Kilmarnock’s Anti-Celtic Fan Pricing Policy Begs The Question: Is It Time To Boycott Away Games?
On a night when my mind is focussed on the prejudice many show towards Celtic fans, Kilmarnock have offered a sterling, and diabolical, example of it.
The Rugby Park club, who last year went grovelling to the bank, Sevco style, to clear their debts, have announced that they want to give visiting supporters the best possible deal by enacting the “Twenty’s Plenty” plan which has gone down well in England.
The basics of that plan are simple; football fans should be charged no more than £20 to watch their teams.
That’s laudable.
That’s a superb idea, and every club should be thinking about implementing it at once.
But they’ve made it clear that this applies to all clubs except one.
Yes, Celtic are that one.
Kilmarnock, you know, aren’t totally to blame here; their mistake is to broadcast the policy with a megaphone.
But other clubs do this to us too, and have been doing it for years.
Charging our fans different rates, as if Celtic fans have more disposable income than their counterparts at Hearts or St Johnstone or elsewhere.
Our fans get shafted.
And so too did the supporters of Rangers before they were liquidated.
What galls me is how much the supporters of these other clubs sneer at “Glasgow fans”, when we are the ones who put new roofs on their stands, and help them sign new players.
Remove our full houses from the equation and you’ll see changes happen there right quick.
If boycotts aren’t the answer then our club should calculate how many tickets to take for our fans based on how much we’re being overcharged.
If they’re charging Motherwell fans £10 and a couple of hundred of them show up for games and our supporters are being charged double that, then perhaps we should only take a hundred tickets for the game.
Let the stands sit empty if they want to play these wee games with us.
Cause here’s what they’ve overlooked, or perhaps just don’t care about; a stand full of Celtic fans paying £10 will still get them a ton more money than a three quarters empty one full of Inverness or Dundee fans.
These people are taking us for a ride and they’ve been doing it for years.
We should thank Kilmarnock for putting this debate out there, for letting us have it in a public fashion at last, instead of this being one of the Scottish game’s grubby wee secrets; Celtic fans are playing a role in building the infrastructure of other clubs, because those clubs are blatantly ripping the piss out of us every second week.
They won’t stop doing it until our fans stop letting them get away with it.
A Facebook campaign to boycott Rugby Park has just been launched.
But the issue goes beyond Kilmarnock. It’s something that ought to be on the agenda at our club’s next AGM.
We need to consider SFA/SPL rules to prevent fans getting hosed.
This kind of crap has gone on far too long.