It’s Time For Celtic To Deliver A Message, And An Ultimatum, On The Away Allocation Crisis.

Hibs had their AGM the other night. Amazing that fans of a club in such a shocking state have time to rail against other fans singing songs they don’t like and the letting off of flares by certain away supporters.

However you feel about flares or certain chants, it’s pretty remarkable that supporters at a club which continues to flounder in abject mediocrity can be so focussed on the fans of other clubs. You would think they’d have more to worry about.

But again, a group of fans is demanding that their club cut the allocations of our supporters. This insanity spread from Ibrox and now toxifies the game. And it is high time that Celtic drew a line in the sand over those and took definitive action on this.

The utter stupidity and selfishness of the clubs in this league is dreadful to watch. Decades of pent-up jealousy and bitterness has erupted since Ibrox took its wholly self-defeating decision to cut our numbers at their ground. Every club in this league now feels free to follow suit. The away match experience is being eradicated, not distilled but eradicated.

But only for our fans and theirs. Their attempts to dress this up as being against pyro and “sectarian singing” are transparently false. Hibs and Hearts still give each other thousands of tickets, and that reveals this for the naked attempt at gaining a sporting advantage that it is, and I can’t believe we’re allowing it to happen. Celtic shouldn’t be tolerating this.

Clubs who cut our allocation to the hundreds should be told we’re turning them down and that their own fans are banned from Celtic Park until we get an equitable solution to this.

I don’t know why we’re soft-soaping this any longer, and if the governing bodies don’t want to act and safeguard the rights of away fans then we shouldn’t allow any at Celtic Park. That will slap the sanity into some of these clubs and force the governing body to actually govern.

This long since passed the point of being ridiculous. These other clubs are run by petty, small-minded people who would actually voluntarily lose money than treat our supporters with a modicum of respect. The prejudice being shown here is sickening and nothing shows up those who run this game more than that they refuse to do something about it.

Their idea of putting it to a vote is a non-starter. That’s not a way of showing responsibility. The clubs who are doing this aren’t going to vote against it, and we all damned well know it. Away fans have no rights in Scottish football, and that would not be permitted anywhere else in the game, and since the SPFL has no interest in granting them we need to force them to.

Our club should make one effort – one public effort – to resolve this crisis, and publish an open call for clubs in this league to respect the rights of away supporters and legislate for change immediately, without further delay. And if they won’t we must reserve the right to do whatever it takes to push the SPFL and the SFA towards taking it out of their hands.