Ibrox’s Anti-Celtic Ticket Policy Screwed Their Own Fans In Ways They Never Intended.

In 1958, the Chinese Government under Mao Zedong decided that it would eliminate “four pests” which had plagued various parts of the country. If ever you wanted to highlight an example of mind-bending stupidity, something ill-thought out and reckless, this would be close to the top of the list.

No thought whatsoever was given to what might happen.

The “pest” which proved easiest to deal with was the sparrow.

According to data, each sparrow in the country ate four pounds of grain per year.

Eliminating them was supposed to improve the nation’s agricultural output and help feed the people. People were encouraged to shoot them, trap them, stomp them and chomp them by whatever means necessary.

Many millions of Chinese citizens did just that. And plenty of sparrows died.

But the sparrows formed a critical part of the agricultural chain.

They ate locusts.

When the sparrow numbers had declined enough, there was a tipping point and the locusts thrived. Swarms of them destroyed entire crops. Between these destructive insects and a series of storms, China was plunged into a famine which killed 45 million people.

Oops. This is the Law Of Unintended Consequences measured in blood, an awe inspiring example of folly.

It’s what happens when people follow through on an idea without thinking about the aftershocks. And in human endeavour this happens all the time. There is a classic example of that kind of stupidity right across the city, in this ticket affair.

Do you know how long clubs, every club in the league in fact outside Glasgow, had to listen to its own supporters asking them to cut the allocations for ourselves and the teams across town?

It was a talking point for years.

Nobody ever took it seriously.

Clubs were not prepared to do without the money.

Clubs didn’t want to be seen to be pandering to the fans in that way.

And then Ibrox cut Celtic’s tickets to 10% of what they had been.

There were one or two clubs who had flirted with doing this, and Kilmarnock even tried it before they realised it was costing a fortune, but it was a limited phenomenon with little actual traction.

Since they did that to us this problem has multiplied exponentially. Whatever “understandings” there were are now gone, over with, and away fans from our clubs are severely restricted almost everywhere.

Some think changes like this were coming; I never saw any sign that it was going to be a widespread problem.

They broke the dam with their decision about our fans, and the thinking in the boardrooms became “well if they do that to each other then nobody’s going to care if we give them only a stand each.”

It’s been like that after since, and this is the way it’s going to be.

People have to reconcile themselves to the idea that we might not be going back, not to anything like the way that it used to be.

Ibrox opened the floodgates and their own fans have paid an enormous price as a consequence … and it is high time some of them opened their eyes to the scale of what their club has done, not just in terms of their ability to visit Celtic Park but in helping to create the conditions under which other clubs have treated them the same way.

They normalised it.

They legitimised the views of all those fan groups who had been screaming for this at other clubs. Still they continue to blame Celtic, still they continue to act as if the two things are entirely unconnected.

You know how Mao tried to solve the enormous crisis he had engineered?

He imported 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union. Talk about too little too late.

But you know what? At least he recognised both the problem and the role he had played in creating it.

This crisis is only just starting, and in case anyone hasn’t noticed this it’s getting worse.

Ibrox isn’t even attempting to mitigate it.

They are prolonging and escalating it instead.