the scenes.

But to look at those things in any meaningful way would force the Ibrox support—and the media—to confront the possibility that this might not have a happy ending. To examine all the ways this could go wrong would be to deny the feel-good story that everyone of a certain persuasion wants to believe in.

Our fans, who look at all this dispassionately and with a critical eye, are accused of “running scared.” Their own fans who have dared to ask the more pointed questions are accused of worse. Nobody wants to hear that things may not get better.

But you don’t have to stretch your imagination too far to see that there are some potentially very bad outcomes here. All you really need to do is cast off the comfort blanket and start looking at it with a more critical eye.

If you’re asking me what the worst-case scenario for Celtic is—on the farthest fringes of possibility—I’d say it’s that this group of investors are all united in a common cause and have decided to turbocharge the club across the city in any way they can. To pour not just tens of millions but hundreds of millions of pounds into a football club they have no emotional connection to—and until recently, no connection at all—knowing they’ll never see a tenth of that money back, and doing it all out of a single-minded obsession with overhauling Celtic.

That’s our worst-case scenario.

I’m not surprised some of their fans have jumped straight to the conclusion that it’s exactly what will happen. These are the same people who clung to the state aid investigation as the thing that would turn our lights out. The same people who believed the abuse cases would bankrupt the club.

These same ones have long thought we were just one misfiled form away from title stripping. They dream about worst-case scenarios for us every single day. Some of them have been waiting on them for years.

So could this particular scenario happen? It could. There’s a theoretical universe in which it plays out that way. Perhaps these are people driven by ego, and this is the biggest ego trip of their lives. That could very well be the case.

But Cavanagh made his millions in health insurance—one of the most low-risk and risk-averse industries in the world. You don’t get many insurance guys speculating wildly like madmen in a casino.

A lot of things would have to happen before that scenario came to pass. And unfortunately for their club, one of the biggest dominoes that would need to fall is UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations. As long as those exist, there is no prospect at all of anyone executing that kind of worst-case scenario.

And I know that’s an inconvenient fact—a fact a lot of them are determined to push as far away from themselves as possible.

But it’s not just a fact that impacts one area. If they can’t overspend, then their chances of catching us are greatly reduced. And if they can’t catch us—and they’ll need to do it soon, within a handful of years before their lunatic fringe turns on them—then this whole enterprise is for nothing.

What’s the worst case scenario for them?

Well, a scenario whereby the American investors come in and buy the club, transfer the cost of the purchase onto the club as debt, try to run it on a sustainable basis for a couple of years, find out they can’t, and then stop paying any bills over and above those which keep on the lights… and watch as the debt continues to rise. All the while they’re scrambling around looking for a buyer to take their shares off their hands—a process that may take longer than they originally thought.

It has happened before.

In that scenario, their club could end up in a worse place than it’s in right now, as much as their fans might dispute that. If they want to look at what’s happened elsewhere in British football, they’ll see dozens of examples of it, from Ellis Short at Sunderland to the multiple owners at Everton these past few years.

The only people who don’t want to face that are those either too scared to face it or who lack the imagination for worst case scenarios. But I’ve spent a lot of my life contemplating worst case scenarios. I can always feel my way around them and understand what they might be. It also helps if you have enough knowledge to know which worst case scenarios are more likely to come about.

My honest assessment of this?

None of it makes any sense unless it’s a leveraged buyout. I’ve swayed back and forth on this one, but largely because of the mechanisms that would have to be involved for a leveraged buyout to succeed. And the simple fact is, without a hefty share of the vote and a hefty chunk of the shares, a leveraged buyout is much more difficult.

But ironically, one of the things we’ve learned in recent weeks is that, having not got to 51% by normal means, they’re preparing to execute a brand-new share issue in order to get there. And if they’re willing to do that to get to 51%, I see no reason why they wouldn’t be willing to do it to get the shares they need to put the club completely in their hands—and from there, do whatever they want.

And in a leveraged buyout—which is how I initially expected this to go—the worst case scenarios start to look not only possible, but more and more likely.

If you exclude our own worst case scenario here—that these are people who come into the club with altruistic motives and simply start throwing money at every problem they see—then you have to conclude there’s a profit motive.

And if there’s a way of turning money at that club, I’m damned if I know what it is. There are more smart people at Celtic Park right now than at Ibrox, and they’ve just signed a record-breaking kit deal. If they’ve missed some trick, some way of upping our own earnings, then I’ve yet to hear about it.

Once you conclude that Scottish football has a glass ceiling in terms of the overall earnings a club can make, you automatically must conclude that the club will have to spend less to make any profits at all.

A US journalist wrote something strange in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—about how any time he was in New Orleans, he would speak to local businesspeople who would offhandedly talk about the moment when the levees burst.

They never had the slightest doubt that it would happen.

So you have to ask yourself why they stayed, why they ran businesses in an area they themselves thought was doomed. And the answer is fairly simple. Even if you know a thing in your gut, you can still find yourself in a place where you don’t quite believe it in your head.

Every single one of those New Orleans businessmen knew intellectually that it was going to happen—at some point. But all of them managed to convince themselves that it wouldn’t happen for years, and perhaps not for enough years for them to be around to see it.

That’s one type of denialism.

It’s the same type that all of us, to one extent or another, indulge in. When we smoke too much or drink too much, or eat too much, or don’t wear our seatbelts in the car. We know disaster could strike at any moment… and many of us still fail to prepare.

In the novel, The Godfather, a top doctor tells another character why he started doing abortions; they were easier and less stressful than facing people who were on the quick drive to the graveyard. Something he says has lived with me ever since; he would tell people “keep doing this and you will die” and the reason they kept doing it anyway is because he never added a single word; “keep doing this and you will die tomorrow.”

And because he couldn’t say that simple word, most of those people would leave his office, carry on with their destructive lifestyles and be back, shortly thereafter, to be given the news that they were now beyond saving.

That’s denialism at its finest.

Another type of denialism is the one I talked about at the start—how governments are very good at only going so far in their worst case planning. And as someone who has read some of their emergency publications, I can tell you that they’re not very good at going beyond timid assumptions about what the worst case might look like.

Almost all of those plans are about a small-scale emergency. It makes you wonder: if there was a large-scale emergency, do they even have a clue how to handle it? And my deep-seated suspicion is that they don’t.

That’s not so much institutional incompetence as it is human nature.

So when you see Ibrox fans mocking us because we’ve been asking questions—when you see newspaper journalists talk about how we’re obviously afraid that this is all going to deliver a bright new dawn across the city—remember that denialism is hardwired in for some people and they will always look for best case rather than worst case scenarios.

And if that’s how you see the world, it takes an act of mental discipline to force yourself to look beyond that natural tendency.

There’s another tendency the Ibrox fans have—and that’s to prime themselves to be let down. To set themselves up to look ridiculous.

As I’ve said before, on the side of the Celtic bloggers, we can stand on our record—because we’ve been right every single time. And they’ve been wrong every single time.

And really, that’s the only way I can properly answer them.

Over the next 12 months and beyond, we’re going to find out who’s right and who’s wrong.

But if I were them, I’d at least start mentally preparing for the worst.

After you’ve done that, there’s no harm in hoping for the best.