The Manchester United example is the horror that should terrify Ibrox fans.

This week, the Ibrox takeover saga continued to roll on towards whatever conclusion it’s going to reach, but a number of certainties have been kicked out from under those making big predictions about big spending and other things.

One of the dominos fell just the other night; the idea of Gerrard returning as manager, something completely ruled out by those close to the club; what a pity.

Tonight it’s Dave King. There is too much in his comments to include here; that’s for tomorrow. But talk about a man consumed by his own self-image; he really does love himself that guy, and the more I hear of him the more pathetic he sounds. Doubtless his schtick will fool many people. It already has.

We’ve all discussed here at great length how there is almost nothing you can do or say to convince the Ibrox fans that this isn’t going to end the way they’re being told it will by their friends in the media—and others. But there are some uncomfortable truths which nevertheless should be obvious to them.

The first is that the word investment, as much as it is misused here in Scottish football, means the same thing the world over: people put something in to get something out. The question is, what do investors get out of owning a Scottish football club? This is the question no one has been willing to ask—because no one wants to. And the reason no one wants to is that no one wants to hear what the answer might be.

You remember that Albert Speer quote about how Hitler’s speeches were deliberately designed to be vague, and the beauty of a vague speech is that the listener hears in it whatever they want to hear?

That’s how this whole takeover saga has gone so far. Not a single word has been spoken about what the plan is, and so in the absence of that information, people are encouraged to project their own hopes onto it.

But why isn’t that information available?

Why isn’t there more detail on what the plans actually are? If they intend to spend big on players, on infrastructure, on the stadium, they could put that in the public domain—even through intermediaries. If they don’t want to confirm anything publicly, it would still help push the process along because it would put pressure on those shareholders who are still holding out.

The only way I can see that they can make money from the Ibrox club is if they get a sale at some point. And there are a lot of people who will tell you that a sale will only happen once the club has been successful. This is not correct. This is far from the truth. The only way a sale happens is if the club is profitable.

Profitability is not the same thing as success.

If you can find a way to squeeze money out of that club, if you can find a way to squeeze value out of it, if you can find a way to show that it can run on a for-profit basis, then you have a shot at selling up somewhere down the line.

There is a misconception that these people require a successful operation if they’re going to consider their investment a success. But there is a club on this island which is a sterling and stunning example of how wrong that misconception is. And in fact, there used to be an even bigger example—the one I have in mind there being Newcastle, when it was owned by Mike Ashley.

But as I said at the very, very end of the podcast the other night, the example I have most in mind is Manchester United under the Glazers.

There are some superb documentaries on YouTube about the Glazers’ time in charge. And throughout that early part of their reign, the mantra was repeated over and over again by people outside of the club—whether it was former players, former coaches, commentators, journalists, or high-profile United fans and fan media. And the mantra was that the investment would be worthless unless the team was successful.

This was not true at all. And it’s only now, years later, when we’re far down the line and Manchester United continues to cycle through managers, that it’s become clear: the Glazers never cared whether the club won another English Premier League title after Ferguson left. They already had what they were after.

They wanted an asset. They wanted an English Premier League giant as their little plaything. They didn’t care whether it was successful or not. They cared that it made money. And that, really, at the end of the day, was all they were interested in.

The club had success in the early years under the Glazers, but they always felt like too much money was being spent. That’s why they brought in a guy called Ed Woodward. He was a banking executive at JP Morgan. He had no football knowledge at all—but he was brought in for what our friend David Low calls the two-cheque system.

In short, the rich owners buy a club—and that’s the first cheque. The finance guy, the money guy, the number cruncher is brought in to make sure they never have to write another one. The club spends only what it earns. The Glazers never intended to spend another penny of their money beyond what it cost to get control. They brought in Woodward to make sure they never had to.

In 2006, they refinanced the club’s debt. Now what does that mean? It means exactly what we’ve said over and over again is one of the likely outcomes here: the cash used to purchase the club will most probably be borrowed money.

Think about this for two seconds. Think about what we’re saying here. With no way to make serious profits as a Scottish football club, the media here really believes that a bunch of individuals are going to sink their own money into the Ibrox operation—to the tune of £50 to £100 million? That simply won’t happen.

That money will likely come from outside investors. The consortium’s job, basically, will be to use their names and reputations to raise that cash. But that cash will not come from them. The companies investing in this project will do so for a rate of return. This is what happened at Manchester United under the Glazers.

