The weekend confirmed the Ibrox club as lawless and the SFA as gutless.

The big story of the weekend wasn’t about us signing a new player, or getting a new contract for the manager. It wasn’t even about Ian Maxwell’s preposterous interview, which I’ll get to in due course.

No, the biggest story of the weekend in Scottish football was the ranting, raving, rambling, shambling statement out of Ibrox after the SFA’s threat to sanction them for the comments made by John Brown in the aftermath of the decision to chop off a goal on the last day of the season.

This story touches on so many areas: SFA weakness, the Ibrox mindset, double standards and hypocrisy, and all the other crazy stuff that sometimes seems unique to the game in this country. I knew I would have to write not just a piece about it, but an extensive piece.

Because where we’ve arrived is at a bizarre transit point in our game. Some of us remain rooted in reality, while others veer off on their own journey into whatever fantasy universe they want to embrace. The board of directors over there has changed almost completely, but the mindset remains exactly the same.

The SFA, in seeking to punish Brown, are showing their own weaknesses — ones the club at Ibrox has always been able to exploit.

I don’t believe they’ll be sanctioned for this, even though it was the least of the offences that the SFA had built a dossier on and could have opened cases against them for. In attempting to show they are willing to stand up to Ibrox, they’ve only proved how spineless they are. And that is one of the things I want to talk about.

More than anything else, though, we’re seeing what the Ibrox club is really all about: a sense of entitlement, a sense of egotism, a culture of whataboutery and blaming other people for everything else.

Above all, this idea that the rules don’t apply to them — that they’ll obey only those which are convenient and ignore everything else. The sense that their own twisted morality should be imposed on the rest of the game.

As I said, this one’s going to delve into various areas, so brace yourselves.

At the centre of what bothers me about this, of course, is the idea I can’t shake — that this is, in fact, nothing but a smokescreen.

Last week, an Air India flight crashed and killed a lot of people. It was a Boeing plane which crashed. Although we don’t yet know what happened, anyone who’s looked at the surrounding story of Boeing should be naturally suspicious that this is somehow down to the company itself and the fact it no longer adheres to the highest professional standards.

I recently watched the case against Boeing on Netflix again and found it extraordinary that no one went to jail for the two disasters that afflicted the 737 Max, which were clearly caused by a shift in the company culture — from one that embraced engineers and safety standards to one only interested in making money.

The postscript to that story, of course, is that in May this year, Trump’s Justice Department dropped the last of the criminal cases against Boeing over those two crashes, allowing them to cut a deal with prosecutors in exchange for a £1.1 billion fine. That means if it turns out they were in some way responsible for the Air India crash, this could swell into a major political scandal as much as anything else.

The May deal was exactly what it looked like on the surface: a smokescreen put up by the Trump government and the company to disguise the fact Boeing has recently signed a major defence contract with its government worth billions. They couldn’t be prosecuted or they wouldn’t have been eligible for those contracts.

So both parties came to a sweetheart arrangement where that wouldn’t be necessary, and they were made to pay a sum which is inconsequential to them considering the deals they’ve just signed.

And that’s a little bit what this is like.

We’re talking about a club whose fans produced a banner suggesting rival supporters deserve to be shot. A club whose fans threw coins and other objects at our players — not for the first time. They could have been charged, and should have been charged, by the governing bodies for any one of those high-profile offences, not to mention decades of singing the worst kind of bile from their stands.

The SFA has stood mute and done nothing. But a comment made by a former player on the club’s official TV channel is what finally moves the governing body to action and an official sanction.

It stinks to high heaven.

It’s the appearance that the SFA is a serious organisation committed to taking action rather than proof that they are, because the evidence strongly suggests they’re not. Their record strongly suggests they’re not. Their failure in other areas strongly suggests they’re not. It’s a ridiculous thing to be opening a case over when you take it in context, because all it does is highlight the lack of charges elsewhere. If we had a media worth a damn, every one of the outlets would be pointing that out.

The club’s own statement is farcical. This may be the least of the charges for which they are eligible to be punished, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve punishment.

Their statement is a bunch of nonsense, all of which is there to distract you from the simple fact that they’re banged to rights and have no leg to stand on.

