One year in, the Americans at Ibrox are acting emotionally. They’ve lost the plot.

The other day, the Daily Record ran one of its pieces on the Ibrox board of directors, Andrew Cavanaugh in particular, and the upshot was that Cavanaugh has fallen in love with everything Ibrox-related.

The media’s handling of that story suggested they think this is a good thing, that there are nothing but bright lights ahead for the Ibrox club.

I think it is a bad thing. Even if it is true.

I’m going to tell you why, but before I do, I should say that this could simply be ingratiating language. The problem with ingratiating language is that after a point, you are only lying to yourself. If you keep telling fans you are in love with the club, sooner or later the pressure to act as though you mean it becomes too great to resist.

In that sense, it may not even matter whether he is full of it or not. He is talking in a way their fans would find profoundly disturbing if they had brains in their heads.

There is no greater or more forceful emotion on this planet than love.

The Ibrox club is built on hate. That is why it will never be stronger than ours, because ours is built on love. We love our club more than we hate theirs. We value success for its own sake, not merely for the possibility of lording it over other people.

We are cut from different cloth.

There was a story in the news not that long ago about a kid, and I mean a kid, not even in his teens, who somehow got lost at sea with his brother and his mother. They were in the water, and because his brother was too young and his mother too old, he took the responsibility on himself of swimming miles to shore.

He should have been dead a hundred times over.

But he told his rescuers, who eventually rescued his family too, that he thought about them every bit of the way. That is love.

This is how ordinary people have lifted cars to free trapped loved ones. It is why people charge back into burning buildings to save family members. It is the strongest force guiding us as human beings.

But it works in weird and warped ways.

It can make people perform great acts of decency and kindness. It can also make people perform appalling acts out of what they think is necessity.

We always hear how Celtic’s directors love this club.

It turns my stomach every time. Not because I necessarily disbelieve it. On the balance of probability, maybe they do love Celtic. But that does not comfort me, because it explains an awful lot about the way they behave.

Part of the problem is that they have become, in their own minds, the epitome of Celtic. They no longer differentiate between their needs, their interests and the interests of the club. That tendency is profoundly disturbing.

I also think that if they genuinely loved Celtic as much as they seem to think they do, they would step back. But they are so convinced that they know what is best, and so convinced that anyone else would be worse, that their love has warped into possession.

Love has also stripped them of initiative and courage. Because that is something else love can do. Love can build a prison.

It can make you hesitant. It can make you averse to risk. If you love something, why would you jeopardise it? You would do anything to protect it, to nurture it, to keep it safe.

That makes some people ultra-cautious.

I think part of Celtic’s problem may be fear. Fear of doing the wrong thing. Fear of endangering the club. Fear of being remembered as the people who brought harm to Celtic.

When you listen to the way they talk, there is an element of fear in a lot of it.

That fear is the fear of being people who damage the thing they claim to love, and they cannot abide that possibility.

Cavanaugh talking about loving the Ibrox club should concern their fans for that reason. It may make their board hesitant. It may make them cautious. It may make them unwilling to take the necessary risks.

But there is a worse possibility.

Love can also drive people to take enormous risks. It can drive them half mad. Crazy love is the stuff of suicide pacts, killing sprees and jealous rage. It is also tied up in egotism, which is self-love taken to extremes.

In certain corporate conditions, that means being so driven to prove yourself the best that you do things no sensible person would advise.

The previous Ibrox board almost broke the club because they loved it. They spent more than they should have. They poured their time, money and energy into what became a bottomless pit. The Americans may find that out too.

In the meantime, they could do real damage to their investment and to the club itself if they allow irrational motives and emotional pressure to drive their behaviour.

I have always said Celtic does not need more “real Celtic men.”

It needs hard-headed pragmatists. It needs people who come in, see the club’s potential and are not afraid to go for it.

When you fill the club to the brim with people who have an emotional investment, you lose some of the entrepreneurial spirit.

You lose flair, daring and imagination, especially when you are a conservative board that hires in its own image and dislikes those who rock the boat.

Would I be terribly annoyed if Celtic fell into the hands of people whose first motivation was profit and the maximisation of profit?

Probably not, if the intent was to rebuild the club into a stronger form and sell it for even more money at the end.

That is what a lot of people thought the Americans were doing at Ibrox.

But as I have said before, that club does things to people. It warps their perception. The fans are so demanding, and the media here so demanding on their behalf and so craven towards them, that every Ibrox board is pushed into doing things it was not initially willing to do.

They all get captured by the same system. By a media ecosystem which expects them to spend. By a fan base which demands that they spend.

That is why every sacking carries with it another rebuild.

It is why every summer is the same.

In some ways, the best thing that could have happened to that club would have been hard-headed realists taking over and deciding that they were not going to follow that road.

To hell with what the media thought. To hell with what the fans thought.

But when you are emotionally invested in something, reason stops mattering.

That is one mistake some people make. When you are making decisions based on your gut and your heart rather than your head, danger follows.

As much as I am angry with our board of directors for being small-c conservative and risk-averse, I still prefer that to the kind of craziness we have seen at Ibrox over the years, whether driven by rage, hate, or by “real Ranjurs men” who genuinely care about the club’s well-being but have swallowed the lie whole and believe they are the guardians of the institution itself.

I want people at my club taking rational decisions based on rational things.

I think it is slightly absurd to hear the Americans talking this way. I do not think I believe a word of it. But that does not matter, because the very act of saying those words means you are willing to go further than is normally sensible.

They are already acting impulsively. They are already acting reflexively. That means they are acting emotionally.

And no Ibrox club which does that is going to do well, especially when that emotion flows from the people in the stands.

It is a disaster waiting to happen.

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