Terry Butcher’s Souness v McInnes argument just doesn’t stand up. The Celtic Graeme Souness faced was on a path to self destruction. Today’s Celtic is a financial juggernaut…

Terry Butcher was out doing the rounds yesterday – plugging his evening at Edmiston House, as it happens – and he came bearing comfort for the Ibrox support.

Derek McInnes, he reckons, can still make a season out of this.

And the proof he offers up is 1986.

Here is what the former Ibrox skipper had to say to the Daily Record. Read it and tell me it holds up:

“You can recover from a difficult start. It’s not about how you start, it’s how you finish.”

He went on to explain how the Graeme Souness squad he joined lost two of their first three games and still ended up champions.

Hibs away, then Dundee United at home.

A catastrophic start, in his own words.

And by May the flags were flying at Ibrox.

It’s a lovely story.

It just isn’t an argument.

Souness didn’t overcome a great Celtic in 1986, he walked straight past one that had already started dismantling itself.

Because that’s the bit Butcher leaves out.

The Celtic that Souness was pitted against was a club travelling in one direction, and that direction was down.

We won the league in 1986 and we won the double in 1988.

Then we won nothing at all for seven years.

Not a solitary thing until the Scottish Cup in 1995.

The men running our club sat on a biscuit tin and told the support to be grateful.

Meanwhile Rangers 1872 were signing England internationals by the fistful.

Butcher himself, Chris Woods, Graham Roberts, Ray Wilkins, Mark Hateley, Gary Stevens, Trevor Steven.

And do you know why they could do that?

Because English clubs were banned from European football after Heysel.

So the best players in England came north to get a European tie, and there was only one club in Scotland with the money to take them.

It wasn’t us.

By 1993 our club was a shambles run by families who had long since stopped caring.

By March 1994 it was reported to be minutes away from the receiver.

Fergus McCann walked through the door and saved the whole thing.

That is the Celtic that Graeme Souness, and then Walter Smith, was up against.

McInnes isn’t facing a club sliding towards the wall, he’s facing the wealthiest football club this country has ever produced.

That’s the difference, and it’s not a small one.

Celtic go to Linz tomorrow evening with a job to finish.

Get that done, and the guts of £40 million drops into an account that already had somewhere north of £77 million sitting in it.

Add 95.5% season book renewals on top of that.

Then look across the city.

The Ibrox side are already out of the Europa League.

They’re five points behind us after two league games.

And they now have to navigate a Conference League play-off just to have European football at all.

Miss that, and the financial gap between the two clubs stops being a gap.

It becomes a chasm.

The same chasm that existed in 1986, except this time it’s pointing the other way.

Because what does a Conference League campaign actually pay?

A few million, a Thursday night in Cyprus, and a squad running on fumes by February.

Set that against the Champions League league phase and it isn’t even the same sport.

Souness had the richest club in Scotland behind him and a rival that couldn’t put a bid in for a bag of balls.

McInnes has a club that spent this summer signing free transfers and Championship squad fillers – hardly Butcher, Woods and Hateley, is it?

And he’s the one being told he can do a Souness.

On what money, exactly?

Souness had the biggest chequebook in Britain and a rival too broken to answer him, and Del boy has neither.

Now, in fairness to Butcher, he isn’t wrong about starts.

Two games and five points decide nothing in August.

And McInnes does have better resources at Ibrox than he ever had at Pittodrie, Rugby Park or Tynecastle.

Who am I to say he can’t string a run together between now and Christmas?

Maybe he will.

But Souness wasn’t the underdog in that story he keeps telling.

He was the man with the money.

McInnes is the man watching somebody else count theirs.

And that’s before we get to the small matter of his record.

One major trophy in the guts of twenty years in management.

Souness had already won three European Cups before he ever set foot in Govan as a manager.

Is that really the comparison Butcher wants to be making here?

Character and tradition and treading in the footsteps of the greats are all very nice.

None of it shows up on a balance sheet.

And here’s the part that should worry us far more than it worries them.

The only thing standing between Celtic and burying that lot for a decade is our own board.

We have the money.

We’ve always had the money.

Whether Dermot Desmond ever allows anybody to spend it is a different conversation altogether.

Because that’s the one thing 1986 and 2026 genuinely do have in common.

A Celtic board that can’t get out of its own way.

Souness didn’t beat us back then.

We beat ourselves, and he simply helped himself to what was lying about.

Ninety minutes in Austria tomorrow night, and Terry Butcher’s wee history lesson falls apart completely.

Get the job done in Linz.

Reality is a bitch…

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