There are things happening all over Scottish football right now which are strange, strange, strange. Ibrox’s phenomenally improbable run of 11 consecutive home cup draws is just one of them.
But there will be nothing stranger than what happens at Ibrox if that club now decides to spend significantly more money than it already has.
I think the chances of that are somewhere between slim and none. They face a critical Conference League play-off, and if they go out there is no European league-phase income at all. They are not built to take that hit.
They are already operating in UEFA’s third-tier competition rather than the Europa League they expected and budgeted to be chasing.
That alone changes the financial picture materially. Fail to reach even the Conference League proper and the picture changes again, which is why, until they know whether European football is secured, I find it extremely difficult to believe they can responsibly commit another enormous sum to transfer fees.
That does not mean they won’t. Maybe there are genuine psychopaths running the place. Maybe people inside Ibrox simply enjoy pissing money against the great big wall outside the stadium. We should never rule anything out. That kind of behaviour has hardly been unknown there, and yes, perhaps the American investors are simply the latest group prepared to put their own money into the black hole.
But I doubt it. I doubt it first because it makes no business sense. American investors did not become involved at Ibrox because they grew up dreaming of Scottish football. The clue is in the word investors. Investment is supposed to produce a return.
Some of the people involved have apparently preferred to remain outside the limelight altogether, which makes the old romantic explanation even harder to sustain. If prestige and bragging rights were the whole attraction, surely being known as the person who owns a major football club would be part of the appeal. If not, what exactly are they investing in?
That is why some of today’s transfer stories are so extraordinary.
Lewis Ferguson. Farès Ghedjemis.
These are not bargain-bin rumours. These are players who would require serious financial commitments, and I find myself wondering what is happening in the heads of the people writing this stuff, never mind the people believing it.
It is fantastical. It is nonsensical.
People still believe the Ibrox club pulled out of the deal for the PSV winger purely because of a medical issue and that the collapse had nothing whatsoever to do with the enormous change in their European position.
But the chronology made the financial question perfectly legitimate. They suffered a major European setback and a major transfer disappeared almost immediately afterwards. That is what you would expect if the full consequences of their position had sunk in over there.
Yet within days we are supposed to believe the same club can simply pivot towards an £8 million player, or perhaps an even more expensive one, as though nothing happened.
That is the parallel reality. The assumption is that Ibrox always has another cheque available. Always another transfer. Always another investor prepared to fund it. Always another pile of money waiting somewhere because, well, Rangers.
And this is precisely the mentality I wrote about this morning.
Part of their continuing problem is a support desperately trying to recreate Rangers as it remembers Rangers while misunderstanding what Rangers actually was. But the media has never really made that distinction either.
It spent years celebrating the spending practices which ultimately became part of the catastrophe. And because the current club wears the name, plays in the colours and operates from the same stadium, the same expectation simply transferred across with everything else.
The club at Ibrox must always have more money.
If the first £20 million does not work, spend another £10 million. If those players fail, give the next manager another nine. If European revenues fall, find another benefactor. If the books do not support it, somebody will surely write another cheque.
That is not a business model. It is Fantasy Football played in the real world and that has already had catastrophic consequences at that stadium.
The last Rangers ultimately disappeared after years of trying to live beyond what its underlying economics could sustainably support.
That financial lesson should be impossible to ignore.
Yet here we are again. The current club may not meet the same fate. I am not predicting that. But American investors who entered this project expecting a return can absolutely decide that the returns are not coming and walk away.
And if supporter pressure, media pressure and football pressure force the people running the club into decisions they would never make in a normal commercial environment, those decision-makers will still deserve the blame.
Nobody gets absolved because Twitter was angry. Someone has to have the courage to say no. And at Ibrox, that may be one of the hardest words anybody can use.
The pressure will be enormous. It always is.
Supporters want signings. The manager wants reinforcements. The media generates names. Everybody starts talking about ambition, and suddenly spending another £7 million becomes not reckless but somehow compulsory.
But look at where they actually are. They are out of the Europa League. They are preparing for a Conference League play-off.
Their European income for the season remains uncertain. And Derek McInnes already has an enormous squad assembled over successive windows.
The idea that the answer must now be another major transfer outlay because McInnes cannot yet get enough from what is already there is astonishing. At some point the manager has to coach. At some point the recruitment department has to develop. At some point the club has to extract value from money already spent.
You cannot indefinitely solve every football problem by buying another footballer, especially when the revenue stream which was supposed to support that spending has just taken a substantial hit. I know the Ibrox ecosystem has always had an unusual ability to bend reality around itself. But surely this is the point where reality has to bite.
The strange thing is that much of the media does not seem to be treating this as an overdue reckoning. The stories continue almost as though nothing has changed. Lewis Ferguson. Farès Ghedjemis. Another multimillion-pound player.
Another big push. Another transfer to prove ambition.
It is as though European elimination carried no consequences at all. As though dropping into the third UEFA competition changed nothing. As though failure to qualify for even that competition would change nothing.
As though the money simply exists because the expectation exists.
That is what I find incomprehensible. This should be the moment when the questions become, “How much can Ibrox actually afford?”
How much has already been committed? How much revenue has disappeared? How much depends on the Conference League play-off? What happens if they go out?
Instead, too much of the conversation still begins from the assumption that another large cheque is waiting to be signed.
That assumption has haunted the clubs at Ibrox for decades. The support believes it. The media feeds it. Managers benefit from it. Directors eventually surrender to it. And then everybody acts surprised when the bill arrives.
The bill is arriving again. Maybe they will reach the Conference League proper. Maybe that will create enough breathing room for another move.
But until that happens, the idea that the club can casually throw another £8 million, £10 million or more into the transfer market is not ambitious, it is reckless. It is mindless.
And if they go out of Europe and do it anyway, then we are talking about a club apparently determined to test, once again, whether financial reality can be defeated simply by refusing to acknowledge that it exists.
Ibrox history suggests that is not a particularly clever experiment.
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They also feel they have to appear able to match Celtic’s ambitions.
I think their big talk and spending is either a myth or something very dark. I don’t think they have spent as much as they say they have, as the signings were cheaper, free or on the never never. Of course they still have to cover wages, insurances, tax (yes the T word at Ipox) and other expenses for their players but they can probably meet these if the deals are cheap enough. Further signings will come from loan deals. The dark side is that the faceless and nameless investors are incognito because they have to be. Remember the shareholder who couldn’t vote because they did not want to give their name. These people probably have money to burn but where they got it from is the question.
Me thinks it’s well past the time Eliot Ness and his fraud squad joined by old big ears tax men to start sniffing around Liebox again….seems a lot of dirty money being washed ?