Because he said it. He said that Scottish officials are corrupt. He did it on the club’s official outlet. Even his co-presenters knew he’d screwed up and tried to talk him out of it. Instead, he dug the hole deeper.

The club did not take immediate action to fire him. Instead, they have robustly vowed to defend against the charge. But the charge itself is a brick bunker of a charge — there’s no getting around it or through it. He did it. They know he did it. Was it against the rules? Yes, it was. So, a punishment is wholly justified in this case, even if the idea of it, in the context of other things, is ridiculous.

Because you’re not supposed to judge this stuff in a broader context — it’s supposed to be judged solely on the merits of the individual case. Did he do it? Yes. Was it against the rules? Yes. Prosecution rests.

But rather than accept that fact, rather than admit it, the club has turned this into a finger-pointing exercise. “Look at what other clubs have gotten away with,” is their attitude — although they never actually cite a case or name a club responsible, despite apparently submitting a dossier full of examples.

They seem to think that because other clubs haven’t been disciplined for it, they should get a pass. Consider for a moment how outrageous that point of view is.

I agree wholeheartedly that the SFA is very selective about the cases it chooses to prosecute—and the ones it doesn’t. Haven’t we been writing about this all last week? The SFA’s standards, the way it ignores precedent when it suits, then creates new precedent only to disregard that too—it’s infuriating, ridiculous, and utterly damaging to their credibility.

A few years ago, Steven Gerrard claimed there was a conspiracy against his club. That claim has been echoed by nearly every person who has held the Ibrox managerial job since. None of them were ever disciplined for it.

Brendan Rodgers questions a referee’s competence and finds himself hauled in front of the beaks. Where’s the consistency? There is none.

At the time Rodgers was charged, I wrote an article basically saying we were bang to rights. There was no question a sanction was coming his way because he quite blatantly broke the rules and there was no talking our way out of it.

Pointing the finger at Gerrard or other Ibrox managers for their own comments made good theatre, and it formed the basis of one of my articles on the subject. But it’s no defence as I said at the time. It carries no weight.

All the disciplinary committee cares about is: “Did you do it? And did you know it was against the rules?” The answer to both was yes. The fact other managers got away with it is neither here nor there.

If you want to argue that consistency should apply and every person who breaks the rules should be sanctioned, then I agree with you, but it’s not an argument that will get you out of that room with your record unblemished.

Celtic knew that and acted accordingly. They fought against a lengthy ban, and we got the result we wanted. Rodgers served a one match suspension and was swiftly back in the dugout. Job done, and well done to the club.

Ibrox is not claiming the case against them has no teeth. It’s simply saying that because those teeth weren’t sunk into others, they shouldn’t be sunk into them. Their argument boils down to this: because the rule isn’t applied evenly, the rule itself is redundant. They’re effectively saying other clubs have breached this rule and got away with it, so they shouldn’t be subject to it.

That argument is procedurally groundless, legalistically moronic, and fundamentally nuts. Imagine applying it to the rest of civic society—we wouldn’t have a civic society at all. Instead, we’d have people deciding which laws to follow based on their neighbour’s impunity. That’s the logic they’re pushing and instead of being called out for it, parts of the media are actually applauding them for ‘standing up to the man.’

No wonder this sport seems lawless at times.

How can you expect people in the stands to behave if the SPFL and SFA act like this? If clubs can argue, “Because rule X was enforced in case Y but not in case Z, it doesn’t apply to us,” then you’re in Narnia. The media clearly doesn’t respect the rules, Ibrox want to pick and choose which ones apply, and the SFA shows no appetite to govern effectively by punishing breaches consistently.

People wonder how we got here, where this game is a shambles and considered by outsiders a footballing banana republic.

Another irony, of course, is that this involves John Brown himself—whose last public outburst on camera, which got this much attention, was his screaming fit against Charles Green when he demanded to see the title deeds. The Ibrox emergency general meeting is on 23 June, when an unknown cabal will vote themselves into absolute power, shrouded in secrecy, doing whatever they want.

So should we await Brown standing up at that meeting to defend transparency and good governance? Should we expect him to demand to know which guarantees are written into the new articles of association protecting the stadium, training ground, and other vital assets from falling into the wrong hands?

