Fear and loathing and crashing out of Europe.

If there is a universe of infinite possibilities, then we may not be living in the best of them. But the Ibrox support might reasonably wonder this morning whether they have somehow landed in one of the worst.

They did not even get two full nights to celebrate a result which had absolutely nothing to do with them and changed nothing about their own predicament before their own situation detonated in spectacular fashion. All the laughter they had enjoyed at Celtic’s expense after Austria has turned to ashes in their mouths, as it so often seems to do. There is something almost beautifully predictable about it.

I am still aghast at the performance Celtic produced against LASK. I am still appalled by the tactical shambles, still disgusted with the people running this club and still furious that even now they appear determined to make us pay part of the bill for their failure by recalibrating what they are prepared to spend after throwing away Champions League qualification.

None of that has changed.

But there are worse things in football than dropping into the Europa League. Celtic still have eight guaranteed European matches, eight opportunities to rebuild some credibility, collect coefficient points and generate European income. We have been humiliated, but we remain in Europe and therefore retain an immediate route towards repairing some of the damage.

Across the city, that route has disappeared completely.

Hearts produced one of the results of the week by surviving with ten men against Rapid Vienna and eventually winning on penalties to reach the Conference League league phase. The Ibrox club could not even manage that.

Having already dropped out of the Europa League qualifiers against Jagiellonia Bia?ystok, they went to the Czech Republic carrying a 1-0 first-leg advantage over Jablonec and somehow contrived to lose the tie on penalties.

They are out of Europe altogether.

And the ramifications go far beyond one dreadful result.

There will inevitably be people trying to dress this up as some strange advantage. They can concentrate on domestic football now. There are no difficult Thursday night journeys. Derek McInnes gets more time on the training ground. The players will be fresher.

Fine. It’s rubbish, but even if it isn’t, all of that pales into insignificance beside the financial damage.

European football is not some optional extracurricular activity for a club carrying the kind of cost base the Ibrox club now carries.

Their own executive leadership recently talked about an annual budget of around £90 million, and McInnes himself described European football as extremely important financially as well as for the prestige of the club before the Jablonec game.

That is why this result matters so much.

No Scottish club operating on anything resembling that scale can casually shrug its shoulders at an entire season without league-phase European football.

Budgets incorporate expected revenues. European matches bring prize money, gate receipts, hospitality, broadcasting income and commercial value. Remove all of that and a very large hole appears in the numbers.

I don’t know exactly how large that hole will ultimately be, and neither does anybody outside the club until the accounts tell us. But it is absurd to pretend it is insignificant.

Nico Raskin might now become part of the answer.

He did not travel to the Czech Republic because transfer interest in him had intensified, and McInnes openly acknowledged before the game that the situation could develop before the window closes.

As I have said before, I hope against all hope that it doesn’t.

I hope Raskin is still there when the window shuts. I hope they don’t sell anybody valuable enough to plug the financial holes. I hope they keep spending money too, because the more money they commit to that cost base without European income supporting it, the more interesting the arithmetic becomes.

And believe me, the arithmetic is already interesting.

This is not Celtic gloating from some position of perfection. There are enormous questions about our own club, our own competence and our own ability to recover from the spectacular self-inflicted wounds we suffered in Austria.

But our position is still demonstrably better. We have European football. We have eight Europa League matches. We have another opportunity to sign players over the next few days who might allow us to make something meaningful of that campaign.

We have opportunities to earn coefficient points, money and, perhaps most urgently after Tuesday, a little European respectability. I do not know how quickly the Ibrox club rebuilds any of those things. It won’t be this season.

If they finish second domestically, they could find themselves straight back in European qualifying next summer, once again facing the sort of rounds which have already destroyed this season’s campaign. Even getting into the Conference League carries nothing like the financial rewards available higher up UEFA’s food chain.

Of course there is still money in Conference League participation. There are home gates, UEFA payments and commercial benefits, so I am not literally suggesting it is worthless.

But they don’t even have that now.

Unless somebody arranges a succession of glamorous friendlies, Ibrox is going to be as silent during European midweeks as a graveyard at sundown. Given the peculiar history of that club, perhaps the graveyard comparison is almost too appropriate.

All jokes aside, they are in a world of trouble.

McInnes in particular is already in crisis.

That should be an almost impossible sentence to write this early in his tenure, yet here we are. His team are already out of two European competitions, they have begun the domestic campaign badly and now Aberdeen await them at Pittodrie on Sunday. And Aberdeen are almost the last club you would want to visit after a result like this.

