Celtic fans are glad to see the back of those dire Ibrox “pot of gold” stories.

One of the most deeply satisfying things about the weekend’s results, even though they make our job a little bit harder, is knowing that the Ibrox fans and their media acolytes have wasted many, many weeks watching results in other leagues on the breathtakingly arrogant assumption that those leagues would decide whether or not they went straight into the Champions League group stage next season.

Think about that for a moment. They have been watching other leagues. The Record has practically been counting the money with every reversal suffered by certain clubs abroad. In the Greek league, for example, Panathinaikos’ travails have been incredibly amusing to the Daily Record over the last few months.

Elsewhere, the one they were anxiously watching until last week was Shakhtar Donetsk, who only needed a win against PAOK to qualify for the final of the Conference League, which would almost certainly have been enough to move them ahead of Ibrox in the rankings.

But all of those rankings were predicated on one thing. The Ibrox club being champions of Scotland.

That was so universally assumed by the media writing this garbage, and by the Ibrox support presumably reading the same garbage, that it is actually quite satisfying to know that the Record’s piece today on Shakhtar Donetsk’s preparations may be the last of the £30 million golden ticket articles we have to endure.

And I’ve got to be honest with you. It has been a drag. It has been an insult to Hearts and to Celtic to read that stuff for all these many weeks.

I’m not kidding. If you’ve seen those articles, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It is one thing for newspapers to give you information and update that information on a regular basis. That is news. That is reporting.

But this was not reporting. This was the media counting money the Ibrox club were never guaranteed to get.

This was the media behaving as if the cash was coming, and that the rest of Scottish football should brace itself for what would happen next. They believed that money was there for the taking. All Ibrox had to do was reach out and grab it, depending, of course, on what happened in other leagues.

It was as if they had forgotten the most important thing. None of it mattered unless they became champions of their own national league.

It was as if the idea that they actually had to win the domestic title had not occurred to them. Of course it had occurred to them. They simply took it for granted. They took it for granted that the SPFL title was already in the bag.

Two defeats in a row ended that nonsense.

I said in my piece earlier that I hope Celtic try to learn lessons from what has happened to us this season. I also said that they will at least try to learn lessons across the city. But I will tell you who will not learn lessons.

The media. Ibrox’s media allies and their fan media both. They never do. These Peepul will never stop doing what they do. They will never stop embarrassing themselves like this. They will never stop boosting Ibrox hopes to an unfathomable degree, even when all the evidence suggests that their club is never quite able to close the deal.

The media does them no favours.

I have said this before. The media does not question strategy over there. It does not question signings. It does not question managerial appointments in the way that it should. There is no equivalent on the Ibrox fan sites of what this site, and several others in the Celtic media space, are dedicated to doing. Scrutinising everything our club does, good and bad.

That is not loyalty over there. It is blind loyalty.

That is not support. It is subservience.

They never learn.

Every year, they make these arrogant assumptions. Every year, they talk as if success and glory are a right. Not an expectation or even a hope. Not something you start the season believing you could achieve, but something you start the season believing you will achieve, simply because the team plays out of Ibrox.

Clubs playing out of Ibrox have always assumed that kind of thing.

But I always thought this was a particularly arrogant assumption, even for them.

They were not only making that assumption. They were already spending the money in their own heads. We had media stories about what they might do with the Champions League cash before they had even won the league.

Knowing what we know about their talent for spending money the moment they think it is coming in, I am glad we never got to find out what they would have done with it.

But it is crazy to me that their supporters allowed themselves to be led up the garden path like this all over again.

That is part of the problem over there.

They never stop long enough to solve the problem in front of them. Instead, they leap straight into fantasies about what the future might hold.

They do not deal with reality. These people fast-forwards past it.

They were not champions. They had not earned the money, they hadn’t secured the prize. Yet the media wrote as if the cash was already theirs, as if Scottish football was standing on the edge of some Ibrox-funded new era.

Now look where they are. No title so no golden ticket. No Champions League jackpot.

Just another season of noise, arrogance and fantasy collapsing into the same old reality.

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