They bought the club using borrowed money secured against the club’s assets. Now, if you’re wondering how a company that doesn’t own the club can use the club’s assets to secure the loans to buy the club—then you haven’t paid attention to how Craig Whyte got his hands on Rangers.

He mortgaged future season ticket sales—for tickets he didn’t even own—to guarantee the bank the money necessary for them to agree to the sale. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of what Whyte actually did.

And it happened before he got control.

Remember: the loan is conditional on getting control. If you never get control, the investors and banks and hedge funds just walk away. Nobody’s lost anything. But the moment you are in control of the club, the clock starts ticking on the debt, and you have a very short window in which to transfer that debt to the club’s books—or start deciding which assets to offer up first in repayment of it.

Now, had the Glazers simply bought Manchester United with bank financing, the interest rate would have been around 4.5% at that time. That’s still a lot of money. And in the context of what we’re talking about here, it adds a significant sum of money to the debt every single year. Think about it. £50 to £100 million in borrowing at 4.5% interest—the maths is as easy as one plus one equals two.

But here’s the real kicker: most of the borrowing didn’t come from banks. It came from hedge funds. And what interest rate did the hedge funds charge? Well, you’re looking at something on a much grander scale. In the case of Manchester United, it came in at 14 percent.

Here’s the fact of it. Manchester United, which had never had debt before, under the Glazers in their first year in charge, had to hand over £113 million in debt repayments to those who had loaned the Glazers the money—and this from an income of just £168 million. It was to get those costs down that they announced they were restructuring the debt just a year after taking control.

And that debt was restructured—so that they only had to pay £60 million a year thereafter. Not only did this increase the number of years over which the debt had to be paid—meaning the debts were on the books longer—but they also upped the interest rates. So the overall debt just got bigger.

Then, some years later, they issued a bond scheme to raise another £504 million. A staggering development, which only further increased the club’s debt burden.

Understand this: the people in charge could literally do whatever they wanted. And although the marketing of the Manchester United name—still the biggest brand in world football, don’t forget—had made a tonne of money and ensured that it was pouring into the club as never before, only two people were staving off the inevitable disaster: David Gill, the CEO, and Alex Ferguson, the manager.

Their departure in the same year sent the club into freefall.

What followed was chaos—multiple managerial changes, humiliating results, disastrous signings. Gill, who had initially opposed the Glazers, stayed on only because he knew Ferguson needed a football guy to protect him from the ravenous money grubbers above him on the board.

It was Gill who ensured Ferguson retained total control of the team and the transfer policy. When they left together United then promoted Ed Woodward—the non-football guy, the bank guy, the money guy—to take Gill’s place.

Here’s an interesting fact: Man United’s debt repayments have now shrunk to around £20 million a year. That doesn’t sound awful compared to what they had been paying for over a decade. But Spurs took out a monumental loan to pay for their new stadium, and their repayments are around the same.

Now look at the difference between Old Trafford and Spurs’ magnificent new ground. United are finally getting around to the idea of building a new stadium, but there are already arguments about how it’s going to be paid for; this is another area where the media here bangs on and on about the redevelopment of Ibrox without ever asking where the money for that is coming from.

That’s a whole new article in and of itself. I’ll cover that somewhere down the line, but The Record was banging on about this today and about the redevelopment of Elland Road without ever once looking at what the costs of that are going to be and, more importantly, how it’s going to paid for.

Let’s bear in mind what Manchester United was, and still is—one of the biggest sporting organisations on the planet. Not just a Premier League giant, but a global footballing icon. That was already true well before the Glazers took over. It’s why they wanted the club in the first place.

For decades now, the Ibrox club has laboured under the delusion that they are a global football brand. They are not. This has been disproved time and again, most recently when Charles Green went to the States to seek money, institutional investment, and hookups with various US sports firms. Nothing came of it. Because nobody outside this country cares who they are.

So what could happen here is that you end up with a club in the Scottish Premiership loaded down with debt that could easily run into the high eight figures—paying interest on those loans into perpetuity, with the principal sum only getting larger as they struggle to keep up. This is by no means an impossible situation. They would not be the first football club to fall into such shocking disrepair.

By the time Ellis Short sold up and left Sunderland, the club’s entire season ticket revenue was going straight back out again in debt interest repayments—to him and his companies. Read that again; not to pay down the debt, but to service the interest. The whole of their season ticket revenue.

Sunderland is a one-club city. If Ibrox fans genuinely believe their club is too big to fall into a hole like that—too big to be mistreated and abused—they want to take a good look at Sunderland and the state that club ended up in, and the despair that brought to their supporters.