They will get in their faces. They will fight for every ball.

Pittodrie will be hostile and those supporters will mock them without mercy before kick-off. If Aberdeen get a foothold in the game, that atmosphere could become absolutely poisonous for McInnes and his players.

That is the next test.

Meanwhile, the spending continues. South Korean winger Minsu Kim has become their 12th signing of the summer, and the club was still working on further deals even before the Jablonec catastrophe. Will there eventually be a coherent football team at the end of all this? I still couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that Derek McInnes would not have been my choice to take a collection of young assets, mould them into a sophisticated modern team, improve them and eventually sell them for significant profits. I have always regarded him as one of Scottish football’s most heavily hyped managers, and nothing about the start of this season is encouraging me to revise that opinion.

The extraordinary thing is that the one group currently keeping the whole project afloat is the group many Ibrox supporters are rapidly beginning to hate most: the American ownership.

I think we may be watching the early stages of a classic sunk-cost problem.

The new owners have walked into a football club whose financial demands are relentless. Football clubs of this size eat money every hour of every day, and this particular club has spent much of its recent history relying on somebody somewhere to make up the difference when income does not match ambition.

I cannot imagine the Americans expected it to start consuming money quite this aggressively, quite this quickly.

Remember the figure because it did not come from me. Their own leadership talked publicly this month about a budget around £90 million being deployed to drive sporting success. That was before an extremely expensive transfer window had been completed.

Now remove European league-phase football from the equation.

The precise loss cannot responsibly be stated tonight because we do not know what assumptions were built into their budget. But whatever projected income they expected from European prize money, ticket sales, hospitality and associated commercial revenue has just been eradicated. Completely.

Gone are the European home gates they would have enjoyed this autumn. Gone are league-phase performance payments. Gone are the opportunities to generate further income by progressing. The obvious way to compensate is player trading.

Which takes us straight back to Raskin.

That is exactly why I hope they don’t sell him.

If you believe this model is becoming financially stretched, the last thing you should want as a Celtic supporter is for them to execute successful player trading and create breathing room. You want expensive players staying exactly where they are while more money continues going out.

That is why tonight’s anger from their support matters too.

If you are sitting in that American ownership group, you know perfectly well that the next few days are going to bring a torrent of abuse in your direction. The honeymoon period was over a while ago. Now the hate has begun to ramp up.

Some supporters already talk about them in language previously reserved for the old regimes, the so-called spivs, Charles Green, Mike Ashley and practically every other ownership faction which has passed through that building since 2012.

Yet whatever else can be said about the Americans, they have sanctioned spending which would cause some Celtic directors to require immediate medical attention. They have spent. They have backed the manager. And now they are carrying the consequences, because that manager is, and has always been, an utter incompetent.

We do not know this was some gigantic leveraged buyout which dumped the acquisition debt directly onto the football club. If that’s the case and the Americans walk the floor drops out from under the whole club, in a big way.

But we don’t need speculative horrors to make this situation look serious.

The facts are serious enough.

A club with a publicly discussed cost base around £90 million has spent heavily strengthening its team, has already exited the Europa League and has now been eliminated from the Conference League before the league phase. European income which McInnes himself publicly described as important will not arrive.

That is the story. There are potentially Year Zero consequences here if things continue deteriorating. I will write more about those.

The interesting question is what happens next.

What happens if Raskin isn’t sold? What happens if the transfer spending continues? What if it doesn’t? What happens if Aberdeen beat them? What happens when Ibrox hosts its next league game and the supporters arrive already incandescent with rage?

Those are the questions which should be frightening them.

The travelling support’s reaction in the Czech Republic was reportedly volcanic. That may be nothing compared with the atmosphere at Pittodrie if the team starts badly, and nothing compared with what could await them the next time they walk out at Ibrox.

No number of new signings will instantly extinguish that fury now. As awful as Celtic’s own situation is, we still possess several things the club across the city suddenly lacks. We have European football. We have substantial financial reserves. We have an underlying institutional stability which, however much many of us detest the people responsible for it, makes a sudden descent into genuine anarchy extraordinarily unlikely.

Across the city, the direction of travel continues to be straight down. They spent 24 hours laughing at Celtic for a European catastrophe then their own European season ended completely. Our humiliation sent us into the Europa League. Theirs sent them home.

And somewhere in this vast universe of infinite possibilities, there must be an Ibrox supporter wondering what terrible thing he did in another life to end up living in this particular one where there is nothing but the fear. And, of course, the loathing.

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