The Celtic sites are on the verge of full vindication as Ibrox nears a new coronation.

The incredible TV show Succession opens with a character-defining moment that is extraordinarily effective. Kendall Roy sits in the back of a limousine, rapping aloud to his iPod on the way to a business meeting—which he tanks.

When, in the aftermath, he suggests that they sweeten the offer and come back again with a second round of talks, one of his associates asks him, “Do you want to call your dad?”

Just like that, we know everything we need to about Kendall Roy.

This pampered manchild, who has never had to make a critical decision in his life without running it by Daddy first, desperately seeks validation as his own man—but is haunted at every step by the giant footsteps in which he walks and by the shadow of Logan, his father, hanging over his shoulder.

Real life is full of stories about sons who tried to walk in those kinds of footsteps.

There is probably no better example anywhere in the world than that of Frank Sinatra Jr.—a genuinely tragicomic case.

A man so overwhelmed by Daddy’s long shadow that he tried to build a career singing Daddy’s songs to Daddy’s fans, while Daddy was still alive and doing it himself, and far, far, far better. Desperate stuff, especially as Junior’s talents were only passable at best.

Even his kidnapping at 19 was an amateurish affair, carried out by a former friend of his sister, who was off his face on pills at the time and demanded a mere $240,000. How amateurish was the kidnapping? One of the perpetrators got cold feet and released him unharmed whilst his two colleagues were collecting the money.

Junior spent the rest of his life denying he was in on it, facing down claims that it was nothing but a publicity stunt to try to increase his own profile as a singer.

If you’ve ever watched Gheorghe Hagi play football, you’ll know he was one of the most sublimely talented players of all time. A genuine pleasure to watch, and when on his game, almost untouchable at both Real Madrid and at Barcelona.

His son, of course, plays at Ibrox. Ianis will never be anywhere near as good as Daddy, and the fact that Daddy is his agent and PR guy and is constantly telling the world how good he actually is gives you a little insight that Daddy never intended.

Because he shouldn’t have to if Ianis really is that good; that should stand out a mile without his needing to keep on pushing the line. It is only one of the many, many reasons he’ll never be a top player; having Daddy constantly give those sorts of assurances puts clubs off.

Ibrox really is a funny place, isn’t it? And its fans really are a strange and funny bunch. They don’t listen. They don’t learn. Even when you try to tell them things they need to know, they always choose to ignore you.

They will always choose to believe in fantasy rather than reality. And as myself and a lot of the other bloggers in Celtic cyberspace have dismantled their takeover fantasy brick by brick—and been proved right at every turn—it was not in the least bit surprising last night to learn that, after all the many weeks of speculation about Gerrard, Rose, Muscat, Benitez, and loads of other managers they regarded as top tier and were sure they could have their pick from… the guy they’re going for is Ancelotti.

Yeah. Ancelotti of Real Madrid. But not Daddy Ancelotti.

His son, Davide, whose entire football life experience consists of following Daddy from club to club as his assistant, and of course, this is the straw to which all those fans of the club who were last night trying to find the silver lining here are clutching to.

They are hoping for it just as Kendall Roy’s little band of followers clung to the idea that because Daddy was a world-class businessman, he had to have picked up some tricks along the way. Just as Sinatra Junior’s agents and his record executives must have thought that you can’t be Frank Sinatra’s kid and carry his name and not have at least some of his talent.

But that’s the same lie that Gheorghe Hagi has been telling himself—and other people—ever since his son first kicked a ball.

That story broke last night, and a lot of people in the media instantly started hyping it up. They found a couple of people who’ve worked alongside him to sing his praises. They’ve highlighted the big clubs he’s worked at, and over and over again, they’ve mentioned Daddy’s name—as if that somehow bridges the credibility gap.

There’s a wonderful story from the States about an ice hockey team called the Danbury Trashers. Their owner was a guy called Jimmy Galante.

Galante was in the waste management business—which of course sounds like a stereotype until you consider that among his closest friends and business associates was a guy called Matthew Ianniello. “Matty The Horse,” as his own family called him, was at the time the acting boss of the Genovese Crime Family. It’s rumoured that Jimmy Galante was the model for Tony Soprano.

