Celtic Will Get 800 Ibrox Tickets Next Year. The Question Is, Will We Accept Them?

As everyone is doubtless aware, Celtic has been told that it will only get 800 tickets for the first game at Ibrox next season, as the new Ibrox CEO digs in his heels and refuses to entertain the idea of giving us more.

This changes nothing, and that’s sort of the problem. Because all the problems Celtic had with this arrangement remain, and unless something big changes we have a choice to make.

Don’t rule out our club turning down the allocation. It could happen.

We are in no mood to play these silly little games of theirs indefinitely.

They have endangered our fans already with this nonsense and if they’re going to continue it then our club has to decide if it is going to continue sending our supporters into a potentially harmful situation.

And I don’t think there’s much appetite to do so at Celtic Park. I think we’ve done everything we can to resolve this, and the will to do that is receding. We’re not going to get a scintilla of consideration or respect from them, and that’s been evident for a long time. Ibrox would be content to make this a permanent arrangement.

We recognise that’s manifestly unsafe.

We’ve already turned down tickets once. If we do it again that too might become permanent.

Clubs across the country are doing all they can now to restrict away fans.

This occasionally means many thousands of empty seats at grounds. The SFA has shown no inclination to get involved and set minimum ticketing arrangements … and it would be easy to do.

I’m not an expert at this, but the rulebook says that an away side has to make “reasonable provisions” for away fans.

Clubs should need to set aside a minimum number of seats – say 10%, which at Ibrox is 5,000 and 6,000 at Celtic Park – for away supporters. Clubs which cannot sell out their own stadiums should be obliged to offer tickets to away fans.

If that caused stewarding headaches then maybe it would force some of them to make halfway decent provisions for our fans in the first place, and allocate us a proper area in their ground instead of jamming us into single stands or bits of them as they do now.

There is a legislative way out of this shambolic and dangerous situation, and it should have been sought for fans before we got here. Instead we’ve got this shambles wherein our supporters need to run the gauntlet at their ground and where at others many thousands of us can be locked outside whilst TV cameras pan around empty seats.

Ibrox’s continuing excuse for this – and one which is swallowed by their credulous and thick fan-base – is that the tickets are already on offer to their own fans and that this can’t be changed.

Bollocks. I have a season ticket at Parkhead which does not guarantee me a seat for a game against the Ibrox club, which I have to buy separately for those games.

That’s a provision that could be easily inserted into the terms and conditions for existing season ticket holders in the Broomloan Road stand, and those fans would still have tickets for every other match at the ground.

Every other one.

To hide behind a pitiful excuse like that is bad enough, but it’s worse that the media lets them away with it.

Bisgrove says there will be “discussions” about future seasons, but that’s kicking the can and a transparent attempt to get us to accept this situation now in exchange for “jam tomorrow.”

We shouldn’t accept that for one minute.

When our board is faced with the decision about what to do with that paltry 800 allocation I won’t envy them.

But I will back them, especially if they decide to reject it as unsatisfactory on the same grounds as last time.

If we get enhanced security guarantees before that, then fine.

But I don’t think there’s any way that they could make that experience safe, even if they cared about doing so. As long as they persist in this I would prefer it if none of our fans went to a ground where their safety cannot be guaranteed.

I suspect people at Celtic Park feel the same way.