League Cup Sponsors Should Not Accept A Half Empty Stadium For A Celtic Game.

Kilmarnock’s decision to restrict Celtic’s fans to a single stand when we visit their ground in the League Cup is as crappy as it was expected. We know that the home support isn’t going to turn out in big numbers for that game, and this in spite of seeing off The Mooch and his team at the weekend. They will be lucky to get half a full house.

How much longer is the SPFL going to tolerate this, as an organisation? It’s an embarrassment. That game will be televised. What must people outside Scotland think watching a major cup tie in front of thousands of empty seats? It’s beyond a joke.

I’m beginning to think that the only way this issue is properly resolved – since nobody in the governing bodies seems to care and Celtic are inexplicably silent on it – is for sponsors to start saying “wait a minute here …” and I can’t help but think they will.

Celtic fans will get just under 4000 tickets for a 16,000 ground where the average attendance, including away fans, is just 7000. That is a scandal, but it’s what we’ve come to expect in this league which is plagued by selfishness and run on stupidity.

If major commercial partners do decide at some point that enough is enough then those who run the game here will only have themselves to blame for it. They have allowed this situation to spiral out of control, when fixing it would have been a simple matter of guaranteeing a minimum away ticket allocation based on the respective average crowds of the two clubs.

This is beyond a joke now. That game, which should be a showpiece for Scottish football, will instead show how backwards, parochial and small-minded our sport is instead. How long advertisers, sponsors and other commercial partners want to be associated with this mess is the question which might decide how long it lasts.