Celtic fans laughing as Ibrox gets snubbed by Spanish rookie.

Well, well, well… the bombshell drops.

Davide Ancelotti has decided to follow his dad to Brazil and help him coach their national side, putting his club career on hold because of—and this is a quote from one of our national titles—a “lack of big opportunities.”

Which says a lot about the job offer he received out of Ibrox.

It’s a pity that this isn’t coming off, because Ancelotti has no managerial experience at all and has shown—by the fact that he’s decided to stay clutching onto daddy’s coattails—that that’s all he ever was.

Still, it is quite a humorous development—unless you’re a fan of the Ibrox club, in which case it’s not funny in the least. But the rest of us are entitled to laugh.

What makes it amusing, of course, is the number of Scottish titles that have spent the last couple of days trying to spin the move itself as a masterstroke—especially those who have strung together bizarre fantasies of Real Madrid players following their assistant manager to Glasgow.

I saw a suggestion on one of their forums the other day that this would enable them to go for the likes of Kevin De Bruyne on a free transfer.

Perhaps they’re unaware that while some people are trying to bail out of Madrid, he’s willing to take a pay cut to stay there. I doubt he’d be willing to take the same pay cut to move to Kinning Park.

It’s a tough old world, isn’t it? A tough old world where even the famous names—who have nothing to offer except those famous names—don’t want to know you. When he talks about a lack of big opportunities, he knows exactly what he’s talking about. This isn’t a big opportunity.

This is an opportunity to go and get strapped into the electric chair. Every single person who’s offered the job has to be aware that that’s what they’re being asked to walk into—a job whose lifespan is measured in months.

The suspicion is that, because of financial sustainability regulations, there will be precious little money to spend.

The suspicion is that whoever comes in will have to make do with the likes of Cortés and Danilo and Dessers—players of that calibre—in spite of the media’s best efforts to drum up interest in some of these guys, with Igamane being the latest this morning to be linked with moves to top Premier League clubs in England.

There’s about as much likelihood of that as there is of me growing wings.

Honestly, the talk was already ridiculous about how he was going to be able to attract top players from all over Europe because of his daddy’s name, as if top players were suddenly going to come here and play for less money than they’d get elsewhere, in a lower-quality team and a lower-quality league, just because he’s the son of a famous father and happened to have done some warm-up coaching at the club across the city. It’s incredible to me, the garbage these people believe.

So some of them, who claimed never to have wanted this option in the first place, are now decrying it and saying he should never have been a realistic choice because of his lack of experience.

Some of them have twigged that, in fact, he is just going to follow Daddy around for the rest of his life. And others have simply pivoted from one bizarre fantasy to another—and they’re dreaming dreams of Marco Rose, Steven Gerrard, and other managers who simply won’t come in and work under the system the new bosses want to impose.

In the meantime, the clock continues to tick. No new manager yet. No takeover complete yet. Some vague talk about a structure being in place that isn’t in place yet. The whole thing is crazy. The whole thing is nuts. Yet somehow, they’ve chosen to ignore that and focus on the idea that better things might be just around the corner—what Keith Jackson, in one of his moments of clarity, described as “jam tomorrow.”

Jam tomorrow is the whole operating philosophy of that club. And the fans fall for it again and again and again. I don’t think Ancelotti was an ambitious move.

I think it’s a sign that they’re aiming low and trying to find a manager who will fit into the system and work with it. And the fact that a complete novice, looking for his first job in the game on his own, has already turned them down is a sign of how difficult it’s going to be to get someone willing to do that.

The media can spin this any way they want. The simple fact remains: this is a minor disaster for them. It sends a terrible message. It makes them look small and weak. And it will do nothing whatsoever to improve the general mood of the fans.