When the window shuts this evening, the ‘Rangers’ will have outspent Celtic – and a board who only know how to sell should be terrified

By 17.00 this evening, we’ll know for certain.

If the Ibrox side get Kevin Kelsey through the door before the clock runs down, they will have outspent Celtic in this transfer window.

Read that back to yourself.

A club with no European football to fund, no group stage money coming, no pot of gold at the end of August, will have laid out more on players than the reigning champions.

And here’s where it stands as things sit this morning.

The Ibrox club have spent somewhere in the region of £30.55 million on incomings, and recouped around £15.10 million on the way out.

Celtic have spent roughly £35.15 million, and banked around £53.95 million.

So on gross spend, we are still ahead of them – just.

But gross spend was never the story, was it?

Their window leaves them carrying a net spend of about £15.45 million.

Ours leaves us sitting on a net transfer profit of about £18.80 million.

Not a break-even.

A profit.

Every single summer, this board find a way to finish August richer than they started it

Their record signing of the window is Min-su Kim at £8.5 million.

Ours is Kasper Høgh at £11 million, and he’s already sitting in the treatment room.

The Scotsman had the combined ‘O** F***’ outlay at around £45 million a fortnight ago, and it has only climbed since.

Because they haven’t stopped.

By close of business today they will have brought 14 players into Ibrox.

Fourteen.

Fourteen players, in one summer, at a club with no European football to pay for any of it?

Whether a single one of them can actually play remains to be seen.

But that isn’t the point, and it never was.

They are not afraid to work in a deficit, and that is the one thing our board have never once been willing to do

The Americans have looked at the accounts, looked at the gap between the two clubs, and decided that the gap matters more than the accounts.

They aren’t waiting on the perfect deal.

They aren’t holding out for a 19 year old project player at the magic price point with a sell-on clause attached.

They’ve backed Derek McInnes – a manager whose season so far has been, let’s be charitable, unconvincing – with fourteen bodies and a hole in the balance sheet.

And they’ve done it after being dumped out of Europe by a Czech pub team.

Back on 21 August, after the first leg against Jablonec, McInnes was talking a good game about what was still to come. Here is what he had to say at the time:

“We’re trying in a few different areas to get the right players in, players with the right quality.”

“We’ve been really focused on certain ones.”

“I’m quite hopeful we can do one in the next few days.”

As it turns out, he wasn’t kidding.

They kept right on signing long after the European money disappeared.

Now ask yourself when Celtic last behaved that way.

Ask yourself when Michael Nicholson last spent money he hadn’t already raised in advance.

Can you think of a single instance?

No, neither can I.

Our board see a hole in the accounts and reach for the panic button, theirs see a hole and reach for the chequebook

We are Chicken Licken.

We spend every summer running about the place telling anyone who will listen that the sky is coming down.

That the Champions League money might not arrive.

That the wage bill is unsustainable.

That we simply must post a profit or the whole thing caves in on itself.

Of course, it never does cave in.

It just gets quietly banked, and we go into September a player or two short.

Meanwhile the club across the city is behaving like a gambling addict at the roulette table.

Black.

Black again.

Then black one more time, and this time it’s coming in.

And what happens to us on the day it finally does?

And here is the uncomfortable part of all this.

If you throw enough shit at a wall, some of it is bound to stick.

Fourteen signings is an awful lot of shots at goal.

Scary prospect, isn’t it?

Whether any of this works for them gets settled on the pitch, and the pitch means the derbies

Two meetings, back to back, coming down the road at us.

That is where we find out what £35 million of Ibrox recruitment is genuinely worth.

If they take 3 points and a League Cup win, then we have a real problem on our hands.

Not a manufactured SMSM problem.

A real one.

Because two results in a row over Celtic would kick-start their entire season, and it would do it at the exact moment our squad is being held together with tape.

Martin O’Neill is already short.

Johnston, Tierney, Høgh, Osmand – the treatment room has been busier than the training pitch.

And we’ve sold Arne Engels and Daizen Maeda for a combined fortune that has not been replaced.

Then again, maybe not one of their fourteen can play a lick.

Maybe Min-su Kim turns out to be exactly what a £8.5 million punt on a Segunda division winger usually turns out to be.

I genuinely hope he doesn’t.

But hope isn’t a strategy, and it has never once been a transfer policy.

At the time of writing, confirmation has just come through that Kevin Kelsey has signed.

It’s official now that they have spent more money than us.

💙 We can today announce the signing of Kevin Kelsy from @TimbersFC on an initial four-year deal with the option of an additional year.

👉 https://t.co/pasouSrKVJ pic.twitter.com/uQtkIBFgjA

— Rangers Football Club (@RangersFC) September 3, 2026

The lesson of this window isn’t that the Ibrox side have suddenly become good.

It’s that they are WILLING.

Willing to spend, willing to lose money on it, and willing to come after us.

Our board are willing to do precisely one thing, and that’s bank the difference.

We’ll find out soon enough which of the two approaches wins a football match…

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