GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - MARCH 01: Rangers chairman Andrew Cavanagh during a William Hill Premiership match between Rangers and Celtic at Ibrox Stadium, on March 01, 2026, in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Later today, I’m going to cover the Celtic board’s latest sit-down with a supporters’ group. However, there is a story involving the Ibrox club and its upcoming meeting with its supporters organisations that I think is interesting, and which may prove important in its own way at some stage.
It is not as important right now, but it might be significant in the medium term because Ibrox’s new owners are about to get a taste of what they have really bought.
These people now own that club lock, stock and barrel.
They have already told the fans that they are under no obligation to hold an AGM, but that, out of kindness and generosity of spirit, they are going to sit down with fan organisations and give them a running commentary on what is happening behind the scenes, as well as listening to their views.
This is just as phoney as Celtic’s own little pretend attempts at outreach. It is not so much what the club is going to say, or how it is going to pretend to listen, that I want to focus on. Those things are standard practice for Ibrox clubs, regardless of who is running them.
No, I want to look at what the new owners are going to hear.
The hacks have already spoken to some of the fan representatives over there and have been briefed that the board is going to be grilled about, among other things, its transfer policy. That should give the new owners some hint of the mindset that exists and thrives, as well as the mindset of those covering the club.
I do not know how much money these people have already spent on the Ibrox team. I do not know how much they have already shelled out on firing managers, hiring managers and then firing managers again. It has to be substantial. It has to be money they never anticipated having to spend in such a short space of time.
On top of that, they are carrying the club’s annual debt, which goes on and on and on. The idea that the club is anywhere near making a profit is pretty hilarious. The idea that they are ever prepared to live within their means has also been exposed as an absolute joke.
What these people are going to realise, sitting in front of the Ibrox fans, is that there is a bottomless pit of ingratitude over there. There is a bottomless pit of entitlement. There is a bottomless pit of malice and suspicion directed at anybody who fails to deliver their only wish, the thing for which they live and breathe, which is to be better than Celtic.
There is another bottomless pit, of course, and if they have not discovered it yet, they are very soon going to.
That is the bottomless pit of money these people expect to be spent year after year, transfer window after transfer window after transfer window.
I said when these people took over that, if they did not immediately draw all the red lines that would enable the club to operate as a profitable endeavour, they were going to be steamrollered by a media and fan narrative which treated the investors’ money as if it belonged to the supporters.
The richer those investors were, the more they would be expected to spend. The new owners had to nip that in the bud on day one, or face the long-term consequences of failing to draw those lines.
Now those chickens are coming home to roost.
There will be some talk about how the money that has been spent was not spent well. At the bottom of it, though, there is not a demand to spend money better. There is simply a demand to spend more money.
That really lies at the heart of the whole thing. The message will be that the money has been wasted, so it is up to the new owners to find more.
On the surface, that is not exactly a new idea in football. At Ibrox, however, more just means more and more and more and more. There will never be enough money in the world to satisfy these people, not while they remain behind Celtic.
They had a chance to make some kind of major pivot in the summer. That would have involved either telling Danny Röhl that he had to do more with the players he already had, or, if Röhl was not going to be around, bringing in a manager who could get more out of the expensive squad assembled last year.
You do not bring in Derek McInnes to get more out of the current squad.
Derek McInnes is not that man. He is the guy who is going to want to rebuild the current squad, then rebuild it again, and then rebuild it again.
The idea that he has regularly taken individual footballers and made them better players is difficult to substantiate with evidence. The idea that he was going to come in and get something out of an Ibrox squad whose potential has remained largely unseen was not credible.
In the aftermath of last weekend’s game, he did not suggest that there were things he could have done differently or that there were things he might have done better.
Instead, he made an immediate demand for more money to spend.
That went down brilliantly with the Ibrox fans, who do not expect any manager there to improve the players he has. Their response is that, if one squad does not work, you throw it out and bring in a new one.
That is how it is done over there. It is how they have always seen it done over there, and they are not about to change their mentality now.
It was even worse in midweek, when McInnes threw the players he does have under the bus, completely blaming them for the tactical incoherence of the team he had selected to get a result.
That is what happens when a manager takes over a dressing room and immediately starts condemning players to the scrapheap by telling them that they will be replaced.
Celtic needed a rebuild because years of squad neglect resulted in us patching up the team in January with half a dozen loan deals, all of whom then returned to their parent clubs.
That was the consequence of not replacing the strike force Celtic sold over a year ago. It was the consequence of not replacing the right-sided attacking midfielder sold over a year ago. It was what happened when the club allowed an ageing goalkeeper to continue despite his injury problems because it would not go out and find a replacement.
It was what happened when Celtic lost its left-back backup, right-back backup and other critical areas of the team were weakened.
It was not because the club suddenly decided that the present squad was worthless and that it needed to replace half of it immediately.
At Ibrox, however, that is precisely how it is done. It is done like that every single year.
You do not get managers who come in and ask what is good, what they can work with, what they can make better or how they can devise a system that suits the players better than the one they previously played in.
