Ibrox fans always demand accountability. They should look in the mirror.

The Ibrox support wants accountability. You can hardly blame them.

They have watched fortunes spent, managers come and go, executives arrive promising new eras and football departments redesigned so often that nobody could reasonably be expected to remember what the last grand strategy was supposed to be.

They have watched recruitment failures pile on top of managerial failures, watched rebuild follow rebuild and listened to endless promises that this time everything will be different.

So yes, accountability is a perfectly reasonable demand. But if they really want to have that conversation, there is one group which cannot simply excuse itself from it: themselves. The supporters. They are a big part of what is wrong at their club.

That will infuriate some of them, because football supporters naturally regard themselves as customers, witnesses and victims of bad decisions rather than participants in the environment in which those decisions are made.

They do not pick the team. They do not negotiate the contracts. They do not sanction transfer fees or appoint managers. All true. But supporters create pressure, and pressure influences behaviour. At Ibrox, the pressure has become so intense and so constant that I increasingly wonder whether the club could implement the one strategy which might actually fix it: a genuine long-term rebuild.

Not another transfer-window rebuild. Not another manager being handed eight or nine players and told to stop Celtic immediately. Not another boardroom reshuffle accompanied by declarations that standards have been restored and “Rangers is coming back.”

A real rebuild. Three years, maybe five.

A period in which winning the league remains the ambition but failure to win it does not automatically trigger another institutional nervous breakdown.

A period where the club reduces costs, develops young players, rebuilds its academy, creates a coherent recruitment operation and sticks with a footballing philosophy long enough for the people responsible to discover whether it actually works.

And here is the problem, the one that has haunted them for year. That would require the Ibrox support to accept something which seems almost psychologically impossible for them: Celtic might keep winning while they do it. That is where every sensible conversation about rebuilding at Ibrox crashes into three little words.

We are Rangers. As a statement of identity, I understand it completely even if it is entirely false. Every support has its mythology and its conception of what its club represents.

As a business strategy, it is worth it in that it still sells tickets, but “We are Rangers” does not create real and sustained revenue. It does not make poor recruitment good. It does not turn an £8 million footballer into a £20 million one. It does not rebuild an academy, improve scouting or reduce a wage bill. It does not entitle anybody to a championship simply because previous generation at a club with the same name won a lot of them.

Yet increasingly it seems to function as an instruction that every problem must be fixed immediately. You cannot accept a three-year rebuilding programme because we are Rangers. You cannot tell supporters that Celtic may win another title while the finances are repaired because we are Rangers. You cannot retain a manager through a painful transitional season because we are Rangers. You cannot sell an established player and replace him with two younger prospects who may take eighteen months to mature because we are Rangers.

Eventually, identity stops being a source of strength and becomes a strategic trap, and they have been caught in it for every day of the NewCo’s existence so far. Now it has become a suffocating box from which they cannot fashion an exit.

There is another uncomfortable truth buried underneath all of this, and this is where people will immediately try to turn the argument into one about 2012. I am not particularly interested in doing that here. I know what happened. We all know what happened, even the Ibrox fans themselves know what happened.

Whatever view anyone takes on sporting continuity, the club people nostalgically remember was destroyed in 2012. You can inherit a name, colours, support and history. You cannot inherit an economic environment which no longer exists. And perhaps the deeper problem is that the Rangers their support believes it is entitled to restore never really existed in the sustainable form they now imagine.

Look at the great period of dominance. Look at David Murray. Look at the spending, the access to bank finance, the financial mechanisms which followed and the EBT years.

None of that means the teams were not outstanding. It does not mean the managers did not deserve credit or that the players did not earn their medals. It means that the scale of spending which helped create that period was supported by circumstances which could not continue indefinitely.

Rangers was a shadow on the wall. It was not real. It appears enormous in memory: a permanent superpower, a club which should naturally dominate Scotland, an institution for whom anything other than first place represents some freakish distortion of the natural order. But what cast that shadow?

Debt financing. Money they never had. Not even David Murray’s personal wealth, but the wealth of a bank back in the day when such insanity was not viewed that way. Still, it was insanity just the same and the fate of Rangers bears that out. Not only did Murray normalise spending they could not afford, but he then resorted to tax evasion when the bank turned off the spending taps. Disaster was never far away from that point on.

