The Ibrox takeover makes the case for a Scottish football regulator iron-clad.

Tumbleweed blows across our field of vision.

The temptation is to retreat. To focus on transfer window stories. To regurgitate every positive memory of Ange Postecoglou or to approach his sacking at Spurs from 50 different angles and get 50 different Celtic perspectives. I understand why some people don’t want to read any of that stuff. I don’t want to write it either.

This week I made quite a splash, it seems, with the piece on the Ibrox Articles of Association ahead of the 23 June meeting—an event which will consolidate control of that club in the hands of a tiny group of people, most of whom are unknown and whose motives can only therefore be guessed at.

As I’ve said before, there is no direct proof these people are running a scam. There is nothing to suggest their intentions are malign. The simple fact is that come the 23 June meeting, if they are, it’ll be too late to stop them.

In theory, there should be three major institutions that protect not just the Ibrox fans but all football supporters in Scotland from that fate.

And to one extent or another, every single one of those institutions has failed so far. I have no confidence that any of the three will wake up in time to act, to prevent the handover of that club to these shadowy individuals with whatever they’ve got in mind. And although there is a part of me that would dearly love to see that club looted, its fans grifted and its shareholders completely stonewalled, it also makes me angry—as a football fan—that anything like this is even possible.

The first of the three institutions that should be trying to stop this is the fan media, and the wider support base—the fans themselves. If you need to put a face on that, it would be found at Club 1872. They are supposed to be the shareholder organisation. They are supposed to be the last line of defence. They are supposed to be the voice that speaks on behalf of the fans and of the ordinary shareholders.

Their silence is deafening—even though their members are going to be directly impacted by what happens on 23 June.

I wrote yesterday about the fan media and how it has aligned itself with the mainstream media in gaslighting the support. So, I have no confidence that either the shareholders’ organisation or the fan media is going to speak up now—if not in resistance, then at least in a belated raising of the alarm. Their failure is total. It is colossal. And the rest of the support will come to regret it in time.

The second institution that was supposed to offer protection against exactly this kind of thing is the mainstream media itself.

But I never expected them to. Nobody in the mainstream wants to touch this story with a 20-foot pole, even though it is begging to be explored properly by a national title. Remember, the 23 June article was speculative only in its assessment of what these people might do. Everything else in it is right there in the Articles of Association they’re proposing to adopt. It’s written down. It’s a matter of fact.

They may not sell the stadium to themselves and lease it back. They may not transfer the purchase price onto the club as debt. They may not shaft all the minority shareholders and shut out any form of scrutiny. But they’re giving themselves the power to do all that. And since we don’t know who some of them are, it’s impossible to properly analyse what their objectives might be.

One thing is for certain: none of them have any emotional affinity with the club. So, they’re not necessarily focused on the same goals and objectives as the support.

That’s just a fact. And it should concern anyone who cares about the future of that club—and about one of the major institutions in Scottish football—that something like this can happen. That something like this is about to happen.

And the mainstream media, which is supposed to be one of the guardrails against this kind of takeover, has been completely and utterly silent on it.

I cannot emphasise this point enough: the people about to execute this full-scale coup d’état have not articulated a plan. They have not told anyone what they intend to do, or how they intend to do it.

Way before this point in Fergus McCann’s takeover—way before he was chairman and running the show—we already knew how long he would stay, how much he would invest and how much he was asking us to invest. We knew the scope of the plan.

In the place where concrete information should be in terms of this takeover, there is instead a lot of media-generated noise.

They would rather write the speculative nonsense that’s been filling the papers for months than actually think clearly about where this might be going. Their imaginations run wild through the garden of positivity.

But there are other possibilities. They’ve dragged the whole fan base into a fairy tale world where money grows on trees.

Look: this is the same media that cheered David Murray to the rafters for years—even when it was obvious, from 2008 onwards, where he was taking the club. They welcomed Craig Whyte as the successor, off the back of stories that he was a billionaire, and that was one of the most easily disproved claims in the history of Scottish football.

And yes, we give Keith Jackson a lot of the blame for that story. He was the man who wrote it, and the lurid headline appeared over his name.

