Yesterday was calamitous for the Ibrox club … and hilarious for the rest of us.

Yesterday was a hilarious day for those of us watching the Ibrox club in terms of its overall transfer business. I am pretty pissed off with our own, as I have made clear, but I am not going to compare us to them because they are the real thing when it comes to being a mess. The scale of the shambles that club has made of this window is absolutely astonishing.

Last night, in a moment of unintended hilarity, the BBC journalist Rob MacLean interviewing Derek McInnes actually opened the segment by saying, “Well Derek, six points out of six,” which is only true if you ignore the other games they played at the start of the season. Six points out of six. You could not make that up. Another way of putting it would be seven points out of twelve, but they chose not to go there.

The two goals they scored last night, in a game where they were very fortunate to get the win, came of course from Lawrence “Lardass” Shankland. The BBC was going out of its way to talk about how he is finally hitting form at the right time for his team. Oh dear. What a pity, then, that he is about to face even more competition from another of the club’s expensive signings, a guy costing them far more money than makes any sane sense.

I have been preparing a piece on the financial hole they are in, but it will not be complete until 5pm tonight, when the window shuts and we find out exactly what dent their transfer business has made in the finances.

We will know more by the end of the evening.

What they almost certainly will not get, though, is the major sale which would make things look a little rosier and a little less grim.

That is not going to happen now unless something completely unexpected breaks today, and everyone at that club is going to have to brace themselves for a long, hard campaign where every passing week increases the risk. Yesterday was the apotheosis of their spectacularly incoherent transfer window, which has somehow managed even to upend ours.

I will have two separate pieces about the two clubs’ transfer windows a little later on, but I will say this much now. With our transfer window, you can see that some thought went into most of it. The thoughtless part was the speed at which Celtic tried to execute all those late deals, and we can talk about how cheap this club got towards the end as well.

By and large, though, we knew what we were doing in terms of the football department setting out its priorities and trying to get them.

What the article about the Ibrox club will make clear is that there is no such coherent process working there at all.

Very little about what they did yesterday makes any sense, but then very little about what they have done throughout the whole window makes any sense. Yesterday was hilariously bad and it has ended in a hilariously bad outcome.

That may change today, but Nico Raskin will probably have to depart before it can.

Because their day started with their own club trying to flog Raskin to Besiktas on loan. All the reports said that a verbal agreement had been reached between the clubs. A verbal agreement, not a written one, but either the Ibrox club offered him on loan or Besiktas asked about him and there was a general agreement that they would let him go.

That alone is remarkable.

Then, at the last second, the Ibrox club moved the goalposts, apparently after intervention from their chairman. I am going to get into the politics of that a little later on in the wider article about how their transfer window went, but whoever had been negotiating that deal appears to have been completely overruled by Andrew Cavenagh because the proposed loan did not include an obligation to purchase at the end of it.

Ibrox fans were gobsmacked by the news that they might let their senior midfielder leave on loan. They were even more stunned when it became clear that the club would have accepted a combined package somewhere around the £12 million mark, some way short of what they had told themselves they would get and especially in light of Celtic’s sale of Arne Engels for £22 million.

I have said right from the minute we signed Engels that it was a no-brainer deal because his pedigree was perfect. I said that when he eventually left Celtic, he would go for a fee vastly in excess of what the Ibrox club would ever get for its so-called star midfielder.

Raskin has been at the centre of completely unrealistic hype from the start.

But this is what they do with players over there.

They started this window being told that Emmanuel Fernandez could go for £20 million, with Arsenal and Real Madrid allegedly interested in him.

Last night he had a shocker and at one point gave the ball straight to a Falkirk player inside his own penalty area. That should have put the home team in front, but the Falkirk player blasted it straight at the goalkeeper. Fernandez remains at Ibrox and all talk of a massive move has collapsed as the joke it always was.

There was also talk that they would get a huge fee for Connor Barron after alleged interest from La Liga giants and clubs in Serie A. We were not talking about £2 million either. The number being quoted was around £8 million.

Fantasyland stuff.

He went out on loan to Middlesbrough.

The Ibrox fans were the only people in the country surprised that a £30 million offer for Raskin did not drop through the letterbox. The only people except, of course, their enablers in the mainstream media, who appeared to believe this fantasy and spent the whole summer selling their readers on the possibility that it was real.

The shattering fall to earth, discovering that he was not even valued at half that and that Besiktas wanted him on a try-before-you-buy basis, stunned them. What stunned them even more was the discovery that their club would apparently have gone along with it if the buy clause had been turned into an obligation.

There is also reporting that Besiktas finally did agree a structure with the club, only for Raskin’s representatives to reject the move because they were not sold on the package. That allowed the Ibrox club to do a little rally-round-the-campfire routine where they pretend they still want him and he pretends he still wants to be there.

All sides in this overplayed their hands and nobody got what they wanted.

There is little doubt in my mind that Raskin wants out of that club. He was not dropped for those European games for nothing, and people who claim to have the inside track on what is going on there say that he and his representatives have been extremely difficult behind the scenes. If an offer arrives today which is even remotely acceptable, I suspect the club will be under enormous pressure to take it.

Still, he remains an Ibrox player right now, albeit, I suspect, a very unhappy one. He remains allegedly committed to the cause because he pulled on the jersey last night, and in a window where Engels could not do us the same courtesy, I have a certain amount of respect for a player willing to do that.

