MEGALOMANIACS are not always ill-intentioned; for every annexation of the Sudetenland, there’ll be some milder character indulging a gentler personal fantasy. In both cases, though, it all tends to end in tears.

Gretna FC may have played their last game of football and reportedly not too many people in Scotland are shedding tears over that. There is the whiff of schadenfreude and spite rolling around the glens, a low chuckling and one or two hurrahs. Gretna are skint, in administration with 10 points deducted, about to be relegated (if they survive) and their benefactor, Brooks Mileson, is apparently on his deathbed.

This is the way fairy tales scripted by Sam Peckinpah would end, except that Gretna’s story isn’t a fairytale, just the consequence of well-intentioned megalomania. “Told you so,” most Scottish pundits say - and they did, much though it may have reeked, at the time, of wishful thinking.

Mileson should have bought a PlayStation rather than Gretna FC. Then he could have indulged himself without incurring the wrath of almost every other Scottish football club – both those that he single-handedly out-bought in trying to get successive promotions and the Scottish Premier League (SPL) teams forced to travel to Motherwell and play in front of 2,000 bemused people.

Mileson, a well-meaning chap whose generosity to a vast array of small-time clubs is unquestioned and laudable, subverted the whole of Scottish football by paying outrageous wages and buying short-term success. Even more, he subverted his own belief in the power of the ordinary supporter.

Mileson has continually helped supporters’ clubs with his money and advice, yet in Gretna he created the sort of beast that most terrifies the average fan – the artificial club kept afloat by a man’s ludicrous, market-distorting largesse, trampling over those whose existence is down to hard-core support. It didn’t help, I reckon, that Mileson was an Englishman.

He wanted Gretna to play in the SPL and, in ensuring that they did with three back-to-back promotions, he spent money with abandon and wilful incompetence. It is reckoned that the wage bill when Gretna were in Division One was about £50,000 – at least three times the next highest spender (St Johnstone, who harbour an especial grudge).

How did he think it would end? Did he expect to live forever? Very rich people sometimes do, but they are eventually proved wrong. What did he think would happen to Gretna after his demise? The border town has a population of about 2,700, enough to sustain a mid-table Highland League side (or one from the Northern League, from which Gretna originated). Or maybe, at a small pinch, a place in the Scottish Third Division; Gretna’s average attendance in that league was about 450, which would put them third from bottom.

It is those 450 we should feel sorry for. I suspect they never yearned for a place in the SPL; they were content to support their club and revel in much smaller triumphs. Some will, understandably, have been carried along by Mileson’s determination to “live the dream”, or whatever fatuous cliche is appropriate, but it is cruel that they may end up with no club at all. They are marooned way out of their depth with the oxygen suddenly cut off, and the sharks are circling.

Football is especially vulnerable to the well-meaning megalomaniac. Someone with a lot of money and the look of destiny in his eyes. Without Dave Whelan, Wigan would most likely be scrabbling around the upper reaches of what normal people call Division Four. But Whelan built slowly and carried the town with him; Wigan’s average attendance this season is 18,860 – bottom of the Premiership by some margin, but still a remarkable sixfold increase on their crowds 20 years ago. Nor have they overspent; if Whelan left tomorrow, Wigan would suffer, but they would not go under. Steve Gibson has ensured that Middlesbrough exist perhaps 10 or 12 places ahead of what you might consider their natural berth; a modest and sustainable ambition. Until the signing of Afonso Alves, who looks as comfortable playing football as does a fish riding a bicycle, his purchases were sensible and mid-priced.

A lot of football supporters, those arrivistes who attach themselves to the top clubs of the Premier League, are attempting to acquire vicarious success. Mileson, I suppose, was doing the same thing, except on a rather grander scale. Shortly before the end of his life, in April 1945, as the Soviet shells were raining down on Berlin, Hitler was heard to say: “In the end, one regrets having been so benevolent.” Ah, yes, that would be it, Adolf. But one really does regret that Brooks Mileson had been so benevolent.