I’ll spare him the lengthy process of scouring those articles for the answer: there are no such guarantees. Is he going to fight for them—or is he so focused on the external enemy that he hasn’t noticed how fundamentally the takeover will change everything at at the club he professes to love, and which he works for?

Say what you like about Green, but he was open and honest about his aims.

Green’s blackmail of Ibrox fans—which sparked Brown’s outrage—was the idea that if he wanted, he could turn the ground into a supermarket or the pitch into a ploughed field if they didn’t back him.

I suspect the Americans will be subtler, but their message to fans will be the same: a demand of loyalty under threat to a support who, by and large, haven’t grasped what the word “takeover” means. It’ll be delivered by a velvet glove rather than an iron hand and that the velvet glove hides the iron hand will, of course, never be publicly admitted.

Bottom line: none of the parties in this little showdown come out looking good. Ibrox’s foot-stamping entitlement is just as deranged under the new owners as the old. The SFA’s lack of backbone is glaringly clear in how they’ve handled this and other, far more serious issues—which, of course, they want to avoid.

This is where Celtic comes in. We’ve been hauled in front of the beaks over alleged fan behaviour at the end of last season. Although the offences haven’t been publicly specified, our club has kept its counsel because we know two things: first, we’re likely guilty of something; second, saying it’s unfair because other clubs have done worse might be correct—but it is not legally sustainable.

Instead, we’ll express our misgivings and concerns privately. We’ll take the slap on the wrist when it comes, then issue a statement urging our own supporters to behave themselves in future. Because anything else would be pointless.

You don’t score brownie points by saying, “But look what those bad boys did over there.” You get your own house in order. You fix your own problems. And if at the end of it you want to take on the system, you do it from the high ground.

That’s how the Ibrox board could and should have handled this.

They could have sacked Brown for his remarks. It’s hard to believe he’s ever made a coherent argument or offered any insight on that channel anyway. So, what exactly are they employing him for, except to dumb down to the audience?

Even considering that their audience isn’t made up of quiz kids, that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. Everyone knows they can get better than this—someone who can provide commentary that makes paying the subscription at least partially worthwhile.

The names at the top may have changed, but the attitudes haven’t. And perhaps they never will. There’s still a paranoid element clinging to old entitlements and grievances, likely subscribing to every ignorant, stupid word Brown’s spat out. That’s why they’re defending him—not because it’s not against the rules, but because most of them sympathise with, or wholeheartedly agree with, what he said.

The SFA knows this because the allegation has been levelled at them from Ibrox before it was levelled by Brown. The season before last, towards the end of the campaign, when Willie Collum was being hunted out of his job—prior to getting an even bigger one, which they’ve been fulminating about ever since—the previous board even went as far as to stir up a lynch mob against Collum by planting stories in fan media that they didn’t want him refereeing their games anymore.

That was about as grotesque a breach of the rules and regulations governing the game, bringing it into disrepute and calling the integrity of officials into question, as you’re ever likely to see. Did it get sanctioned? Of course not.

Which makes sanctioning a mere flunky like John Brown absolutely preposterous. Nobody should suggest otherwise in that context.

Context is the all-important word here, because it’s only in context that this looks as dumb, pointless, and stupid as it does. A plain reading of the rules and regulations is clear: Brown’s guilty as hell and therefore the club that employs him is too. No appeals to the viscera or public opinion can erase what’s in the rulebook, so context couldn’t matter less when it comes to the charge itself.

But never forget the context.

Never forget that the SFA is basically saying a halfwit making half-witted comments on the club’s official media channel is more serious than their club-sanctioned supporter group putting up a banner threatening our fans with violence. It’s more serious than the actual violence their fans launched against our players and staff on multiple occasions. And that it is more serious than the countless times their supporters have sung much worse from the stands—not just at home, but across the country and in Europe too.

In that context, the SFA is a hypocritical, gutless disgrace and the club itself is an anarchic institution that thinks it’s a law unto itself.

Until the governing bodies get serious about stamping that notion out, Ibrox will continue to believe it—and act accordingly.