The Ruinous Powers of Ibrox: Which dark god holds sway there?

Sometimes I just have to get stuff out of my system.

Here goes.

So yesterday, Barry Ferguson got a win at home as the Ibrox boss. It doesn’t affect us in any significant way; in fact, if you wanted to find some impact at all it’s in that Aberdeen were well and truly humbled and look woefully short for a team that has to come to Hampden in a fortnight and stop our treble juggernaut.

Lately, I’ve been trying to do some gaming in my spare time, just to relax, and I’ve been playing a lot of the strategy games I really enjoy, and as regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of the Total War series and have been since I first picked up a second hand copy of Rome: Total War in a computer game store discount bin about 20 years ago. I have bought every Total War game since.

There was only one I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy, and that was when they got the licence for Warhammer. I had read a little bit about Warhammer over the years — just little flashes of stuff — and I couldn’t see anything in it that really grabbed me.

In fact, the things I did know seemed so offbeat that it came across as a huge turn-off. Lizards with laser guns, riding dinosaurs? Giant humanoid cyberpunk rats with zany technology, including chemical weapons and battlefield nukes?

Don’t get me wrong — I was fine with elves. High Elves, Wood Elves even Dark Elves; it was like something out of Lord of the Rings on steroids. Orcs and goblins, I was already familiar with from Tolkien’s masterwork.

Wizards, dwarfs, dragons, magic — yeah, I could get behind some of that. Most of that. But there were other elements that just sounded nuts. Vampire lords leading armies of undead? I mean, it sounds cool in principle, but… really?

I was even less impressed when I found out they intended to release not one game based on the Warhammer series, but a trilogy which wouldn’t all come together for about ten years. They did make a promise that once the third game was released, they’d bundle all the various sections of it together and release the biggest game map they had ever produced. And that was an impressive boast.

Still, when the first game came out, the reviews were so stellar that I knew I would buy it. And steadily, over the next couple of years, that game became a bit of a masterpiece. So obviously, I bought the second and all the attendant add-ons for that. And then, when it was released a couple of years ago, I bought the third.

And the third is a little bit different from the first two — because although it had six playable races on release, four of those races are essentially on the same side, although it’s a bit more complicated than that, as I’ll get to shortly.

They’re the Chaos factions.

By the end of the second game, I had started to get more into the lore. I read a couple of the books and enjoyed them. But it was the third game — and Chaos — that hooked me.

That whole Warhammer fictional universe is a strange, scary, and horrible place with a warped sense of morality and there are no real “good guys” to speak of. Even the human factions are ruled by religious fanatics who, amongst other things, persecute their own citizens, and there is not a race in the whole game that wouldn’t murder a member of any other race for the flimsiest reasons.

If you think our world is a hotbed of wars springing up on the weakest of pretexts, it’s nothing compared to the crazy stuff that goes on in the mad Warhammer universe. And this is just the fantasy setting — this is not even the more well known 40K setting, which is even crazier, darker and more violent.

But in a fictional world that essentially doesn’t have any good guys — just slightly less horrible factions than the rest — it’s still easy to tell who the genuine bad guys are. The four Chaos factions are a class apart. They’re in their own universe of nasty, vicious, vile evil. And unlike the other factions, which at least have certain xenophobic pretexts for going to war with everyone else, the Chaos Gods do it just because they like it. It’s not for nothing they’re called the Ruinous Powers.

And watching the Ibrox club against Aberdeen, I thought — if the Ruinous Powers had ever infected a football club, they’d have felt most at home at Ibrox. Imagining for a moment that we lived in their world, which would be the undisputed master of that club? And there’s a good case to be made for at least two of them.

That club, when you look at it … it’s like that Mitchell and Webb sketch I’ve sometimes mentioned — the “Are we the baddies?” one.

The answer is obvious: yes, you are.

In the Warhammer world, people who lust after power, or whose motivations become warped, sometimes offer themselves to the Ruinous Powers to be used as instruments of their will and some of them do quite well in the service of the Dark Gods and become strong and influential in their own right. Some of them actually become Warriors of Chaos and lead their own armies.