So that’s what cast the shadow. That made Rangers appear larger than they were, stronger than they were, richer than they were. And when you remove the machinery which created the shadow, shouting “we are Rangers” does not bring it back.

Rangers was not a superpower. It was an artificial construct. They are pining for a club that never existed in the first place. Without all that debt financing they would have not have won things with such regularity; indeed, history proves they might not have won things when any regularity at all.

There is an enormous difference between believing your club should be capable of challenging for championships and believing that anything less than winning one immediately represents intolerable failure.

The first is ambition. The second can become self-destruction, and Celtic supporters know this because we have lived through the alternative.

Fortunately, we had Fergus McCann.

People sometimes remember McCann now as though he descended from heaven carrying a completed Celtic Park in one hand and a balance sheet in the other while the entire support applauded appreciatively. That is not what happened.

McCann came with a five-year plan, and consider when he asked Celtic supporters to buy into it. Rangers were winning everything. They were closing on nine in a row and then threatening ten. There could hardly have been a worse psychological environment in which to tell Celtic supporters that patience mattered.

Every instinct screamed for immediate action.

Spend the money. Stop them. Do whatever it takes. Win now. We were Celtic, after all. European champions once. Enormous support. One of the great names of the game. We could have developed our own version of the phrase: we are Celtic. Instead, Fergus McCann effectively told us something much more important.

History does not pay invoices. It does not build resilience. The institution had to be rebuilt before sustainable sporting success could follow. So, Celtic rebuilt the stadium. The finances were repaired. The ownership structure changed. Commercial revenues grew. The foundations were put in place.

And meanwhile Rangers kept winning. Financially doped, sure. But winning. Creeping ever closer to that goal they were all striving for, and they got there. They made it nine. They equalled our record. All in, three years passed without Celtic winning the league. Three long years. Three painful years. People were frustrated. McCann was criticised. Managers were criticised. Transfer spending was questioned and every Rangers victory increased the pressure. But the rebuilding programme did not get thrown into the bin every summer.

Then, in the fourth season, Celtic won the title and stopped ten in a row. That alone would have justified a huge part of what McCann had done.

But the most important lesson came afterwards. Fergus McCann eventually left Celtic with Rangers champions again. Christ, he got booed by a section of morons on the day we unfurled the flag. There was, and always has been, a section of our support which does want success yesterday, and could not cope with the pace of progress.

But most of us stuck with it because we understand that conceptually everything had changed. We were back, not theoretically but for real. If you judged his five-year plan solely by the league table when he walked away, you could have said Celtic was not even the best team in Scotland. But we were the biggest

McCann did not regard that as failure. Nor should anybody else. Because his real achievement was not simply winning one championship. He had built something capable of lasting. The stadium was there. The revenue-generating capacity was there. The financial stability was there. The machinery was built.

Celtic still required somebody capable of operating it properly.

Then Martin O’Neill arrived. He did not have to rescue Celtic Football Club. He did not have to build a stadium or recapitalise the business or invent the economic platform on which a successful football team could stand.

Fergus had already done that.

O’Neill walked into an institution which needed football leadership rather than institutional salvation. He turned the key, adjusted the dials and discovered that McCann had left him one hell of a machine. That machine has been humming ever since. There have been times when we’ve dropped the ball, but we’ve been the biggest club in Scotland in all the ways that matter since Fergus completed his five-year plan.

That is what makes the comparison with Ibrox so compelling. They keep looking for their Martin O’Neill when what they actually need first is their Fergus McCann.

And you know who doesn’t allow them one? The fans. Aided and abetted by the media, by the way, who have their own responsibility for the mess over there.

Every new manager arrives as the next saviour. He gets his players, his system and his rebuild. Then Celtic goes six points ahead, a European campaign goes wrong or a cup disappears and the questions start immediately.

Is he good enough? Has he lost the dressing room? Does he understand the club? Does he have the mentality? Does the board need to back him? Then comes another transfer window. Then another manager. Then another rebuild.