There’s another example the Ibrox fans should consider, and it’s closer to home. Take a look at what happened to Rangers—the club they used to support.

Everyone believed, except a handful of us who saw the writing on the wall and said so well in advance, that they were too big to fail. It wasn’t just their fans who believed it. The entire media ecosystem did. The SFA, the Scottish Premier League, the Scottish Football League—all of them.

Hell, there were times in the two or three years between my article The End of Rangers and the actual end of Rangers when I spoke to Celtic fans who didn’t even believe it. People who had read every word myself and others had written, and still thought the club across the city was too big and too important and too culturally significant to go out of business. If anything should rip the scales from the eyes of these people, it is what happened to that club, and the doom it fell into.

If this takeover happens on anything like the same basis as at Leeds, or at Manchester United, or at dozens of clubs across Europe, then it is very possible that all that will be left at the end of it is a hollowed-out, indebted husk.

I know a lot of people don’t want to believe that. But I only ask that they look at what has happened elsewhere. I only ask that they look past the fantasy that there must be a master plan, that there must be some grand strategy. I ask them to examine the Manchester United story, the Sunderland story, the Everton story, the Leicester story—and all the others that have ended in disaster south of the border.

Here’s the thing: all those clubs were propped up to some extent by two things. Financial Fair Play regulations were not as all-encompassing and concrete as they are now. And almost all those clubs were the beneficiaries, from the start, of enormous television deals. That’s what made them attractive in the first place—but it also helped them, at least at first, meet their debt repayments.

The average Premier League club earns, from television money alone, more than the Ibrox club’s entire annual income.

Unless these people have found a brand new way to squeeze money out of Scottish football, that club already operates with very little wiggle room. Load it down with even £50 million in debt—especially at hedge fund interest rates—and you’re virtually crippling it in the short term, as profits will need to be made just to meet those payments. In the long term, you’re jeopardising its future. No mistake about that.

All this information is out there—but you have to want to see it. You have to want to look. You have to want to read it. You have to want to understand it. I’m quite sure the Ibrox fans don’t want to do any of that. Because to do that would spoil the fairy tale. It would force them to confront questions. It would force them to face up to inconvenient facts.

And don’t let anyone kid you that this is pie in the sky—that this is all some unlikely scenario. This is the most likely scenario.

Everyone thinks their football club is special, and that this can’t possibly happen to them. But Manchester United was arguably the most significant football club on the planet—and it happened to them.

For all the years of protests—including the fans making history as the only supporters ever to have a Premier League football match stopped in protest against their own board—the Glazers are still in control.

They may have sold off a portion of the club to new investors, but they still run the show. They still retain the power.

It is much easier to do due diligence on people like this and slam the door on them before they get in, than it is to prise their hands off the controls once they’re inside the room. If these people get into the club—if they get their 51%—they run the table. If they get 75%, the party’s over.

They can stay as long as they like and do whatever they want. And the only thing the Ibrox fans know about them is that they exist, and that they’re trying to get control.

That aside, everything else is speculation. Everything else is coming from the imaginations of over-excited sports writers who don’t know what they’re talking about and aren’t prepared to look at the other side of their fantasy.

Let me say again what I’ve said in several other articles before this. If you want to live in a fairy tale, you should be worried about dragons.

In short, if you can imagine transfer war chests and Jose Mourinho as manager and all the rest of that madness, then your imagination should at least extend to the idea that the club might be looted, that it might be culturally transformed into something unrecognisable, or that it might be loaded down with debts and crushed under them.

Because if one of those scenarios is possible, then so is the other. And if you want to step out of the fantasy and back into reality, you’re going to find one horrible thing: one of those futures evaporates—but the other does not.

It is probably already too late for any concerted effort by the Ibrox fans or the media to give this the proper scrutiny it deserves and to stop it before it takes place.

Even if there was any interest in doing so, things have likely progressed beyond the point where it would do the slightest bit of good.

Not that it matters. Because people are too busy indulging their wildest dreams to look at the possible darker scenarios.

And the people buying this thing haven’t released any genuine information—because that’s how they want the media and the fans to behave.

Speer was right. You keep it like that, and you let people’s imaginations do the rest. They paint the pretty little picture, so you don’t have to.

And once you’re in control—once you’ve got your hands on the wheel—you can steer the ship wherever the hell you want, having promised nothing in advance, and so having not broken a single pledge to the supporters, the media, or anyone else.

By the time they realise what your true intentions are, it’s already way too late.