The Ibrox club enters the dangerzone and nobody seems to know it.

One afternoon in the summer of 1990, a medical student named Linda Waters went for a jog in a wooded area of Colorado Springs. As she rounded a corner, she encountered a cougar. A mountain lion. Her initial surprise turned into something like elation. How cool is that? she thought.

Now, she knew a thing or two. She knew to make herself look big, so she stretched out her arms. She knew to make herself loud, so she started to shout. She knew to back away slowly, which is exactly what she was doing when the cat started coming towards her. And it was then that she noticed another one, just off to her side, coming out of the undergrowth.

So she backed away. And she climbed a tree.

But, of course, cougars are great climbers.

One of them started to come up the tree after her. It slashed at her leg. She kicked at it until it fell, and then, for the next half hour, she watched as they circled the tree beneath her, waiting for her to come down. Finally, they went away. One report said they went off to pursue a deer. Another claimed they wandered to a local stream for some water. Either way, she got out of it. No harm done.

She would later tell the media that she did not believe the animals had intended her harm. “If they wanted to kill me,” she said, “they could have.”

Linda’s story is part of an amazing book called The Beast In The Garden by a writer named David Baron. I’m going to come back to that book a little bit later in the piece, but what’s incredible to me is that the attack on Linda Waters wasn’t an isolated incident, but the culmination of a long series of chilling encounters people had with mountain lions during a very short period of time in Colorado Springs.

Those encounters had been widely publicised in the newspapers and were the subject of at least two public meetings.

Still, even with the way they behaved that night, and even with all the other documented issues involving cougars, Linda Waters and others refused to accept the growing evidence that there was a major problem with the local wildlife.

People have an incredible capacity for denial—for seeing only what they want to see, for hearing only what they want to hear. They cling to all sorts of rationalisations and justifications which don’t make any sense. And once you place them in danger, sometimes in great peril, it’s obvious to everyone but them.

It should be obvious to any person who examines the Linda Waters case—even without the context of everything else that was going on in Colorado at the time—that she was lucky to survive that encounter.

Indeed, it was obvious to everyone except her, and to a surprisingly large group of people, many in positions of responsibility and who wielded influence, and yet who clung to a comforting fantasy far longer than they should have.

There’s a lot of it going around, folks.

The other night, I posted my initial piece on the Ibrox takeover. And in all the media coverage I’ve read in the last 16 or 18 hours since the story broke, I haven’t read a single critical piece of analysis. Not one. Although there are plenty of red flags, and suggestions that this is not going to be a benevolent dictatorship.

I mentioned the atrocious piece from Scott McDermott in The Daily Record. That was topped by an even more contemptable piece from John McGarry in The Daily Mail. These people are not behaving like journalists.

Yet one other warning turned up, courtesy of Peter Smith of ITV News, and it’s a bigger red flag than anything else their fans or the hacks are going to get.

That warning sign is about the purchase price—or the alleged purchase price—of the club. And if those reports are true (and I suspect there’s a bit of gilding the lily going on, but not enough to matter) then I can’t believe no one is spotting the obvious issues that arise from it. It’s as unbelievable, in its own way, as Linda Waters’ refusal to accept that those cats would have killed her that night, had she not been smart enough to take preventative action before they felt confident enough to try it.

These people aren’t committing a fraud—at least not as far as we know. In fact, they’re doing quite the opposite it seems to me. They’re doing everything out in the open. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t concealment going on.

They’re putting out just enough to present an image of cooperation with the fans, of openness and transparency. But to the informed and educated they’re not really hiding their agenda or the means they intend to pursue to take control.

As I like to point out, Hitler laid out his whole strategy for Germany and the Second World War in Mein Kampf; that book, in its complete form, was published in 1926. For over a decade his rivals in Germany and elsewhere convinced themselves that it was all talk, much as millions of Americans convinced themselves that Trump wasn’t to be taken seriously when he talked about tariff wars and rounding up immigrants and pursuing Project 2025.

Even when these people operate in plain sight, there are still folk who will deny reality right up until the ICE agents kick in their door.

This new Ibrox board has spelled out the means by which they’ll eliminate scrutiny and accountability, much as Hitler did when he told all who would listen that the dictatorship would be achieved by constitutional means … and that he would use the constitution to essentially abolish it once and for all.

Any way of keeping these people in check disappears on 23 June if the changes they want are voted through at the emergency general meeting, and they’ve preannounced it in advance. If you want to look. If you want to see it.

To those who want to look, they’re doing everything you do if your intent is to eliminate scrutiny and accountability, and to enable yourself to use the club any way you please. It’s there in black and white. It’s crystal clear.

