Ibrox has fallen into the sunk cost death trap and there’s no easy way out.

From the outside looking in, the Ibrox gamble looks completely nonsensical. Nobody could examine the way that club is behaving and conclude anything other than that it has gone slightly mad.

It continues to accumulate footballers at a compulsive rate without any obvious strategic plan for what to do with all of them, how to deploy them, how to keep them happy or how to carry the swelling wage bill. Every time somebody has a poor run of games, the apparent response from the manager is that he needs somebody else.

From the outside, that makes no sense.

If you were running almost any other business this way, you would either have stopped hiring long ago or been much more selective about who you employed in the first place. You would probably hire somebody with a reputation for getting the best out of the assets already available to him and allow him to tweak things around the edges. You would not hand him another complete rebuild every time the first version disappointed him.

But organisations are not always rational, because organisations are made up of human beings and human beings are subject to pressures which regularly make us behave against our own interests. Gamblers know one of those pressures particularly well. It is called the sunk cost fallacy, and it is one of the reasons gamblers chase losses.

You sit down at the table, walk into the bookmaker or open the app and make a bet. You lose it, then you make another because you want the first loss back. You lose that too, and eventually you have spent so much and fallen so far into the hole that continuing to dig begins to feel like the only reasonable way to get yourself out.

That is the trap. The money already lost should have absolutely no influence on whether the next bet is sensible. It is gone. The only rational question is whether the next decision makes sense on its own merits, but human beings are not particularly good at thinking that way.

Sometimes the dominant force is ego. Every loss feels personal, almost insulting, and you convince yourself that the result was unfair, that circumstances conspired against you or that somehow the gods simply refused to smile on you.

So, you make another bet to put things right.

Sometimes it is pressure. Perhaps it comes from a partner, a bank manager, creditors or simply the knowledge that somebody is eventually going to look at what you had, what you have now and what you lost and pass judgement on you. Maybe there are bills due and your previous decisions have made paying them harder. Then comes that very human thought: I got myself into this. I can get myself out.

And do not underestimate self-loathing either. Look what an idiot I’ve been. Look at what I’ve done. I cannot believe I’ve managed to make such a mess of this. At that point restoring everything to zero starts to feel less like an objective and more like emotional redemption.

It does not really matter which of these feelings is driving the bus. They are all dangerous, and none of them applies only to individuals. Organisations and governments fall into exactly the same trap.

Look at almost any major public project which is years late and billions over budget and you will eventually hear some version of the argument that stopping now would waste everything which has already been spent. That is sunk-cost thinking. The fact that £10 billion has already disappeared does not make spending another £10 billion rational. The rational question is what you get for the next £10 billion.

But stopping means admitting something. It means admitting that the previous spending was wasted. That wounds the ego, creates political pressure and eventually introduces an element of self-loathing too: we already look ridiculous, but imagine how ridiculous we will look if we stop now. So, the project continues consuming money, and every new expenditure makes stopping psychologically harder.

This is why I think the behaviour at Ibrox makes much more sense when viewed from inside the psychology of the people making the decisions rather than simply from the outside. I would be willing to bet that some version of sunk-cost thinking is operating there right now: look at everything we’ve already spent; we cannot simply write that off; we need to spend more until we finally get it right.

That way lies madness.

One subject I have been discussing increasingly in my personal circle is artificial intelligence and my growing conviction that the industry may eventually produce one of the greatest sunk-cost episodes the corporate world has ever seen.

The sums being committed to data centres, chips, energy infrastructure and future capacity are extraordinary. Companies have raised vast amounts of capital and made enormous promises about technologies and returns which may or may not arrive on anything like the timetable being suggested. Once those investments are made, slowing down becomes psychologically and competitively difficult because the next thought is obvious: we have already spent this much; we cannot stop now.

Then your rival announces another data centre, another chip order, another huge capital programme, and the next investment is justified partly because of everything already invested. That is how the sunk-cost trap becomes an arms race.

Football does this constantly. There are clubs which have spent hundreds of millions backing managers who are obviously failing. They have recruited player after player into projects which have produced little or nothing, yet the response becomes to spend even more.

The amount already wasted becomes the argument for spending again. Nobody wants to admit that the previous investment has produced nothing, and football is perhaps uniquely susceptible to this because the pressure is enormous, the egos are substantial and the emotional component is constant.

But do not kid yourself that self-loathing is absent either.

There are executives who must look at squads built for tens or hundreds of millions and privately think: this is absolute shit. Then comes the next thought: the only way to make this resemble what we intended is to spend more money on it.

Eventually the money already spent becomes not merely the reason to continue but the need to continue. Who wants to be the person who admits that all those millions were squandered?

