AT the Assembly Rooms on Sunday, that wonderful actor and great Scottish patriot Brian Cox predicted that Donald Trump would not see out his four-year term.

I was in the audience and a great many heads were nodding in agreement – mine, too – when Cox explained that Trump’s concerns in life were all commercial, ie: how his business is affected. The Donald would go when Trump Inc really starts to suffer.

My only slight disagreement with that theory is that Trumpf, as Alex Salmond insists on calling him, will go as soon as he thinks he has become a loser. He knows that people have until now seen him as a winner, and when they start to see him as a loser, that’s when Trump will go.

So what’s that to do with the state of Scottish football, I hear you ask. Bear with me… I have long thought that the world is about winners and losers, and fortunately the vast majority of us spend our lives hovering between winning and losing.

We win some, we lose some, and only the very blessed win forever while only the truly damned lose forever.

That is true for sport, as it is for life. Nobody can win forever, just as nobody can lose forever.

You can argue this point as long as you like, but I will not waver from my view that luck has nothing to do with winning and losing. It’s all about planning and ‘the fix’.

Those who will tell you that betting, for example, is all a matter of deduction are usually not gamblers. For true gamblers, luck is the added element in their systems, or lack of them, for winning at horses, cards or even slot machines.

The real truth, as Gamblers Anonymous, will confirm is that you can actually lose everything for months or years on end if you are a chronic gambler, and the excuse will invariably be “I ran out of luck” or “I had a streak of bad luck”.

Bookmakers don’t do luck. If you do not believe me, go to the racecourse and ask yourself why you’re going home on the bus, while the bookies are charging off to the nearest five star restaurant in a top of the range Merc. You’ll think “just my bad luck” while the bookies will know that the market dictates that they will always win in the end, not least because they fix the market.

That’s not just my theory about gambling and betting. The truth about sport nowadays is that luck, good or bad, the rub of the green, is increasingly less and less to do with success or failure. In our major professional sports, winning and losing is all about money or the lack of it, and about the organisational “fix” that seems to always favour the big clubs over the small clubs.

The biggest sports clubs in this country are Celtic and Rangers. The former has hit on a winning formula developed over many years now, and tonight will almost certainly see them into the Champions League group stages and an income somewhere north of £30 million and possibly a lot more. Celtic deserve it because they did the job properly over the years following Fergus McCann’s arrival at Parkhead. No luck, just careful planning.

These are not happy days at Ibrox, but Rangers are still the second biggest club in the country in terms of their income, and that’s why they and Celtic appear to have an inordinate amount of influence over the ruling bodies of Scottish football – the fix. Rangers problems are too well known for me to bother repeating them, and the fallout from their Tax Cases is still ongoing, though can I say to those who are talking about a judicial review of the Lord Nimmo Smith Commission that there is no chance of it succeeding as the courts won’t entertain a consideration in 2017 of a matter that was dealt with in 2012.

Right now the Scottish Football Association has so far refused to entertain the Scottish Professional Football League’s welcome call for an independent review of how the administration and liquidation of Rangers was dealt with by the SFA and the then SPL.

By doing so the SFA adds to the perception that it is self-serving body. Personally, I would be absolutely amazed if a truly independent review of Scottish football’s governance and the way the Rangers situation was handled is ever conducted.

Yet it must happen, or else the SFA, SPFL, and every club involved in what happened back then – including Rangers and Celtic – will be tainted with the accusation that something went wrong, that rules weren’t followed, and that there was a fudge by clubs and governing bodies alike.

No doubt many fans of other clubs will say the horse bolted long ago, and Rangers’ own support will no doubt see it as a slight against them – it’s not, because they more than anybody deserve the truth – but the independent review of how numerous decisions were reached needs to take place.

For it was the system which was at fault, and it still is. That’s why I say the review should address wider issues such as the whole governance of Scottish football, not least the many conflicts of interest between the SFA and the SPFL. We could start with the public exposure of all e-mails and letters between the SFA and the various parties involved.

The fans deserve to know what went on and what is going on even now, and then we can all be winners because we will know whether Scottish football is being run properly. And if it is not, heads must roll.