But it does not mean he likes it. It does not mean he is happy about it. It means he is willing to honour the terms of his current deal up to a point. I wonder whether that mood will remain if an offer arrives today and the club then turns it down.

Ibrox does not look like a particularly happy place to be.

Just when their supporters were getting over the seismic shock of the Raskin story, another one popped up. Again, this was a beautiful example of the media running the version they wanted to run rather than the factual one.

It did not matter anyway because the facts were already in the public domain and were always going to overwhelm the positive spin eventually.

The tabloids started running simultaneous stories about Thelo Aasgaard being the subject of a £6 million bid from Anderlecht. That story is true as far as it goes, but the £6 million is the option on him. The initial deal is a loan.

So, another player who, on the back of the World Cup, some people thought might bring in an eight-figure fee has gone for much less than that, and not even straight away. He now has to prove he is worth the transfer fee Anderlecht have written into the deal, and if he does not, they simply will not pay it because they are under no obligation to.

Again, this was greeted with disbelief on the Ibrox fan forums. “Why are they letting one of our key players go effectively for nothing instead of holding out for the big money?”

The big money they have been waiting on all summer long. The big money which had still not arrived by close of business yesterday.

Aasgaard is gone. He has departed for Belgium and the Ibrox club has taken in a loan fee for him while surrendering control over whether the permanent move actually happens.

This is a club which had already, if you believe the reports, lost out on a huge potential payday when Chermiti’s injury situation disrupted an alleged £22 million move. Undaunted by that blow, and by a double exit from Europe which leaves them without league-stage football, they continued spending anyway.

Yet it is not even clear that their squad is stronger for having done so.

If they had let Raskin go yesterday, or if they let him go today, they are weaker again. Meanwhile this is a club that has now signed what, thirteen or fourteen players this window? I have honestly lost count.

Underpinning a lot of the anger across the city is the idea that Celtic somehow manages, as they put it, to “hold out and get the fees we want”.

The £22 million for Engels has shattered them because they know they cannot get the same for their own Belgian midfielder.

Then there is roughly £6 million for Hatate, £3 million for Kenny, £10 million for Maeda and the other outrageous sums Celtic appears able to get for players who are not even central to the first team, players like Palma and Nawrocki.

It has convinced some of them that the alchemy at work here is simply that Celtic names a price and does not budge until somebody pays it.

Try selling anything on that basis when you actually depend on the money coming in, and you will be in the poor house before you know it.

“Do not budge until we get it” is not a football negotiating strategy with any prospect of success if what you are trying to sell is second-rate tat and junk, and that is exactly what the Ibrox club has been trying to sell for months.

Connor Barron is never an £8 million player in his life, certainly not one who is going to end up playing in Italy or Spain because somebody wrote that down in a transfer rumour.

Fernandez wanted by Arsenal, the Champions League finalists? Wanted by Real Madrid, the most successful club in world football, based on a handful of good appearances in the SPFL?

Please Jesus. It is crazy.

Aasgaard scored a good goal at the World Cup and on the basis of that some of them expected £20 million. Raskin had a few good games in Belgium’s midfield and, because Celtic got £22 million for Engels, who was not even in our squad, they expected more for him.

This is not valuation. It is wish fulfilment.

Chermiti should probably have been on a plane somewhere before the injury which ended his season, and again that looked like an example of the Ibrox club believing that if somebody has offered X, perhaps they can be squeezed for Y, instead of simply looking at the offer on the table and recognising that it may be as good as it is ever going to get.

Djeidi Gassama is another one they apparently hoped to find a buyer for. He played last night. He is still there.

These people are crazy.

Now they face the race to 5pm to make a big sale, and it is a race they are unlikely to win because most of Europe’s major leagues closed for incoming transfer business on Monday night. Not last night. The night before.

The handful of leagues which remain open may not necessarily contain clubs Raskin or anyone else in that squad wants to join. When you are reduced to a small number of countries as possible options, you are already in a very bad place if you need to get bodies out the door for big money.

Without those exits, they are carrying an extremely bloated squad. Even saying that makes me smile because, in spite of the bloat, there is not a lot of genuine talent there.

Some of the players they hilariously think of as blue-chip assets are not remotely blue-chip footballers, and the handful who could command decent fees have been talked up to such absurd levels that the market has simply ignored the valuations.

They must have one of the most bloated squads around, which would matter less if they were actually in Europe. But they are not.

That is not just a black mark against the season. It could be the prelude to a multi-year horror story where anything goes, and they may eventually discover that this last week was merely the shape of things to come.

Key assets considered for loans just to get them out the door. Players shuffled around because the wage bill needs trimmed. Cut-price deals sought because what the club really wants is for those players to be signing permanent contracts somewhere else.

From the outside, much of it is head-scratching. But the honest thing about it is that some of the behaviour is not quite as incoherent as it first appears.

Both Glasgow clubs are dysfunctional. We are dysfunctional in different ways.

That is what I am going to write about a little later on, but the Ibrox club’s dysfunction is of a far more dangerous sort than ours. If the two clubs remain locked onto these courses for the foreseeable future, only one of them is going to dominate.

It is not going to be theirs.

I offer no defence whatsoever of our own board of directors.

Even with their limited understanding of what it is they are doing, though, they are operating on an entirely different plane from the directors at Ibrox, who are absolute babes in the woods and collectively so far out of their depth that you can probably see it from space without a telescope.

Their club is going to suffer for that in ways they have not even thought of yet.

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