Glenn Gibbons: Pride and profligacy a prelude to Rangers’ fall

RANGERS’ descent into administration was no more surprising than a hurricane in the Caribbean (if potentially just as damaging), but the islanders tend to be better prepared than the great majority of those with an allegiance to Ibrox.

Considering the attention given in recent years to the financial devastation wreaked by the former owner/chairman, David Murray – this was long before the conferral of a knighthood – it seems almost perverse that the event should register as a shock, the collective wailing and lamentation disproportionate to the expectations of less partial commentators.

As with the rise of Nazism and fascism in between-the-wars Germany and Italy respectively, the most pressing question asked in retrospect has been: how could it have been allowed to happen? In the 1930s, it was concluded that entire populations were duped because Hitler built the autobahns and presided over the introduction of the Volkswagen Beetle, while Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Sixty years on, it was not difficult for any non-aligned observers to see that, in truth, Murray’s pot-hunting bluster and bravado appealed to Rangers supporters’ innate taste for triumphalism. This is a remark that will doubtless raise hackles and cause veins to pop on fevered brows, but it is a trait that becomes evident too regularly to be dismissed as insignificant.

Even the most successful managers at Ibrox have had to tolerate booing of their team for committing the capital offence of being a goal down at half-time, long before a match is completed. Underlining the hunger for success at any price (the result emphatically more important than the performance) is the peculiar phenomenon of reserving the most intense celebration for the least impressive of victories over the most moderate of opponents. Sown on such fertile ground, it is hardly surprising that the seeds of assumption and complacency should thrive.

Rangers followers’ claim to being “the greatest fans in the world” is as hollow as that made by supporters of clubs all over the planet (including Celtic). It is so much juvenile pap because, like the greatest movie ever made, the world’s greatest fans do not exist.

If anything, those who claim unswerving loyalty to Rangers have been distinguished over the decades by a tendency to thin out in the face of adversity. It is a mere two weeks since fewer than 18,000 fans (including around 1,600 visitors) attended a Scottish Cup tie, while a random glance at matches in the early 1980s, when lying third in the league, reveals crowds of 4,500 and 8,500 for successive home matches against St Mirren and Dundee.

Those hard times would undoubtedly deepen the joy of the 1990s, the support understandably too consumed by their own elation to give any credence even to the possibility that the orgiastic indulgence was unsustainable and would one day exact a toll.

When Murray made his now infamous boast of putting down a tenner for every fiver spent by Celtic, the Rangers fans were too busy gloating (a natural and forgivable reaction) to see the true significance of the bombast. It was not simply that the principle was basically unsound but that it symbolised Rangers’ suicidal readiness to pay a transfer fee that was double a player’s worth.

This peculiar – some would say insane – commercial practice was never more convincingly exposed than by the Gordan Petric business in 1995. The story is the more authentic for having been told to me by Fergus McCann, the Celtic owner/managing director at the very heart of the affair.

The late Tommy Burns, then manager at Parkhead, approached McCann and said he would like to sign Petric, the Serbian central defender, from Dundee United. Complying with the usual drill in these matters, McCann asked the manager how much he thought Petric was worth.

“Tommy told me £800,000,” the little Scots-Canadian recalled later. “So the board approved the approach. Tommy came back and told me Rangers had got wind of it and had offered £900,000. I went back to the board and got permission to up the offer to one million. Tommy came back again and said Rangers had bid £1.1 million. This continued until we went to 1.4 and Rangers once again topped it by £100,000.

“At that point, I said, ‘Tommy, enough. You are now asking me to offer £1.6 million for a player you told me was worth precisely half of that just a short while ago. No, thanks. Rangers can have him”. In the event, Petric’s generally unremarkable performances in his three years at Ibrox rather vindicated Burns’s original evaluation, but, in the context of Rangers’ present predicament, the episode becomes a beacon of enlightenment.

But no warning could have been more stark than the words uttered by the former Rangers director, Hugh Adam, and reproduced in the sports pages of The Scotsman just a few days more than ten years ago, on 2 February, 2002.

In a piece almost spookily headlined “Adam Shakes Ibrox Pillars With Warning Of Bankruptcy”, the then 76-year-old board member first revealed that he had, just before, sold the remaining 47,000 shares of his original 59,000 holding for no other reason than his conviction that, having lost two-thirds of their value in the previous three years – from £3.45 to £1.15 – they were heading towards worthlessness.

He predicted bankruptcy because “that’s the logical conclusion to a strategy that incurs serious loss year on year.” As recently as two weeks ago, Rangers-supporting posters on internet threads were still disdaining Adam as some kind of ill-informed eccentric. There is none so blind...