While another Ibrox club stares into the abyss, hackers are chasing squirrels instead of the real story.

Yesterday, as the Ibrox club released its financial accounts, the BBC did its best to soften the story by pointing out a curious twist: the club is finally “immune from prosecution”.

Even trying to boast is a remarkable thing; a classic case of deviation from the main takeaway here: the loss of an eye-watering £17.2 million.

This useful narrative was not limited to the BBC; Other publications immediately jumped on it and lined up to chase away the distractions.

A perfect example of how the media should have resisted but couldn’t.

There’s a great scene in the second season of The West Wing that brings this to mind. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet is enraged when a Colombian drug gang manages to trap and shoot down special forces helicopters using a fake radio signal.

“We weren’t prepared for someone to try to outsmart us with a tactic so complex that it would take an entire generation beyond, ‘Hey, look, your shoelaces are untied!'” he fumes. “Is this how I lost nine of my men to a street gang with a ham radio?”

However, “freeing the case” was not even the only sleight of hand.

Ibrox came up with another story about the so-called billionaire “investor”; This was a performer who was hardly new to the scene and frankly wasn’t even invested.

Instead he is simply restructuring debt for more shares rather than pumping new capital into the club. Few in the press examined this objectively; instead most Ibrox fans preferred the script. It is surprising that none of them seem interested in exploring what it means for another shareholder to carry the club’s debts rather than living within Ibrox’s means.

But that is the real question for anyone who thinks the club is a serious challenger to Celtic’s supremacy.

Our media is extremely susceptible to PR nonsense, trivia, and gossip.

The Ibrox PR machine must be giggling as it feeds these half-baked distractions to journalists. Yesterday’s figures could have triggered serious debate about the sustainability of Scottish football’s finances. Yet the media touched on this issue lightly, then veered into the usual speculative nonsense. They could have learned from the crisis in Inverness, whose finances were bankrupt and warning signs were ignored. The only difference for Ibrox is the supporters who will shoulder the debt for now.

But that’s what the Ibrox club is; Inverness has slightly deeper pockets. But the contents of those pockets eventually run out. Always. This is just basic math.

The collapse of Inverness showed why we need financial sustainability rules here, as we do in European football. England has adopted Financial Fair Play with strict sanctions for violators and the question of why we do not comply is vital to the future of the sport.

Scottish clubs currently operate without any financial impediment, with many relying heavily on external funding; If anything, it’s a destructive path.

It’s not as if Scottish football hasn’t been burned before. Hearts, Hibs, Motherwell, Dundee, Gretna; all faced financial disasters resulting from unsustainable practices. The Rangers themselves went under, and Gretna’s collapse came after her benefactors could no longer pay the bill. Although these examples are serious warnings, they are repeatedly ignored.

No league in Europe cries out more urgently about financial sustainability regulations than ours. With no multi-billion pound TV deals to support these clubs, it is crucial they operate within their means. But we are still moving in the opposite direction. I believe this approach only serves one club, and that club’s opposition is preventing us from making meaningful change.

The figures themselves are a mockery of our league and an insult to any club that has lost revenue and titles from the Ibrox club’s debt-fuelled expenses.

Hearts, Aberdeen, Hibs, Kilmarnock; All were impressed.

They seem oddly willing to comply, perhaps hoping their own deep-pocketed investors will carry the debt on their behalf. Incredibly reckless.

So what for? This reckless course did not yield many victories either, with results that were laughably inadequate considering the resources poured into them. Investors received poor returns on each pound, yet the myth of potential success persists.

Meanwhile, the media continues to play along, either unaware or unwilling to examine the broader implications. The Scottish media understand very well that if Financial Fair Play comes into force, the Ibrox club will likely be in breach of these regulations tomorrow.

But without that interest the Ibrox club continues its unsustainable approach, fueled by new capital injections rather than living within its means.

What is commonly misunderstood is where this money goes. Despite the enormous sums, it’s not just wages or transfers that are draining Ibrox dry. The club itself is a cumbersome and costly machine that consumes tens of millions before a player even steps onto the field.

To operate sustainably the club needs to significantly cut their football spending but they still continue to rely on shareholders to foot the bill. Recent headlines emphasize one word, and that word is not “debt,” “losses,” or, heaven forbid, “consequences”; no, this “billionaire”, this “investor” stands ready to sink everything he owns into the Ibrox black hole, as if his fortune will change their fortunes overnight. We all know that reality is different. He’s here to refinance debt, not to inject cash, but that will make you think this is going to be a game changer.

People – including some cheaters – lose their minds when they see this word and think it’s a big breakthrough that will change everything. You would never believe that the rules of financial sustainability exist outside of our imagination.

So once again the media chased a pair of carefully planted squirrels and resorted to pushing a false narrative to convince fans that this endless cycle could continue unchecked. They cling to the myth that this club can sustainably keep up with Celtic. As every year, reporting on this issue has been blind to long-term consequences.

If the media had explored this issue in much less depth than Celtic fansites have, they would have addressed why Financial Fair Play is necessary. They would explore what living within one’s means would truly look like for clubs across the city.

But this superficial reporting does not encourage change. As every new philanthropist enters Ibrox, they face the same pressure to chase the impossible dream.

This cycle works in our favor in a twisted way, but it endangers the game as a whole. This is the second time an Ibrox club has run headlong into the abyss and the press won’t even acknowledge what happened the first time. With numbers this grim, it’s no surprise that the spinning machine goes into overdrive. But this narrow-mindedness will cost them dearly.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Sun Also Rises, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. First slowly, then suddenly.” Football clubs are dying in the same way. It happened at Ibrox once. They seem largely oblivious to the fact that it could happen again… and so they are locked in this cycle of doom. Because it’s normal for the media to behave this way.