By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent
The nervous coughing you hear is from Rangers fans watching events round a boardroom table like gamblers waiting for the dealer to turn the next card.
A week ago they couldn't have told Andrew Ellis from Webb Ellis, but I'll bet his name has been Googled into submission since news of his proposed takeover of the Ibrox club broke last Saturday.
For months Dave King, the South African ex-pat was the only genuine contender for Sir David Murray's shareholding; the rest of them were just pretenders.
Mostly, it was phoney interest. Football's equivalent of what the car salesmen call tyre-kickers.
But the 41-year-old Londoner has the ear of the Murray Group, the club and most significantly of all, the bank.
He's a player in this game all right.
Andrew Ellis has been linked with a takeover at Ibrox
Meanwhile, King may be about to lose the crown he craves most. But here's the thing: should the fans welcome Ellis with ticker tape or a baseball bat?
They'll not like his profession - property developer. They tend, for football clubs, to have the smell of foxes at the rabbits' burrow.
Nine years ago Ellis launched a £9m takeover bid for Queen's Park Rangers which involved plans to move the club from Loftus Road in west London to a stadium near Heathrow Airport.
The inference was that the area round the ground would have been ripe for property development.
What he forgot of course is that if you move to say, Harrow, you aren't really Queen's Park Rangers any more. Football clubs are tribal; you can't do a flitting and retain the soul.
They moved Clyde to Cumbernuald, but they forgot to divert the river from Rutherglen.
I have no evidence, of course, that Mr Ellis has any such jiggery-pokery in mind at all.
In fact, I would guess that Sir David has already asked for guarantees that the club will remain nailed to the floor of Govan and indeed that Murray Park, much more desirable - I would have thought - for the building of houses remains green and pleasant.
Sir David Murray controls about 90% of the shares at Ibrox
So what's it all about then? Why would a 41-year-old man with no ties want to invest his millions in a city and a club which don't tug at his heartstrings?
He has already dabbled briefly in Northampton, where he departed as mysteriously as he arrived.
So he will have no problem in posing, chameleon like, in the requisite red, white and blue scarf should the photo opportunity arrive.
But then perhaps the truth is that he sees a real business opportunity here; that Rangers, whose debt has been reduced to the high twenties in terms of millions and who are about to pocket another Champions' League swagbag, are actually not a bad buy at £33m.
Of course, he would rather be in the Premier League in England, but you can hardly get a player for that kind of investment never mind a club.
The future of Glasgow Rangers is in the hands of a chosen few - including John Greig - who have to make a judgement call on this man and the colour of his money.
They will already have made up their minds on the colour of his nose, and blue it is certainly not.
But does it really matter that a new owner is not a supporter of the club? Sir David wasn't when he bought Rangers and indeed once nursed a dream to throw his money at Ayr United.
But over nearly quarter of century he allowed the club to live a dream and indeed be re-invented by blowing apart a signing policy which was a disgrace.
Sir David allowed his managers to buy players the likes of which may never be seen again in this country and lost millions of his own in the process.
I hope history will judge him more kindly that some sections of the Rangers support who are big on opinions but short on memory.
Your man Ellis - if he is successful in his wooing - has a hard act to follow.
Turning the training facility named after the outgoing owner into a housing scheme would be a bad start.
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