Now, you can’t actually say that Ferguson did any of that. He didn’t offer himself to the Ruinous Powers. He was born in the Chaos Wastes — perhaps in some Norscan village that paid homage to one of the Dark Gods. He was baptised in the faith, you might say. He was brought up surrounded by it, enveloped in it.

So he knows what he’s doing. He knows what side he’s on, and he always has. Or he seems to, anyway.

The only questions we need to ask ourselves, when you look at the wreckage and rubble of the club he’s in charge of, are these: which of the Chaos Gods is he working for… and does he even fully understand the extent of their influence, or their dark plan? Is he really a willing disciple … or a useful idiot?

It’s fun to speculate on these things.

Now before I start, I consider all four Chaos Gods to have a foothold at Ibrox; that just makes good sense. There is a little bit of all of them present in its makeup and its psychology. But predominant power … that can only go to one. Our quest here is to identify which it is, by looking at what the Ibrox club itself is.

So, let’s use a process of elimination here, and by doing that, we can rule one of the Chaos Gods out right away; their club is most certainly not formed in the image of Slaanesh, the Dark Prince; god of excess, pleasure and pain.

Slaanesh is ruled out because there is precious little pleasure to be had following the Ibrox club. Pain is another matter entirely, of course, pain — and in particular, that sadomasochism which comes with having to go to Ibrox every couple of weeks and sit through that dire fare — I can see a bit of Slaaneshi influence in that.

It’s definitely there; N’Kari the Soul Flayer would definitely enjoy sitting in the directors box wallowing in the suffering all around him, although yesterday he’d have found slim pickings not just because of the result but because most of their fans stayed at home judging from the number of empty seats … what a vote of confidence in Ferguson that was. He must have been mortified looking around him.

So, without the pleasure aspect, rule Slaanesh out completely. Slaanesh is sexy and seductive. Slaanesh has one cultural avatar who is recognisable even for those unfamiliar with the Warhammer lore; Pinhead from the Hellraiser series — ecstasy and agony twisted together into one loop.

But seduction is the number one tool of Slaanesh. And there’s no force on Heaven or Earth that could seduce me toward that dark side. Ibrox simply does not have anything alluring about it. Fat gutted yobs in blue tops. Blue masked gimps marauding down an empty High Street. Yahoos scrawling messages on bed sheets … it’s not sexy.

And so yes, although Slaanesh does enjoy watching suffering and participating in it and inflicting it — so it’s possible that there’s a little Slaaneshi influence weaving its way through the stands at times – they are not the guiding, operating force around that club, and around Ferguson. We can rule them out.

That brings us to Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways.

Now, the Changer of Ways might sound right for a club in transformation, but don’t forget—these are the Chaos Gods we’re talking about.

Even when you’re serving them, they’re warping your desires, your needs, and your ambitions so they more closely serve their ends and nobody does that more brilliantly than Kairos Fateweaver, the Mocking Watcher, the Lord of Change.

The Changer of Ways is using you to achieve his grand plan… and that plan is probably nothing like the one you had in mind … there’s an argument for saying that in trusting the Americans without knowing the full scale of what they intend to do that Ibrox is invited Tzeentch to come right to the heart of the club.

That is more than possible. I’ve written about it enough times.

The Warhammer Wiki describes Tzeentch as the lord of “change, evolution, ambition, intrigue, destiny, lies, trickery, sorcery, knowledge, and mutation.” Ferguson, without a doubt, sees a lot of himself in that.

But Tzeentch is about complexity, about a plan whose dimensions are so vast, so twisted and so eldritch that no mere mortal can comprehend them—and those who try tend to go mad. I can see people going mad trying to work out the Barry Ferguson version of tactics, but that’s more about looking for complexity where there is none.

I d think Ferguson would like to think he’s a servant of Tzeentch—he’d love people to believe that there’s some grand plan being worked out in the background, one we’re perhaps all too stupid to see, and that he is guiding it along, but that’s giving him more credit than he should ever have.

Ferguson is an idiot, pure and simple, and although I can see the appeal, for the Changer of Ways, for Kairos or the Changeling, in using such an empty vessel—moving him around the game board of life like a pawn for their own cosmic amusement—I don’t think Ferguson meets their standards. The Lord of Change can do better.

Which brings us to Khorne—the Blood God. The Lord of Skulls. The Hunter of Souls. He is the god of war, hatred, wrath, rage, and murder.