The cycle repeats because nobody is given the political space to say the words Fergus McCann effectively said to Celtic supporters thirty years ago: This might hurt for a while.

Imagine somebody walking into Ibrox tomorrow with a genuine five-year plan and telling their supporters the truth;

“Celtic will probably win the next couple of championships. They may win the one after that too. We are not going to spend money we cannot sustainably afford simply because you cannot tolerate watching them celebrate.

We are going to reduce the cost base. We are going to prioritise younger footballers whose values can grow. We are going to rebuild recruitment. We are going to improve the academy. We are going to appoint a coach whose ideas fit that strategy and we are going to give him enough time to implement them.

There will be bad results. There will be players who take months to settle. There will be transfer windows where you want a £7 million statement signing and instead get two 21-year-olds you have never heard of.

Judge us in five years.”

Would the Ibrox support accept that? That is the question at the heart of all of this. Because if the answer is no, they do not really want a rebuild. They want a shortcut. They want more sugar-daddy money thrown at a problem that can no longer be fixed that way.

This also explains the endless appetite for boardroom revolution. Change the chairman. Change the chief executive. Change the sporting director. Change the manager. Bring in investors. Spend. Restore what we had before.

But if every new group enters the building operating under exactly the same demand – stop Celtic immediately or you have failed – then changing the personnel does not change the system. They do not need another revolution. They need a government which survives long enough to govern. And that leads back to accountability.

Of course, directors should be held accountable. So should executives, recruitment departments and managers. But supporters cannot demand accountability for every bad outcome while refusing to examine the incentives their own expectations create.

The support demands immediate improvement, so managers demand experienced footballers capable of delivering immediately. Then supporters complain that the squad has insufficient resale value.

They demand the manager be backed with his own players. Then the manager gets sacked and they complain that his successor has inherited a squad which does not suit him.

They demand marquee signings as proof of ambition. Then they complain that too much money has been wasted. They demand another rebuild, then six months into it they demand another one. The support keeps demanding accountability for the fire while simultaneously insisting that somebody pour more petrol onto it.

And Celtic makes the whole thing infinitely harder, because patience at Ibrox comes with the worst possible emotional price. It means watching us win.

Tell that support they need three years and what many of them hear is not “three years to rebuild.” They hear “three more Celtic titles.” And maybe it is high time someone said “Yeah, that’s exactly what we do mean.”

Yet that is intolerable to them.

Celtic’s dominance does two things simultaneously. It is partly the consequence of Ibrox instability, and it constantly creates more of it.

Celtic wins, so the pressure across the city increases. The pressure increases, so shorter-term decisions are taken. Short-term decisions make sustainable rebuilding harder. That makes Celtic more difficult to catch, so the pressure increases again.

That is the doom loop I wrote about elsewhere.

See, people asked me the other day why I keep warning them of what they are doing wrong. It’s simple; they can’t do anything to put it right as long as they have a fan-base which refuses to accept its own role in the downward spiral of their club. Celtic does not need to destroy the Ibrox club. Their fans are doing it for us.

Fergus McCann showed them exactly what a genuine reconstruction looks like. It is not glamorous. It is not painless. It does not guarantee instant championships. Indeed, the architect might leave while the other side of the city is still champion. But if the foundations are right, the sporting success can come afterwards.

McCann’s greatest achievement was not stopping ten in a row, magnificent though that was. His greatest achievement was building a Celtic which would never again require another Fergus McCann to rescue it.

That should be the ambition at Ibrox. Build something which does not require a billionaire to keep writing cheques. Build something which does not require nine new players every summer. Build something which does not collapse when one manager fails. Build something in which young footballers are allowed to develop, recruitment mistakes can be absorbed and one bad season does not require the entire institution to be ripped apart.

But to do that, somebody over there eventually has to tell the support something it desperately does not want to hear. You are not exempt from reality. History does not shorten a five-year plan. Entitlement does not create revenue. Shouting about standards does not build a sustainable football club.

Until the people across the city are prepared to accept that, they will keep looking for their Martin O’Neill without ever allowing their Fergus McCann the time to build something for him to inherit.

They want to talk about accountability? Start in the mirror. That’s where the root of the whole mess lies. It always did.

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