Deranged Ibrox fan site pushes £70 million warchest fantasy.

This is the first of two pieces I’m going to put up today about the Ibrox situation. In this one, I’m focusing on their fan media. Later, I’ll talk about their transfer strategy. Both are equally nuts, but the fan media is capable of such wild flights of fantasy that it’s no wonder we relentlessly take the piss out of them.

Now, I know our mainstream media isn’t brilliant. I know it frequently boosts them to a level that bears no relation to reality.

But even the mainstream media can’t hold a candle to some of the nonsense churned out by their fan media sites. Ibrox News is one such site, and it has gone completely off the deep end in the past 24 hours—with claims so bizarre and ridiculous they almost take my breath away. And I’m someone who thought he’d seen it all from these guys.

Yesterday, one of their websites ran a headline about a £10 million transfer chase for a player—apparently, they were going head-to-head with Hull. The headline suggested Hull had an “advantage”.

I don’t know if they bothered to explain what that was, because I didn’t read the piece. But I’d hazard a guess that the advantage is this: Hull have £10 million to spend on a single player. They don’t.

I thought that might be one of the more bizarre notions I’d come across on their fan media. Then Ibrox News came out with the claim that their manager might have as much as £70 million to spend this summer.

“49ers to hand Russell Martin £70m war chest amid (club) transfer latest,” read the headline of this truly deranged piece of work. And there was so much wrong with the article that you want to scream at the writer that he’s lost his mind. But then I started to wonder if he really has lost his mind.

Because what have I said in previous pieces? That the gaslighting of their support isn’t primarily done by the mainstream press—it’s done by their own websites. And this is surely a sterling example of that.

It’s either a stellar case of gaslighting your own fans, or the writer genuinely is a deranged fool who believes in fairies at the bottom of the garden, magic money trees, beanstalk beans, and all the rest of it.

Let’s start with the basis for the claim: that it’s the 49ers who are going to hand over all this cash. Now, the club itself has confirmed—and this has been discussed at length on all our platforms—that the 49ers are not the ones who’ve taken over.

They are a minority player in this. So, all the talk about them handing the manager a massive transfer budget is nonsense, and any article beginning with that claim can be dismissed before it gets another word in.

But not content with pushing that fantasy, the writer then moves onto the £20 million claim—another one that’s been widely discredited. In fact, it’s been completely destroyed by statements from the club’s own executive team.

That cash is being used for several purposes, including providing sustainability and flexibility for the year ahead. That is there in their statements in plain English; the media, fan and mainstream both, have pushed this fiction until people believe it.

That money is not solely for the manager’s use. Some of it might end up in his hands—but the idea that he’ll get it all is ludicrous.

And yet, that’s only the beginning of the madness. The writer believes they’ll realise £30 million from the sales of Diomande and Raskin. He thinks they’ll raise another £20 million from flogging Igamane and Dessers. And he reckons this will give the manager an unparalleled transfer kitty of £70 million.

Let’s start with the idea that they’re actually going to get those kinds of fees for those players. That’s a segue into the next article I’m going to write, but for now, let’s just say that this is cloud cuckoo land stuff. I’ll go into it in more detail later.

But even if you pretend for a second that it’s true—even if you accept the idea that they’ll rake in these ridiculous fees for four key players—the notion that the manager will get the full £70 million has already been shredded to bits.

This guy’s argument is based on the idea that the 49ers own the club and that it’s “their” transfer window. If that’s the case, then why not look at what they did down south?

Leeds United, last season, raised more than double the £70 million figure he’s talking about. They were chasing promotion back to the Premier League—a prize worth hundreds of millions. The manager’s transfer budget? Just over £30 million. Less than what Celtic spent. Less than half of what this clownish website expects Russell Martin to get for a tilt at the Scottish title.

So if the 49ers are in charge, and if they are the ones pulling the strings, then the comparison with Leeds tells you all you need to know.

Leeds brought in £140 million in player sales and gave the manager a budget of around £30 million—about a quarter of the income. That kind of formula here would give them a transfer “war chest” of around £15 million. Which, ironically, is less than the £20 million they’re already pretending the manager has.

I honestly don’t know which part of “hard-nosed businessmen trying to make a profit” these clowns are failing to grasp. But it’s clear to anyone who’s even remotely sentient that these people aren’t just going to throw money at the problem and hope for the best. That’s not how proper ownership works.

It’s also not going to be allowed by UEFA, another salient detail which these muppets have singularly failed to grasp.

This is utter fantasyland stuff. And I can only conclude that the writer knows it’s fantasyland stuff—and is just spoon-feeding rubbish to his fellow fans. Because the alternative is even worse: that people this delusional are actually out there, walking the streets, howling at the moon.

And they wonder why we mock them.