Celtic get accused of wasteful spending too, and we have certainly made plenty of dreadful signings. Balikwisha may become the latest example of a player on whom we take a substantial loss because he simply has not developed into what we expected.

But long before Celtic assembled an entire squad full of Balikwisha’s, somebody would slam on the brakes.

One of the few areas in which Celtic can sometimes be described as almost insanely rational is financial risk. A manager who had wasted millions would not automatically receive another mountain of money.

Part of the reason is obvious. We do not operate under the same psychological pressure. Celtic have enjoyed extraordinary domestic success, so there is no institutional desperation to overthrow an established dominant rival because we are generally dominant. That changes behaviour.

Across the city, the psychology is completely different. Their club is built around ego. It cannot emotionally tolerate being second best because the entire mythology around it — We Are The People, Simply The Best and all the rest of it — tells supporters that second place is somehow unnatural.

Then there is the pressure.

A support conditioned to believe that spending is the cure for almost every football problem continually demands another signing. No amount ever seems sufficient.

And then comes the self-loathing.

They finish behind Celtic repeatedly, and occasionally behind somebody else as well, and every failure becomes another reminder that the enormous expenditure has not restored the position they believe belongs to them.

That creates a self-reinforcing psychology: spend, fail, feel humiliated, spend again to repair the humiliation, fail again, then spend even more because the previous spending has to be justified. That is sunk-cost thinking almost in laboratory conditions.

If Celtic found itself in a similar dark place, consistently losing titles and trophies, there might eventually be pressure towards short-termism and desperation.

Although knowing our board, I suspect the opposite would initially happen. They would become even more cautious, demand more certainty and multiply their prudence until everyone wanted to throw furniture through windows.

That mentality can absolutely hold Celtic back.

But the defenders of that approach are also correct about one thing: it dramatically reduces the possibility of catastrophe.

The Ibrox club does not appear to have that brake. It has already fallen into Conference League-level income, assuming it completes the job and gets there at all. There is still another leg to negotiate and no guarantee that it will be straightforward.

The difference between Europa League and Conference League money is already substantial, although the loss of Conference League football entirely may ultimately be presented internally as less disastrous than it really is. You can almost hear the rationalisation: there wasn’t that much money in it anyway; the crowds weren’t great; the league is the priority; winning the title is where the real money is.

And that is how the next bet gets justified.

Because the biggest prize is now domestic.

They have already invested heavily in trying to win the league, so abandoning that strategy now feels impossible, even if the early results are poor, even if the performances are terrible and even if the sense is growing amongst almost everyone watching them that much of the money already spent has been wasted.

That is precisely when sunk-cost thinking becomes strongest.

Because there is another pressure operating here too: the future. As we have discussed before, finishing second in Scotland next season will not provide the same route into Champions League qualifying.

The European safety net becomes thinner, the prospect of having to qualify for the third-tier competition creates multiple opportunities for catastrophic failure, and a huge operating cost base cannot comfortably coexist with Conference League income.

That is why the desperation makes sense psychologically even when it looks ridiculous financially. The pressure is not merely coming from the stands. It is coming from tomorrow.

And that makes the gamble more dangerous.

It is clearly reckless to have spent what they have already spent. It is even more reckless to continue spending simply because of what has already gone. Yet I will admit something uncomfortable: there is still a part of my brain which asks, what other choice do they have?

That is the sunk-cost fallacy speaking.

The rational part of me knows the answer perfectly well. Walk away from the table. Cut your losses. Accept what has happened. Understand that the money is gone and that every additional pound spent trying to recover it may simply become another pound lost.

Protect what remains. Rebuild intelligently.

Accept that the recovery may take years.

That is the rational course, and yet anyone who has ever known a serious gambler knows how difficult that course can be to take. They can explain perfectly well why chasing is irrational. They can give you every mathematical argument.

Then they chase anyway.

Understanding that is important because it explains why simply telling Ibrox to stop spending does not mean they will. They could tell Derek McInnes and the support: we have signed nearly a dozen players, we believe this squad contains enough quality to compete domestically and we are not buying another football team.

They could tell the manager that an expensively assembled squad should be capable of beating most Scottish opponents on most weekends.

And if he says he still cannot do it without another five players, perhaps the question is not whether the squad needs another rebuild.

Perhaps the question is whether the manager is the wrong man.

That would be the rational response.

Stop, accept that major mistakes have been made, accept that those mistakes incurred substantial costs, accept that some of that money is never coming back, then protect what remains and build again from there.

But that requires admitting the previous bets were bad, and Ibrox keeps reaching for the chips. The bet just keeps getting bigger.

And one day, there will be nothing left but a sob story. Not that any of us will be sobbing. We’ll be too busy enjoying our own success.

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