Anyway, Galante bought the Trashers as a gift for his 17-year-old son AJ.

He made the kid general manager.

Now here’s the thing: if you think this story is going to be about AJ and Jimmy, and how the son didn’t live up to the father, you’re wrong.

They’re not the point of the story—although that is a fantastic and fascinating story in its own right, and if you want to learn more about it, you can watch it on Netflix as part of the Untold series in an episode entitled Crime & Penalties (and I recommend it without equivocation).

No, the point of the story is that they needed to pull off a coup if they were going to be taken seriously by the league and the press.

And so AJ went out and signed Gretzky to be their star forward. But not Wayne Gretzky—quite possibly the greatest player ever to grace the NHL. No, he signed his little brother, Brent. It didn’t bother them that Brent wasn’t really that great a player. They just wanted to be able to put the name on the back of the shirt and generate the headlines that came with it.

Whoever the Ibrox boss was going to be, the media was always going to wet its pants over it. It is not a coincidence that this one comes with a famous name. That’s the whole point. The fact that he’s gotten every break and every job off the back of Daddy’s name will be suitably ignored. That famous name goes a long way.

Sinatra Junior and his record company found out that it can sell a lot of tickets all on its own. The Galante’s knew it too. The Ibrox board—whichever one it is that signed off on this deal, the one going out or the one coming in, if you even believe that’s happening—knows how to make a PR splash, and they know too that the local media here will desperately spin this for reasons of their own.

We know all about famous names here. We hired one of those. And a Daddy’s boy to boot. Mark Lawwell didn’t last long because Mark Lawwell’s best qualification for the job appeared to be his second name. We’ve talked a lot about the Strachan’s and the general belief that we employ them only as a favour to their Daddy. It’s a pattern repeated all over the world.

I’m not saying that some of these guys don’t have skills. They’re not all the idiot sons of famous fathers. But let’s be honest and tell it like it is; a lot of them are.

A lot of them end up in big jobs too—and not just in football. They can be found in gigantic corporations. The character of Kendall Roy didn’t just pop out of the brain of Jesse Armstrong; he’s an amalgam of several of the failed children of hugely successful dynasties. Kids who were shoehorned into positions of power they were not remotely qualified for. They accrue the outward look of success, but it’s all illusory. Only very rarely do they achieve anything for themselves.

Take away the famous name, and this guy is just another assistant manager who’s never had the power or responsibility that goes with actually sitting in the hot seat. And a lot of those guys are not cut out for that job.

Some of them are smart enough to know it. John Kennedy knows it, for example, and although a handful have been successful, there are literally hundreds I could name right off the top of my head who have been catastrophically bad at it. And all the talk about “learning from great men”? That doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Here’s a selection of assistants, just for fun, and all worked under managers whose names would be blindingly familiar to you. A couple of them worked under really elite, top tier coaches. The number who worked under Alex Ferguson alone —the most successful manager of the modern era—is mind-bending:

Look at the careers of Brian Kidd, Carlos Queiroz, Steve McClaren, René Meulensteen, Paul Clement, Christian Gross, John Carver, Peter Taylor, Kevin Bond, Stuart Gray, Chris Hutchings, Tord Grip, Steve Round, Pat Rice, Sammy Lee, Rui Faria, Ryan Giggs, Steve Clarke and Michael Appleton, to name but a few.

I could have given you more. I could have given you a lot more. Those are just some off the top of my head. You’ll notice one of them, Paul Clement, actually worked under Ancelotti himself. Rui Faria worked under Mourinho when Mourinho was in his prime. Did the quality rub off on him? Did it hell.

I highlight all of this simply because the idea that the father’s skills are passed down to the son is one that the media will do its level best to promote in the days to come—and it’s manifestly untrue almost all of the time.

And because they’ll also try to push the line that hanging out with a great manager for several years, whether he’s your Daddy or not, automatically translates into success that needs knocked on the head as well.