These are the things that feed Khorne. These are the things he thrives on. He is the most base and animalistic of all the Chaos Gods. The simplest to understand. The purest form of evil—war for no other purpose than to destroy, wreck, and kill, and to amass the twisted treasure of battle.

It’s not for nothing that the armies of Khorne are best known for their cry: “Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!”

I mean, this at first seems like the Ibrox club to a T. This is the Ibrox fanbase summed up. I’ve said many times that the entire club is defined by hatred.

That’s Khorne, right?

The constant need for battle, to exert themselves over their enemies. To crush beneath their feet any and all who stand in their way. That’s their mentality. That’s what drives every single thing they do over there.

Ferguson has all the attributes of a Khorne warrior of Chaos—aggression, anger, a thirst for revenge, and a lust for blood.

Fenian blood, preferably, I’m sure—but really, any kind. Any kind that satisfies the craving they all evidently feel over there. The craving to demonstrate supremacy. And that is a very Khorne thing to want to do.

There’s a little of Skarbrand the Exiled in Ferguson. Skarbrand was once Khorne’s most faithful warrior, a killer so skilled and feared that he was said to have piled skulls and corpses miles high and filled entire oceans with blood.

But what’s most fun, perhaps, about the Chaos Gods is that the four of them are always at war with each other—as well as with everyone else—always trying to be the Chaos God, battling it out in what’s known as The Great Game.

And so Skarbrand found himself targeted by Tzeentch, who used trickery and flattery to convince him that he was the equal of Khorne himself.

Of course, he was nothing but another soldier—albeit a very powerful one—and for his arrogance and egotism, Khorne cast him down into the mortal realm, condemned to feed on corpses and to pile them high until he had paid his dues.

If Tzeentch is anywhere in the vicinity of Ibrox, it is whispering in Ferguson’s ear and tricking him with the delusion that he’s good enough to be the manager there, to be the leader.

You can see it in his foot-stamping rage as the realisation dawns on him that he’s come up short, that he’s not going to get the job, that he’s not considered good enough.

All those empty seats yesterday were a sign that the fans are already sick and tired of him and can’t wait to see him gone.

And that, of course, only feeds the beast of rage and satisfies Khorne.

But here is where Ferguson really comes up short—and this is where it becomes obvious that Khorne’s influence, although undoubtedly present at the club and particularly among the fans, is not the guiding force at Ibrox.

Because Khorne is the god of conquest.

And they’re just not very good at conquest.

It’s all well and good being willing to go into battle, being ready to fight and to shed blood for the cause. But if you’re just not very good at it, you’re not going to be shedding blood for the Blood God—you’re going to be spilling your own.

Khorne would not sully himself to be involved with such abject failure. Khorne likes his acolytes to be good at the killing. To actually be adept at slaughter. That’s what feeds him, after all. And if you’re just not that good at it, you’re going to end up being slaughtered instead of doing the slaughtering.

No—as we shall see—if the Chaos Gods are working behind the scenes at Ibrox, then the one who is ascendant in this Great Game – the war of supremacy between the four of them – is not any of the three we’ve mentioned already, but the last of them: Nurgle.

Of all the four Chaos Gods, Nurgle is by far the most abhorrent to behold—and his realm is the one I would least like to be stranded in.

He is the god of decay, of pestilence, of disease, of filth, of degeneracy. And everywhere in the Realm of Nurgle is rot, is stench, is foulness.

The wiki pretty much sums it up like this: “The mortal worshippers of Nurgle include the diseased, nihilists, and the insane. His followers commonly come from the lowest classes of human society, who live in filth and despair already. Nurgle embraces the downtrodden, the forgotten, and those with nothing else to live for.”

I think that sums them up rather nicely.

Nurgle speaks to everything at that club. It speaks to the foulness that comes out of the stands, the putrid bile that seeps from every song and chant, to the rot that has to exist in your brain not to evolve at all into a better form.

See, apart from being the god of death and decay, Nurgle is also the god of rebirth, but every iteration is more twisted and toxic than the one before it.

When Rangers died, it was buried and the new club came out of its grave—and the new club was spiritually worse. It’s mind-bending to me how that could have happened, but it did. What crawled out of that grave, squirming with maggots, was even more warped and vicious and intolerant than the club that came before it.

