Whatever else we may say about Rangers — and so much has already been said — it is clear that despite all they have endured this remains a club who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Basically they are living well beyond their means. They know this, but refuse to recognise it.
Pride, that dirty old scoundrel, is getting in the way of reality. No matter who sits around the boardroom table or in the dugout, there has to be a concrete realisation that Ibrox is not the place it once was.
The power and the glory in the Scottish game no longer reside therein. It would have been so much better had the financial smelting of 2012 been followed by a down-scaling of the entire operation.
Sometimes it feels as though the very opposite has happened. Will no-one there proclaim it? Will no-one say the squad, the wage bill, the salaries and the transfer budget must be decimated — and much more?
It would be easy to feel sorry for Ally McCoist who stands on the sidelines complaining about “dirty linen” being washed in full view and hoping football will still win the day.
Yet isn’t the Rangers boss also culpable in some respects? He is, after all, demanding a signing policy which pays over-the-odds salaries to many among the first team.
Having won promotion last season using a side which outstripped the rest in the old Third Division with a whopping 24 points to spare, McCoist has gone large.
This is dangerous because it is taking place at a club which is down as much as £1 million a month. Think, for instance, of Lee McCulloch on a reputed £7,000 a week, and summer signing Jon Daly, aged 30, being paid around £5,000.
Is any of this value for money? Highly doubtful, I would say, but there’s precious little which can be considered good value round Ibrox these days.
There are plenty of folk who watch every scratch and spit of the Scottish game and will gladly tell you that Rangers are now nothing more than a “tribute act” playing out of Govan. They insist they are dead and gone.
Let me be frank, the club itself is, at this moment, doing a more than passable impression of going through the very throes of death.
On any given day it seems we may find shares being traded in their millions out of the blue, coups being hatched, rows with the press, threats of legal action, and in one case allegations of betting offences levelled against a prominent player — Ian Black.
Such madness cannot go on indefinitely. Yes, Rangers are bigger and grander than any club in Britain ever to sink beneath the waves, but do not let that fool you.
They remain in real trouble, pretending to wave and yet failing to spot they are in fact drowning.
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