But let’s never forget that most of his media colleagues—although some were mildly dismissive of the “billionaire” tag—believed, because they wanted to believe, that they were dealing with an individual of significant personal wealth. Someone who could fund the next big spending spree. They had no evidence for it.

None of them likes to be reminded of that now. They all prefer to point the finger at wee Keith and act like he was the only one. But he wasn’t. He didn’t carry all that water on his own. Whyte was cheered through those doors by more than one man. Their entire industry was standing there with him, clapping wildly.

They did the same with Charles Green. They did the same with Dave King. Some of the things being written about the Americans now were also said about Ashley when he took over. He needed to see a successful club if he was going to make a return. They completely misjudged Ashley’s actual interest in the club.

If the failure of the fan media is an atrocity, then the failure of the mainstream media is simply disgraceful. Even if the outcome ends up being wholly benign, the press should stand condemned for all eternity for letting it happen on their watch without so much as the bare minimum of scrutiny.

The third guardrail against this kind of thing is arguably the most important of the three. Fans can only scrutinise so much and influence so much—although I remain convinced that if they made a concerted effort to oppose something like this early on, while it was still in its infancy, they might have been able to kill it stone dead.

The time for that, though, would have been many months ago, when the negotiations were first announced and it was reported that the entire club was being handed over to the 49ers group. The moment that story collapsed—essentially the moment Keith Jackson and others started backtracking on it and instead began promoting Cavanaugh as the public face behind the move, that was when people should have begun asking serious questions. It’s far too late now.

Likewise, had the mainstream media started digging earlier—and had it identified some of the concerns we raised well before these Articles of Association were even mentioned—this could have played out differently.

The fact that there were unknown individuals involved, that there were signs of manoeuvring to circumvent ordinary shareholders and dilute their stakes … There was more than enough there for the press to investigate, had they wanted to.

The mainstream media could have taken some responsibility, could have demanded to see a plan. That, in turn, might have alerted the Ibrox fans early enough to give them the time and cover they needed to organise resistance, to do their own due diligence, or simply to ask the right questions.

So yes, those failures are significant, and they’re not inconsequential. But the organisation with the real power to prevent this didn’t just fail recently—it failed many months ago. That failure came long before the takeover details became public. Their failure is a long-term one. Not just a failure of imagination, but a gross, appalling abrogation of responsibility. And those people are the alleged governing bodies of Scottish football. Their failure is the greatest of the three.

They were the ones who, for reasons known only to themselves, weakened the protections Scottish clubs once had by opening the door to multi-club ownership stakes in our football teams.

Yes, there was clamour for it from some clubs—but it was the governing bodies’ responsibility to govern, not to cave in to a few who wanted the rules relaxed. Those rules existed to protect the whole game. They were never meant to be bent or broken at the whims of a handful of teams.

It’s not hard to see how a multi-club ownership system could be dangerous for Scottish football. At plenty of English clubs where it’s been tried, it’s ended badly—bad owners, shambolic leadership, clubs run into the ground and left teetering on the brink. And while no one is saying these guys are necessarily that type, the point is simple: there’s absolutely nothing to stop them if they are.

Supporters have no protection. The only safeguards fans have in other footballing nations simply don’t exist here.

The Ibrox fanbase and its shareholders’ group don’t want to do due diligence. The media doesn’t want to write anything that might upset its customer base—even if staying silent is actually dangerous to the very thing those customers love most. And the governing bodies don’t want to govern. They want to make it easier for people to acquire stakes in Scottish football clubs, not harder. They impose absolutely no limits on what those people can do once they’re in the door.

One of the reasons I’ve been writing about this has little to do with the club involved. It’s about the game. It’s about the structural weakness of Scottish football, which, astonishingly, is even worse now than it was in 2012. That is an absolute scandal. After everything we’ve seen since then, that things have regressed is an outrage.

If vulture capitalists turned up tomorrow looking to take over Celtic, we’d find ourselves in the exact same position as the Ibrox fans are in now: on our own. There’s no regulatory framework to protect us. There’s no press corps that would raise the alarm. We would be alone.