I’ve talked often about how, back in the sands of time, when UEFA came in and banned the Billy Boys, what came next was the Famine Song.

So, one is laid to rest and something even more putrid grows in its place. That’s Nurgle. That’s the Plaguefather, tending his garden.

The signs of Nurgle are everywhere at Ibrox, and the proof that Nurgle is completely in control there is Ferguson himself.

You tell me that that appointment—at the fag-end of the current board’s existence—and all the putrid football, and all the awful press conferences, and everything else, all the nastiness that bubbles up in the man himself, are not the final proof that that club, in its current form, is a decayed mess at the very end of its life cycle.

A lot of their fans do believe themselves to be the warriors of Khorne. They’re not. The worst of them are the bloated, pus-leaking, lumbering armies of Festus the Leechlord, dragging with them their degeneracy and their filth.

This is how they portray themselves to be with their songs of disgusting hatred, with their bile pouring out of every orifice. They’ve turned their ground into a sewer. They’ve turned their club into Scottish football’s leaking open sore.

And all we’re doing is bearing witness.

All we’re doing is holding up a mirror to them and saying, “This is what you are.” More important than that, we’re reminding them; “This is what you’ve made of yourselves.”

All the mortal followers of Chaos shape themselves into the form of whichever Chaos God they choose. And these people have—by their own will—gone down in the gutter with the filth. Look at the hatred that spews out of their forums. Look at the despicable subject matter that fills them to the rafters—their dark obsessions, their sick fantasies.

The hatred, which could easily be mistaken as Khorne at his purest, is actually a form of sickness. And that makes it Nurgle.

I’m not saying there isn’t some Khorne influence on that club.

There absolutely is, and we all know that there is. But Ibrox is not the realm of the Skulltaker. It is the domain of Tamurkhan, The Maggot Lord.

This, then, is The Great Game: Ibrox Edition.

So there we have it. The full pantheon of Chaos, their unholy dominions laid bare, and their influence mapped neatly onto the twisted, snarling face of Ibrox.

We’ve walked the burning wastes of Khorne, slipped through the impossible labyrinths of Tzeentch, gagged in the festering swamps of Nurgle, and stood at the edge of Slaanesh’s mirror, only to recoil in horror.

This is the “Great Game” all right.

Only at Ibrox, it’s not a divine contest of cosmic power—it’s a tragicomedy written in bile, with Barry Ferguson roaring and raging at a world that doesn’t rate him.

What have we learned?

That the chaos there isn’t metaphorical. It’s practically doctrinal.

You can trace the threads of the rot and decay all the way from the top of the marble staircase to the last row of the Broomloan Rear. You can hear it in their songs, see it in their forums, smell it in their press releases. Every grimy corner of that club tells the story of a place under the sway of Nurgle and its corruption.

Here’s the good news; chaos consumes itself.

Just when Ibrox tries on the seductive face of Slaanesh and tries to entice the Americans, some Union Brat lets out a loud, wet fart and the noxious stink of Nurgle fills the air and reminds them just what they are buying.

Every time Ferguson thinks he’s been smart with a nod to Tzeentch and the grand plan, a maggot crawls out of his ear and reminds us all that his brain is a lump of festering jelly and that he’s not that intelligent at all and nor are those who hired him.

Each time their fans rant and rage and fill the air with their fury they are channelling Khorne … but then you think of Manchester and those ranks of swollen bellies and unwashed tops, the bile in their songs and the stink of their forums and you remember it’s the Plaguefather pulling the strings over there.

Obviously, I’m leaning heavily into satire here—whether any of it’s actually funny I’ll leave to your own judgement. But what I’m really trying to do, for better or worse, is finally purge myself of my own anger over the events at their ground a fortnight ago, and all the handwringing that’s still going on in the aftermath.

I am sick to death of that club and the way we—Scottish football as a whole, and Scottish society in general—continue to tolerate it.

Writing this has helped me vent some of the fury I’ve carried since that game and over the ludicrous buck-passing that’s followed.

But I know I’m only bottling it up again for next time—because there will be a next time. Unless this country finally gets its act together.

And I very much doubt that will happen.