Jed York, an Ohio trailer park and the most Ibrox story imaginable.

News from the United States tonight has struck my funny bone in so many different ways that I barely know where to start.

Jed York, the San Francisco 49ers owner whose interests through 49ers Enterprises extend to the Ibrox club, has managed to get himself arrested in connection with an alleged attempt to arrange paid sex at a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio. I guess when the gods want to mock your football club, they really do it in style.

There are a couple of important factual points to get out of the way first.

York was originally charged with engaging in prostitution, but that charge was subsequently amended to disorderly conduct. He pleaded no contest to that and to a second misdemeanour charge of possessing criminal tools, received concurrent one-day jail sentences with credit for time already served and was fined $1,150.

Reports say the arrest took place at the Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community and that the operation involved the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force.

Now, about these “criminal tools”.

I initially had no idea what that meant under Ohio law, and my mind immediately wandered towards extreme sex equipment, a Spider-Man ski mask and a metal pole, because obviously it did. In the absence of information, I was fully prepared to encourage everyone to speculate as irresponsibly as possible purely for entertainment purposes.

Sadly, there appears to be a more boring explanation. Reporting around the case suggests the relevant item was his mobile phone, which was allegedly used to arrange the encounter. The court ordered the phone returned to him, while $160 seized during the arrest was forfeited to the human trafficking task force.

So alas, no ski mask, no metal pole and no unexpected crossover episode with Glasgow city centre. What a pity. Still, speculate freely if that makes you feel good. It certainly worked for me when I read the initial story.

I will not labour the legal point because, as far as Scottish football is concerned, I doubt there is much of one. Whether this creates any conceivable issue under SFA ownership rules governing fit and proper person is for somebody who enjoys reading those documents more than I do, but I would be astonished if this particular episode altered the footballing situation at Ibrox in any meaningful way.

If this is the kind of thing that made you persona non grata at Hampden, I rather suspect the carparks there would be considerably less full than they are on any given day.

So, this is just an amusing little tale we can all take the piss out of.

It doesn’t affect tomorrow’s Celtic game. It doesn’t affect the title race. It doesn’t change their transfer window. Nobody at Celtic Park is suddenly rewriting the team sheet because Jed York had an adventurous weekend in Ohio.

But come on. It is very, very funny.

There is also a serious side to this because York is married and has a family, and whatever embarrassment or distress this causes them is not something I particularly want to make light of. Powerful men attempting to buy women is hardly a new phenomenon either, and prostitution stings involving wealthy people are not some extraordinary American invention.

But then you get back to the location.

The trailer park. I’m sorry, but that is where my professionalism leaves the building.

This is an enormously wealthy man. This is the principal owner of one of the most famous franchises in American sport. He moves in corporate circles where people probably spend more on lunch than most of us spend on holidays, and somehow this story ends with him getting lifted at a mobile home park in East Palestine, Ohio. It is the trailer park that elevates the entire thing into art.

You hear stories about rich and powerful men behaving badly and your brain instinctively supplies glamorous hotels, discreet agencies, absurdly expensive restaurants, private entrances and people whose entire careers exist to make sure nobody ever finds out.

Not Jed. Apparently, he’s touring mobile homes.

That is such an astonishing reduction in glamour that I’m struggling to process it. There are scandals which make you think somebody has lived too extravagantly, and then there are scandals which make you wonder whether somebody has deliberately searched Google for the least salubrious possible location in which to blow up his reputation.

Again, I am not making assumptions about the actual people who live there. The comedy is entirely in the disparity between the world this guy inhabits and the surroundings in which he managed to get himself arrested.

This is a man connected to NFL ownership, major international business and two British football clubs. Yet the police report leads us to a trailer park near the Pennsylvania border. How? I joked on Twitter recently about Ryan Kent being 18 months without a club and how that didn’t make me as sympathetic as perhaps I was supposed to be. Instead, I said it had reinforced my conviction that he would turn up one day as the subject of a Netflix series called The Trailer Park Serial Killer.

That was supposed to be absurd. I did not expect somebody from the Ibrox ownership structure to start doing location scouting.

The whole story is grubby. That is the word for it. Grubby.

It makes you want to have a shower just writing about it, and I suspect there will be people close to York who feel much the same way. There are certain scandals where money and status somehow manage to retain a little veneer of sophistication around the whole sordid business. This one appears to have stripped even that away. Imagine a man like that getting caught it a place where just standing in the front yard requires you to get a tetanus shot. Can you even imagine the client? Oh, dear God.

And still, this inevitably, brought my mind back to football.

Gordon Dalziel recently talked about Celtic and the Ibrox club shopping in different markets. The way he put it was that they were running around Aldi flinging things into the trolley while Celtic were strolling through Marks & Spencer putting nice stuff into the basket.

There is something about this story which suddenly makes that metaphor feel inadequate. Aldi deserves better. Because when you look at some of the Ibrox club’s transfer dealings this summer, the volume of signings, the money committed, the questionable profiles and the apparent willingness to keep adding bodies regardless of what has already been spent, you do start wondering whether there is a corporate philosophy at work here.

Perhaps “shopping in different markets” really was the clue all along.

There has been an unmistakable element of going low-cost, going opportunistic and going for whatever is immediately available in parts of their recruitment strategy. Dan Neil, Cammy Devlin, Lawrence Shankland and some of the other names associated with their rebuild have often looked to me like attempts to find a shortcut rather than build something genuinely ambitious. And Derek McInnes as manager?

Suddenly it all makes sense, and with it so much else that otherwise didn’t make any, like the Ibrox takeover itself. This is the football equivalent of engaging the services of a pro in a trailer park, although that may be a grotesquely unfair comparison for the trailer parks. (And for the pros as well, let’s be honest.)

Ordinarily, you would expect the press to have an absolute field day with a story like this. York has already pleaded no contest to the amended charges, so we are not dealing with somebody who is merely the subject of an untested rumour circulating on social media. The basic facts of the arrest, plea and sentence are matters of public record.

How enthusiastically sections of the Scottish media choose to explore his connection to Ibrox will be interesting. I’m sure we’ll all be watching with enormous smiles. Because we have always joked that the Ibrox club attracts some peculiar characters.

For a while, people have wondered what exactly the attraction was for the Americans. Why this club? Why Scottish football? Why buy into something with all the historical baggage, financial pressure and extraordinary supporter expectations attached to it?

Perhaps we have been overthinking it.

Maybe somebody at the 49ers looked at the available set of clubs they might purchase and looked under the Trailer Park Hooker list of options and simply thought, yeah, this’ll do. There is something almost poetic about an Ibrox investor being involved in a story where the defining image is shopping for something in a marketplace like that.

The Ibrox club, with its tiny trophy haul for an institution which continually talks as though it bestrides the world, one where its history, its clothing and even its identity is nicked from a corpse, yeah, it’s a yard-sale purchase.

The seller assures you it is priceless. The sticker says $4.50.

Sometimes in this job we get lucky and a news story takes a collection of things which previously made absolutely no sense and somehow causes them all to fall beautifully into place. The spending. The recruitment. The strange decisions. The questionable judgement. The Ibrox purchase itself, which we’ve all looked at and wondered “Why?”

Then suddenly an American billionaire is sitting in an Ohio police station after being arrested trying to solicit sex at a trailer park and the entire universe snaps into focus.

We live in very strange times.

But as banter-years moments go, this one is going to take some beating.

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