At Ibrox, you are expected to come in, take one look at the team, junk half of them into the reserves, get rid of the rest by whatever means you can and build a brand-new one.
It is not only the way the club operates. It is the way everybody expects it to operate, from the fans to the media that covers the club.
The trap the Americans set for themselves was failing to end that nonsense on day one. There were people who warned them that they should. The irony of ironies is that most of those people were our people, the people on the other side of the divide.
We were the people who warned the Ibrox fans not to trust Dave King. Not to trust Charles Green. Not to trust Craig Whyte.
Not that they listened to any of it.
I am always incredibly amused whenever we issue warnings which they subsequently laugh at and ignore, only to discover that we were right. It does not compute with them that we are not simply gloating or taking the piss. Perhaps we know something they do not because we can look at the situation with a more detached eye.
The thing is, we could have said nothing.
The result would have been catastrophic either way.
The only thing that might have changed things was if they had fancied listening to us, done their own homework, sussed these people out early and then lobbied against them ever being in charge in the first place.
Of course, that would have destabilised the club.
People often ask me why I have been one of the principal people sounding the warnings all these years. The answer is surely obvious. It is a win-win for us either way, because all that club attracts are basket cases and loons.
If the fans ignore us, we get to gloat when it all goes wrong. Had they listened to us they would have plunged their club into chaos and we’d have gloated for every minute of it and for the protests we pushed them into.
Now they have the Americans, and we have no idea what they are really up to. We have no idea what is happening behind the scenes because there is no external scrutiny any longer. They are a private company.
Whatever secrets exist are wrapped up in that Delaware LLC, which now ultimately owns the club lock, stock and barrel and can do with it whatever it wants.
Perhaps our warnings to the board over there are completely irrelevant because the new owners can see ten steps further down the road than everybody else. If that is the case, it does not mean anything good for the club or its fans.
Still, even in the short term, it does not make it sensible for the board to continue along the same lines as every previous Ibrox board.
That path only brings about disaster because the club cannot indefinitely keep spending money as if it is going out of fashion. There is no magical money tree planted somewhere on the premises and whose use broadly aligns with UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations.
They do not seem to care about those regulations, but eventually they will test the patience of Europe’s governing body. Then they will have to care.
It is at times like this that I remind myself that the world does not have to make sense. We have one club in this city which uses financial sustainability regulations as a shield for not spending money, while the other does not appear concerned that they exist at all.
One of those paths inevitably leads to UEFA sanctions and the kind of trouble they can least afford. That means enforced spending limits they cannot get around.
Whatever business plan the Ibrox board of directors is working towards, it has already been shot full of holes a dozen times. The hard and simple truth is that when they go in front of the Ibrox fans later this month, they are not going to hear “thank you for trying”. They are not going to hear “thank you for doing what we asked you to do by sacking the last two managers and then for bringing in this new one”.
They are not going to hear “thank you for spending millions to buy this club and millions more to sustain it”.
They are going to hear: “What have you done for me lately?”
They are going to hear: “You have not done enough.”
They are going to hear: “When are you going to spend more?”
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result, then it is tempting to conclude that the Ibrox club has been mad since its conception. In reality, that gives the institution itself too much of the blame. The same is true of Celtic.
If we are where we are through choices, then so are they. The only way that club is ever going to change, grow and become what any sensible board of directors would want it to be is if the choices change.
The problem over there is that those choices are never defined by what the people running the club actually want to do. They are increasingly defined by a fan base that never stops clamouring for more and a media that never stops applauding the madness.
That will be the message of the unofficial AGM. The Americans will again come face to face with the ambassadors for their own folly and choices that should have been made on day one and have been deferred for far too long.
The Peepul they will meet there are not an audience which is in any mood to hear about those choices now.
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Thank God, that no matter how our own board underperforms, that we only have the dysfunctional club from Ibrox as our only real rivals on the domestic scene. Europe of course is a different matter, we will huff and puff and strive to be better without breaking the bank and perhaps even get lucky occasionally, but at least we aren’t having to look in our rearview mirror to see if anyone is creeping up on us. That in itself is a wee bit of a comfort.
Brilliant stuff James, reminds me of my Dad’s favourite Monty Python sketch:
Q: What have the Romans ever done for us?
A: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health.
Q: but apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I’m laughing my arse off tonight , mccinnes always was a sleeping wee shite, the word today is that the huns turned down a mega money bid for chermiti, then he goes down injured,
Mccinnes, will demand more and more but you can’t polish a turd or 9 new one’s that mcinnes brought in.
Please give us a fear and loathing at ibrox article or even a spew heevins vibe.
Look forward to it HH
* sleekit not sleeping
Dannygal , i’m on board with the football , but i wonder are you aware that when the britisher arrived in Ireland none of the benefits that the romans brought to to the ” british ” was brought to Ireland , the romans were in Ireland ” Hibernia ” for a short time and never returned ,
Well done to the hibbies tonight !!