He’s worked at big clubs, but we don’t know whether he’s a good coach in his own right, or whether he’s just a guy who got lucky that Daddy liked to have him by his side, and the media doesn’t know the answer to that either.

They’ve talked to a bunch of people who know him well.

What else are they going to say except that they think he’s ready? One of the newspapers actually has Daddy’s endorsement as a positive in his favour, as though Daddy is going to say that his son is shit.

Cutting through all the BS, all the hype, and all the hysterical rubbish that you’ll read in the papers over the next day or two about how great this appointment could be, focus on one thing. We have no frame of reference for this at all. He has never coached a game in his life. We have no idea if he has a management philosophy. We have no idea what his man-management style is. We cannot say what his tactical approach will be. We can’t even say that he has a fully formed tactical approach.

What we can say for sure—and which no one will even attempt to deny—is that this is a momentous risk at a time when the club cannot afford a momentous risk. There are plenty of candidates out there who would have offered them a safe option.

Christ, even Derek McInnes would have offered them that. Something like stability. Something like some security that they were going to get out of it someone who would understand the needs of the team and who could work on a budget.

I mean, there are people on the Ibrox fan forums who are trying to kid themselves that this appointment—because of the famous name and the background—means the club must be offering him fortunes to come here, and a guarantee that he’ll get to spend a lot of money. I don’t see it that way at all.

I see a club offering a complete novice a first-time shot at management, and the thing about those guys is that a lot of the time they’re willing to work on a shoestring whereas a more experienced manager would want guarantees. He would want more money to spend, and he would have the gravitas, the background, and the personality to actually get what it is that he wants.

But the risk of hiring someone with no experience is bad enough. If you then compound that risk by giving him more money to spend than you realistically should, then you deserve everything you get.

And nobody—surely to God, nobody—can be that stupid.

No matter what gloss and glitter they try to put on this, one other thing is absolutely clear. This is not the appointment that their fans expected or were promised by a media that couldn’t wait to start pushing every crazy name under the sun. Between this and the so-called takeover, the media has fed these guys a banquet of bullshit for months upon months upon months since Clement got his jotters.

Only we, in the Celtic blogosphere, have told them the truth.

The bottom line here is that their club are about to give the keys to the kingdom to a complete novice. A rookie, first-time boss.

And so all the talk of a big name and an experienced coach, someone with a track record, has disintegrated in front of their eyes. The one hope those fans with enough savvy to recognise this for what it is are clinging to is that he somehow turns the job down. But then you have a real problem going to the next choice, because this one’s been so widely trailed in the media.

But there never was going to be a José Mourinho, or a Rafa Benitez. That was all utter fantasy-land rubbish.

But enough of their fans believed it that it sold some season tickets for a while. Now that season ticket sales are done, now that they’ve sold all the renewals, little by little, the facts are starting to emerge.

You have this story and the likelihood of a rookie boss. You have Patrick Stewart sitting in front of a fans’ forum and saying no matter how much money the Americans may have in the bank, they’re not going to spend it because financial sustainability regulations won’t permit it anyway.

And so all the warnings we gave them not to pin their hopes on this, not to expect big things, not to believe any of the more hysterical hype, it all fell on deaf ears, the way it always does. Even if the guy doesn’t take the job, everyone now knows he was offered it, and that he was the first pick. So, what do you think the second choice is going to look like?

The hope for a big name has already been trashed. It is not going to happen. It never was. And so once again, we were right.

I always like to say that we have no magical powers. I know it must seem sometimes as if we do, but we don’t. We deal in reality. We deal in the black-and-white day-to-day of real life. And in real life, no American super consortium is buying a Scottish club and pouring money into a black hole without getting some kind of return.

No top coach is going to come and work with the kind of budget they’re going to have. FSR regulations explicitly forbid the kind of fantastical nonsense that some in the papers are pushing.

None of this should be a shock. Not to anybody. All we did was open our eyes and look around and say what we saw. We deal in reality. And this is the real world. This is what the real world looks like, and so this morning I want to say to them;

“Welcome to it. And don’t say we didn’t warn you.”