You have to want to see it, I guess. You have to be able to step back from it and look at it objectively—and recognise what it is that you’re looking at.

Why take the club private? Why lock out the shareholders? Why the power grab to assume total and unfettered control? It’s exactly what I predicted would happen. To do what these people want to do—to run the table the way they see fit—they need that unfettered control. And they are working it so they get it.

But to what end? For what purpose? Why go that far?

If their plans are benevolent, they could accomplish them with 51% and the support of the other shareholders. They want those other shareholders out of the way. They want to eliminate any fan involvement. They want to silence dissent—at least any that exists inside the club.

And it’s my strong suspicion that the answer is right there in plain sight.

It’s right there in the purchase price. And the purchase price is the big, flashing warning sign. The one that people cannot and should not ignore—but which, I predict, they will ignore nonetheless, even though it’s obviously a very significant issue. One that people looking at this objectively could spot a mile away.

Whatever the purchase price was, it’s clear that in order to get where they want to go, these people are going to have to sink a vast sum of money into the club just to take control of it. That number might be as high as £50 to £75 million. Some overexcitable hacks are claiming it could reach £100 million. And they use that number like it’s a good thing, like it’s somehow brilliant, like it’s remarkably good for all concerned.

Not one of them has paused long enough to ask: who would sink £100 million into the purchase of a Scottish football club?

Even if it were Celtic, that would still have alarm bells ringing in any sensible media environment. And we post regular profits. That is not a sum of money you can easily recover, even in a much more lucrative football environment than this one.

The reason some of us dismissed the idea of this takeover at the start is because, on the surface of it, it makes no sense.

It is not commercially smart to sink that kind of money into a football club which, in its 13 years of existence, has never turned a profit—in fact, one that has made losses upon losses, each and every year. If these people are as smart as they are said to be, they would not be taking on such a momentous undertaking without knowing how they’re going to get their money back. And some of the suggested ways they might do that are fantasyland, if we’re being generous.

A massive upturn in commercial sponsorship? But how’s that justified?

A transfer trading strategy? Apparently, they’ve been trying to enact one of those for the last ten years and haven’t cracked it. Anyone putting faith in that is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Regular appearances in the Champions League group stages? Well, that’s a reasonable thing to hope for. But it’s not something you’d base a business plan on. And besides, the cost base necessary to get there would have to be much increased from what it is now. And then you run into UEFA regulatory problems straight away. Qualification gets harder year on year, and one bad one could bring the whole thing crashing down.

Listen, without wanting to toot my own horn—or that of other people in Celtic cyberspace and the blogosphere—we’re pretty smart people. And if this made sense, if it was commercially feasible, if it was viable, we’d be looking at two issues right now.

First, we’d be asking why our own club has failed to pursue some of the alleged commercial avenues, and second, we’d be telling them to wake up and get on top of their game, because a real and serious threat had emerged across the city. And that would necessitate everyone at Celtic being at their very best.

I wrote the “phoney war” piece this morning.

But even that piece is based on the idea that it could happen—not based on any expectancy that it will. We’re not prone to complacency. If this looked like a credible and genuine threat, if it looked like these people were coming in with nothing but altruistic motives to pour money into the black hole of Ibrox, I’d be concerned. Especially if there were no FSR rules preventing it.

Someone must have said to Linda Waters, “You were being attacked, and you should acknowledge that—if for no other reason than because doing so might protect other people.”

By the same token, I wonder how there’s nobody in our media who isn’t saying there are dangers here that are quite clear and obvious.

I know nobody wants to spoil the party. I know nobody wants to be the guy who points out there’s a turd floating in the punch bowl. But there is a turd floating in the punch bowl. And it’s ridiculous to let people keep drinking out of it.

As I’ve said previously, we are not picking holes in this scenario—we are pointing out the holes that are already there.

If these people have spent £50 million and upwards just to get control, how are they getting that back? If they’re willing to spend nearly £100 million getting control and consolidating power, how are they getting that back?

Does nobody want the answers to those questions? Or are people really content to settle for the ludicrous answers we’ve been offered?

If it were possible to secure significantly larger sponsorship deals than they currently have, then it was possible for Celtic—and we’ve somehow missed it.

If it were possible to pay for a £100 million club takeover out of transfer sales, when their club managed a mere £800,000 from four or five players last season, then that strategy could have been executed by the previous board as well as this one—because there’s nothing new under the sun.