And although I trust Celtic fans would never allow such a deal to happen without at least some proper scrutiny—far more, certainly, than the Ibrox support is getting right now—if those on the board and in possession of shares were determined to sell, we probably couldn’t stop them. And no one would step in to help.

Scottish football is ripe for vulture capital takeovers.

It’s wide open for every sort of corruption and malfeasance to worm its way in and take root. I’ve believed that since 2012. I’ve been writing about it ever since. We’re now more than a decade on from the scandal that destroyed Rangers, and yet the game’s protections are weaker than they were then.

Later this year, assuming the Labour government doesn’t backtrack—and they’ve already backtracked on so many promises that I wouldn’t be surprised—they’re due to introduce an independent regulator for English football.

If they water that down, it will be a disgrace. But even in diluted form, it will be more than we have. At the very least, Scottish football deserves a regulator of its own. One that takes key decisions out of the hands of governing bodies which have proved utterly incapable of dealing with them.

When the UK Government announced it would be creating a football regulator for England, it was a quiet revolution.

Years of scandals, collapses, and chaos had finally forced action. English football, despite its wealth, was rotting from the inside. The regulator is being brought in as a safety valve. And for once, Westminster has got something right.

This murky mess of American investors, mysterious share transactions and boardroom reshuffles feels nauseatingly familiar. We’ve seen this film before. Now the sequel is playing out. And, just like last time, nobody is paying attention. I cannot overstate how dangerous this environment is for clubs and for fans.

Scottish football has no way to stop a club from sleepwalking into catastrophe. No institutional safeguards. No oversight. Not even a culture that demands good governance. That, in fact, might be the biggest failure of all.

The English regulator will have the power to probe club finances, enforce sustainability, block unsuitable owners, demand transparency, and veto dodgy takeovers. It’ll have the authority to protect “community assets” like stadiums and training grounds, and stop owners from selling them off or remortgaging them to offshore investment funds. Basic protections fans here still don’t have … and badly need.

Imagine if, in 2012, a regulator had stepped in and said: “This club is insolvent. Liquidation means liquidation. A new club must start from the bottom, or not at all. There will be no five-way agreements. There will be no asterisks. There will be no corporate shell games.”

Imagine if, right now, a regulator could demand clarity over share purchases, ask who’s really bankrolling the new boardroom players, or whether UEFA rules are being breached by overlapping interests.

That’s what the English regulator will do. It won’t be perfect. It’ll be slow, bureaucratic, maybe even politically compromised. But it’ll exist. It’ll be there, looming over the clubs and more important, looking over the shoulders of owners and warning them that they are not untouchable.

In Scotland we’ve still got the three wise monkeys running the show—see no evil, hear no evil, and mouth empty platitudes about “football integrity” while the game risks being looted right under their noses.

Scottish football needs a regulator more than English football ever did. We are a smaller, more fragile ecosystem. A handful of clubs are all that’s holding the pyramid together. If Celtic, or the Ibrox club, or even Aberdeen were to implode under mismanagement, it would shake the entire sport to its foundations.

We cannot afford to get it wrong again.

But the SFA will not reform itself. This much is clear. It’s had countless chances and all it’s done is reshuffle the pack, appoint new cronies to the lifeboats, and steer straight into the next iceberg. The SPFL is no better—a cartel concerned more with self-preservation than transparency. The clubs won’t lead the change either. They’re too afraid of what scrutiny might turn up on their own doorsteps.

This is where Holyrood needs to step in. The Scottish Government must look at what’s being done down south and draw the obvious conclusion.

Yes, sport is devolved. But Scottish football is a national institution and a multimillion-pound industry. It employs thousands, entertains millions, and commands a kind of public loyalty nothing else in the country comes close to. If we allow it to keep being run like a backstreet bookies, we are inviting disaster.

This isn’t just about the Ibrox club—though they’re a textbook case. It’s about how we handle money, ownership, contracts, youth development, fan voices, media access—everything. A proper regulator could finally force the game here to grow up. It could end the lies, the secrecy, the backroom favours. It could restore some kind of trust.

The regulator is coming to England. It might just save their game from itself. Scotland should be so lucky.