The Rangers crisis is a necessary reality check If you cock your ear northwards, you can pick up an odd hissing sound seeping down the M1 from Scotland. It's not a late winter gale heading from the Highlands. In fact, it's coming from what may be the first puncture in the most over-inflated object in the country: the football bubble. Earlier this week, Rangers Football Club announced that it had set in train the process of going into administration. This is not some minor footballing entity, a small-time club suffering from an excess of ambition, spending its way into oblivion in an Icarus-like attempt to fly to the top. This is one of Britain's finest sporting institutions, a club of history and gravitas. A club, moreover, that sees 50,000 people regularly clacking through its turnstiles and flogs dozens of shirts every day. If it were engaged in normal business, it would be a solid, respectable, cash-rich entity. But then, it isn't engaged in normal business. It's a football club. Travel anywhere in the world outside of North America and you might be forgiven for thinking British football was in the ascendant. The colours of Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal are worn from Bangkok to Banjul. I have seen Rangers shirts in Addis Ababa and Accra. Yet while our clubs are earning more money than ever, none of it appears to have stuck: last season, only four clubs in the Premier League made a profit. In Scotland, where the money coming in from television started to dry up several years ago, the inability to control outgoings has become endemic. Sure, in Rangers" case, there are mitigating circumstances. In fact, the conspiracy theorists in the polarised environment of Glasgow football are having a field day. Administration, they claim, is no more than a cunning tactic to avoid paying a substantial overdue tax bill. Get the Revenue off your back by going bust: well, it's a strategy. But whatever the alleged shenanigans in the boardroom, the fact remains that if Rangers can go bust, anyone can. Fifteen years ago, Alan Sugar observed that money in football is like prune juice: it goes in one end and is immediately spurted out the other, in the form of unsustainable wages for players and payments to their agents. Yet no one took heed - including Sugar himself, who as chairman of Tottenham handed over a king's ransom to those selfsame parasites. Now that Rangers have restored football's connection to financial reality, Sugar's words may finally be noted. Or maybe not. This is football, after all - a business in which not even going into administration brings about a return to sobriety. The other day, I visited Crystal Palace's training ground. This is a club in the second tier of English football, with a turnover far less substantial than Rangers. Since 1998, the club has twice gone into administration, most recently in January 2010. Not that you'd know it from the players" car park, which resembles a Mercedes dealership. No more than 18 months after the club was perched on the lip of financial oblivion, nobody in the first team drives a motor worth less than £70,000. So if they follow football precedent, that noise coming out of Rangers may not be the first hissing of a puncture after all. It may just be a gigantic raspberry, being blown loudly in the direction of common sense.