Ibrox is bored with its owners and the deranged hunt for new ones is on.

Earlier this week, we got one of the Daily Record’s most beloved stories. A story so typical that there have been more variations of it than Heinz has varieties. And it’s this: the billionaire who wants to invest in the club.

How many times have you heard this? How many times have you heard this story over the years?

They will claim that they have their billionaire investors now, but that’s only partly true. The current majority ownership is the unknown consortium led by Andrew Cavenagh and 49ers Enterprises involved in it somewhere.

It is not simply a case of the York family owning the Ibrox club outright, and Cavenagh is very clearly one of the central figures in the whole arrangement.

But billionaire Ibrox investors are as old as the hills.

It is a story that just keeps going round and round and round. David Murray was looking for them back when he convinced Joe Lewis, through ENIC, to put serious money into the old club in the 1990s, taking a 25 per cent stake for around £40 million.

Then, of course, we were famously told that Craig Whyte was a billionaire.

He wasn’t. Oh, how hilariously he wasn’t.

Mike Ashley genuinely was a billionaire, but he wanted his pound of flesh out of the club and for the thing to be run on a paying basis. Their fans were never going to stand for that, so eventually he was run out of town on a rail.

Dave King certainly spent plenty of time looking for wealthy backers and trying to bring people to the table. Jim McColl’s name surfaced repeatedly over the years, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s name has also been linked with possible investment discussions.

They dream of somebody with the deepest imaginable pockets. Not somebody who will spend £10 million. Not £20 million. £100 million.

As if UEFA would simply let that happen. But they dream of it all the same.

The latest name is Neil Lal, and he has been the subject of several articles in recent weeks. The Daily Record ran another piece on the 10th and once again described him as a billionaire. What makes that hilarious is that the same article then undercuts its own headline a few paragraphs later by saying that Lal reportedly has an estimated personal net worth of £2 million.

Read that again. Billionaire. Estimated personal net worth: £2 million.

That is not close even when you’re using Sevconomics.

Lal is currently fronting the Bharat Consortium Group, which is trying to buy Leicester City. He has said the group contains four investors taking 25 per cent each. So, it’s very clearly not going to be his money behind the bid.

Who exactly they all are, how much money they have and how the whole thing is structured is a different question. But Neil Lal is not really the story here.

I genuinely don’t care whether he has the money to buy Leicester. I don’t particularly care whether he is interested in the Ibrox club. I am not especially interested in who he is, what his plans are or what he is trying to do.

Because he is not the truly astonishing part of this.

He is just the latest name thrown into the mix. The really astonishing part is what the Daily Record’s promotion of this guy says, and what the raving on the Ibrox fan forums says. Ibrox is bored with yet another sugar daddy.

Ibrox wants somebody new to come in and spend all the money under the sun on their club.

They are already impatient with the Americans. They already don’t trust the Americans. Not because the Americans are necessarily up to no good. We don’t actually know what the Americans are ultimately going to do.

But because, in the eyes of a lot of their supporters, the Americans don’t understand the club, don’t understand football and are doomed to failure. Even while they are spending money.

So yeah; read that again. Ibrox is bored with its latest sugar daddy.

The novelty of American owners lasted about five minutes. Now it has worn off, and already they are looking around for the next great saviour.

You have to have lived here or watched the game here for a long time to understand how bizarre that club is. And when you see it, it’s all pretty amazing.

Since 2012, when the old club went into liquidation, with the assets eventually bought by the Charles Green consortium, things have just got progressively crazier and crazier over there in terms of the boardroom.

First it was Green himself being ousted. Then they wanted to sever all ties with Mike Ashley. After Ashley came the famous Blue Knights, sweeping in on their shining steeds. Then Dave King, a convicted tax offender, was at the helm. When King became problematic, the club was in the hands of the Parks and others who had plenty of money and were perfectly happy to keep the lights on for years to come.

But that wasn’t enough.

Not even the fact that they were also willing to spend money on transfer fees was enough. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing will ever be enough. Ibrox is never getting off this merry-go-round. They treat their board of directors the way some clubs treat squad players. Not getting the job done? Move them out. Bring somebody else in.

As if it is that simple. As if it is that easy. In their little minds, maybe it is.

For the rest of us watching it, it is bizarre.

The Americans have come in and catered to just about every demand. Their fans have not had this level of spending and attention for years, and already they are bored. Already they are fed up. Already they are looking around for the next saviour, the next wealthy individual or group of individuals to come in, buy the Americans out and start the whole thing again.

I have never seen anything like it. It is the strangest stuff.

And the Record talking Lal up was hilarious. Several different pieces described him as a billionaire over the course of weeks, yet the article the other day which screamed this headline acknowledged that his personal net worth is probably less than that of the man who famously bought Rangers from Murray for a quid.

If they don’t see the delicious irony in that I don’t know what to say to them.

The really funny thing is that they’ve obviously taken pelters for this nonsense; the writer of the piece on the 10th has already edited the headline and his own article to substitute the word “millionaire” in there instead. Thankfully the Ibrox fan forums have preserved the original and so there are always the internet archive sites.

“Billionaire.” They absolutely love that word. And the really revealing thing is that the fantasy doesn’t even require the billionaire to be particularly billionaire-ish anymore. These people have no sense of embarrassment. And a lot of that club’s fans have no sense of shame when it comes to this stuff either.

Go onto their forums and look at the way they talk about the Americans now. It is not dissimilar to the way they used to talk about all the other ownership groups and boardrooms they have had over the years.

They cheer every one of them in through the front door. Eventually they jeer and boo them as they scuttle out the back.

And for the Americans, this is only the start of their problems. They lost Dan Purdy this week, the technical director who had overseen a staggering level of player turnover during his time at the club. Reporting this week put the number of signings during his spell at more than 30 players, and yet the club does not look any closer to having a coherent recruitment model than it did before.

So, they are going back to the drawing board yet again. It is hilarious how much of a mess the Americans have already managed to get themselves into, and the Ibrox fans are not happy in the least.

Yet what can they accomplish with all their usual foot-stamping? I personally don’t know how they imagine they are going to get rid of these people. The current ownership group has sunk an awful lot of money into that club, first to acquire control, then to stabilise it and then to finance the transfer ambitions.

These people are not just going to walk away because a section of the support has become bored with them. And with finances likely to be tight over the next couple of years, the option of trying to starve them out would hurt the club itself long before it hurt the owners.

That is before we even get into the wider structure of how the takeover was funded, who owns what within the consortium and how the different interests sit alongside one another.

That is a labyrinth all of its own. The club is a mess. But the media ecosystem in which it exists is an even bigger mess.

And the fact that we are already seeing stories about the next wealthy consortium, the next saviour and the next billionaire tells you everything about the crazy times we are living in.

It doesn’t get much madder than this.

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