The Ibrox fans can stamp their feet in fury. No-one will be listening to them.

One of the most amusing things about watching the Ibrox fans’ volcanic reaction to the Russell Martin appointment yesterday was this idea that if the board has gotten it wrong, their honeymoon will be over and they’ll soon be feeling the heat.

I laughed reading all those suggestions yesterday—even the one where Keith Jackson said something very similar in his typically silly way.

The miscalculation is immense. And it’s a critical aspect of the takeover which these people have failed completely to grasp.

As you all know, I wrote a piece about the 23 June EGM, a piece which has been extraordinarily well received. I’m very grateful to everyone who has commented on it or discussed it on a podcast or forum.

All I did was look where I was told to look. Someone knowledgeable about this stuff told me that’s where the red flag would be—and it turned out to be correct.

Hasn’t made any difference. Not one bit.

There hasn’t been a single Ibrox editorial on why this EGM has to be monitored carefully—far less opposed. There hasn’t been a single article on any of the Ibrox fan media sites digging any further into what I found.

They don’t seem to care, and I knew they wouldn’t. The £20 million bribe is all that they can see, and that’s all they’re interested in. If they can get that money, all’s good, all is well, and everything else they’ll just leave to trust.

But what they fail to understand is that come 23 June, their voices won’t matter at all. Their voices don’t really matter right now, because the club already has their season ticket money.

These people already have one foot in the door, and their plan to take total control has been hatched in such a way that you can’t see where the opposition is going to come from. So, for all intents and purposes, the voices of the Ibrox supporters are already as good as silenced—because nothing they say is going to matter in any meaningful way.

“The Americans have taken a risk” seems to be the operating theory.

But is that really true?

They’ve appointed a manager who will work within parameters that they set. They’ve appointed a manager who will follow their plan. If that plan is simply to develop players, sell them on, post profits and take those profits out of the club as dividends or salaries or repayment of the club’s debt—provided they transfer the purchase to the club itself—where is the risk?

“Fans won’t be satisfied unless they get success.”

That seems to be the general consensus.

But the question that automatically comes to mind is: if the club doesn’t get success, if Martin turns out to be a footballing managerial disaster, what exactly are the fans going to do about that? Protest? Protest what?

They can demand the removal of the manager, sure—and the board may even go along with that at some stage, if he’s not fulfilling their objectives or getting the job done the way they want it. But they’ll only replace him with someone else who’ll do it the exact same way. Because it’s their plan being followed—not his.

The chief executive will cop a bit of flak, but I’m sure he’s getting well paid and he’s not going to bend. He’s proved that already in the number of times he’s gone in front of them and delivered bad news and essentially said, “Like it or lump it.”

That’s why he’s kept his job. That’s exactly the kind of thing the board wants to hear. A guy who will act as a lightning rod. That’s his job.

The Americans have no emotional investment here. Theirs is purely a financial one. That’s it. They care about the bottom line. They don’t care whether some people in the Louden Tavern are stamping their feet in fury.

The club’s no longer run from those kinds of places. It’s now run from gated communities 4,000 miles away. And the people in those mansions—they don’t care about protests going on over here. The Glazers have proved that conclusively, and they’re not the only ones.

Always, always with these things, there is an aspect of distance between directors and fans. But the Ibrox fans have been used to directors who have some proximity to the club, and to the supporters.

There are only three sets of directors who didn’t have an affinity to the club or some emotional bond—and didn’t have physical proximity to the fan base. Those guys were Ashley, who ran it from England, Whyte, who ran it from Monaco, and Charles Green, who—like Ashley—had himself a nice big pile down south and retreated right back there after he looted the place.

They don’t get that this physical distance gives these people the ability to zone out all the white noise. Imagine how much less that white noise is going to seem from the other side of the Atlantic. These people won’t register it at all.

On the few occasions where they turn up at the ground to watch games, they’ll step out of luxury limos, mount the stairs, sit on a heated seat in the stand surrounded by security, and at the end of it all, they’ll retreat to a private lounge, have dinner, get back on a plane and go home again.

You’ll get fan groups like the Union Brats, who’ll cause them a little bit of a headache—that’s if they allow the Union Brats to exist in their current form in the first place. That’s something time will tell. In their shoes, you might just decide to do away with the Union Brats entirely. And they may well choose to do that.

Having made sure that come 23 June they’re going to shut down any and all dissent in the boardroom, they may well decide that the best thing they can do is shut down any and all dissent in the stands too.

They already have the Union Brats on their radar, I’m sure—because of the appalling banners they produced whilst the Americans were in proximity.

I have to think that group is in grave danger of being kicked out of the club. But as I said—on that one, time will tell.

I do know that everything these people do will be unsentimental. I do know that everything they do will be about how they can realise their bottom line. If the people just happen to be unhappy with that—too bad.

I’ve spoken before about the former Hull City owner, Assem Allam.

When he was barracked by fans for the suggestion that they change the name of the club, he responded to banners saying “Hull City till we die” with “They can die anytime they like.” And he further fuelled the fire by saying, “Nobody questions my decisions in my business.”

Ibrox fans should expect the same treatment—and perhaps even the same response. They just haven’t twigged yet what control from the other side of the ocean, by people who don’t have any emotional stake in the club, actually means.

They don’t understand why the 23 June meeting, which will formalise the power these people hold over every element of the club and how it is run, effectively renders them voiceless and powerless.

But they will come to know it. They will come to understand—and they’re not going to like it when they do.