All this data-driven analytics stuff? It’s available to anyone who wants it. There’s no proprietary version. No secret super-duper way of doing that they alone can access. This is about numbers, and that’s an exact science which anyone who knows how to read a spreadsheet can readily access.

And even if there were some secret way to read those numbers, Leeds United would already have it. Anyone who thinks these people are going to let Ibrox steal players from under the nose of their blue-chip asset is dreaming.

And that last one—regular Champions League income?

That requires regularly winning the Scottish Premiership. This isn’t a chicken-and-egg scenario. To win the league regularly means spending enough money to keep up with Celtic and once you’ve done that it means successfully navigating several rounds of qualifiers, which is not getting easier—it’s getting harder.

Scotland’s about to lose its second Champions League slot. So, this little task of overhauling Celtic over a 38-game campaign now becomes the be-all and end-all of the strategy. Or you can forget it.

From the start, some of us warned that anyone spending that kind of money—anyone from the corporate backgrounds these people come from—would want to do it in such a way as to minimise the risk to their investment.

And how do you do that?

Well, that’s very simple.

You borrow all the money. You assume complete control. You rewrite the articles of association, allowing you to shuffle the shareholding to suit yourself. And once no one can stop you—once you’ve pulled down the corporate veils of secrecy, easily achieved by taking the organisation off the stock exchange and going private—you simply transfer the purchase cost and the debts to the club itself.

And you’ve got it, essentially, for free.

With a purchase price of this size, I cannot conceive of circumstances where it is anything other than a leveraged buyout. Anything else means that all the investors are personally putting up their own cash and risking losing it all, and if these people are the smart, savvy, and sophisticated businessmen the media keeps telling us they are, then why would they be stupid enough to do that?

See, you cannot have your cake and eat it too here.

You cannot have smart, sophisticated businessmen and pretend such people are willing to piss their money up against the wall.

If they’re that smart and that sophisticated, they’ll minimise the risk to themselves by whatever means necessary. And we’ve already laid out, in detail, several times now, what the best means of doing that are.

Any for-profit scenario exposes those who value the club – and believe it belongs to them – to the gravest possible peril whether it’s a leveraged buyout, a mortgaged buyout, a sale-and-leaseback of the stadium, or whatever else it may be.

Come 23 June, there will be no mechanism by which anyone can stop it from happening. And the bigger the purchase price, the more danger the club itself is in. Because the larger that purchase price is, the more radical the steps these people must take in order to get their money back.

As I said the other night, they can’t say they haven’t been warned. The thing is, the warnings are now too late to do any good.

Which brings me back to David Baron’s book, The Beast In The Garden.

By the time Linda Waters was chased up that tree, the path towards a tragedy was already irrevocable. Because for a couple of years, the people of Colorado Springs had been at the centre of an ever-escalating problem.

Cougars had been seen in back gardens. They had been seen on front and back porches. In daylight as well as at night.

Then they started harassing smaller pets. Then they started killing smaller pets. And that, at least, provoked some sort of public discussion about what should be done. And the answer was – nothing was done.

Then they started to kill larger pets. One householder went out to his back porch one night after hearing a commotion and found a cougar dragging away his Doberman.

And still, people told themselves and each other that there wasn’t a problem – because no humans had yet been attacked. And then Linda Waters had to shimmy up that tree. And it was her public statement – that she didn’t regard it as an attack – which saw the denial taken to the next level.

Then Scott Lancaster, an 18-year-old student, went jogging along the trail behind his high school and disappeared. When they found his body, days later, there was nowhere left for denial to go.

Even as the body was being recovered, investigators were stunned to find a mountain lion watching them. One that didn’t have the least fear of humans – and which harassed them until they shot it. When they autopsied it, they found enough evidence in its stomach to conclude that it had killed the kid.

There’s an old aphorism about putting a frog in boiling water and slowly turning up the heat until you have what is effectively frog soup.

It is one of the most vivid – and cut-through-the-bullshit – images of how situations can become intolerable, even dangerous, because you slowly acclimate yourself to the abnormality of it as it gets progressively worse.

The frog aphorism isn’t true – a frog won’t really sit in an ever-boiling pan until it’s dead – but it’s a useful image just the same. Because people can acclimate themselves to dangerous situations until disaster strikes.

And across the street at Ibrox, they have, over the years, gotten very, very good at it. And you would think they would learn – but they never seem to.

And so, questions that should get asked don’t get asked. Conclusions that should be drawn aren’t drawn, and warning signs, which should be crystal clear to even the most gullible fan, are ignored.

And this one is a beauty. If you thought the Linda Waters level of denial was something, my friends, you ain’t seen nothing yet.