Celtic Fans Need Serious Leaders. We Don’t Have Them At The Moment.

Last week, I was a virtual guest at a meeting between the Celtic Trust and the Celtic fan media sites. Nothing dramatic happened during that meeting; the Trust wants Celtic shareholders to help get them to 5% of the shareholding so that they can “hold the board to account.”

I’m in favour of it, although it’s a long-term plan which won’t help us in the here and now.

There was an open meeting last night in Grace’s. I decided not to attend it. I already knew exactly how that meeting was going to go.

Because in the interim, a senior member of a support’s group went on Twitter to suggest that fans at Motherwell attempt to down a police drone, a section of our support wrecked seats and plastered stickers all over them at that game, and on Wednesday night at Celtic Park a fan group put up a banner attacking Police Scotland and making sure that it slandered every single serving cop in the country, including those who are Celtic fans.

This on the day that the club sent them an open letter warning them of their conduct. Again. There’s almost certainly another conflict between the club and those fans coming and at the worst possible time. The whole thing is taking on a depressingly familair shape, and we simply cannot afford that to happen with the league race this close.

There was no point in attending that meeting last night in any capacity or form.

Because the point was to find a way to put pressure on the board, and a lot of these people are too busy waging their private wars against the police and the council and UEFA and anyone else who tells them that they have to obey the same laws and rules as everyone else.

And so the idea of pressuring this board to make meaningful changes inside Celtic will be lucky to see the light of day again this season unless things unravel in a big way. If we win the league, there will be no concerted fan campaign against these guys and the summer will bear a striking resemblence to the last one. Nothing changes, at least not for the better.

The focus on targeting the police is worriesome if I’m being generous.

I think policing at away games is becoming increasingly draconian. The video footage of a fan being physically held on the ground which was passed around the internet in the aftermath of the Motherwell game looks distrubing on the surface of it

But this Mexican Standoff with the police and the increased security at games was not only a predictable outcome, but this blog and others did predict it when flares became commonplace in the stands, which is to say nothing for other crazy behaviour.

A large police presence and the heavy hand that goes with it it is the all-too predictable consequence of people breaking seats, fighting with stewards, trying to enter without tickets and sneaking in flares. Act like hooligans and you give the police no choice. Overcrowding a section of a stand is dangerous even without flares and fireworks and nobody should be defending any of it.

The people responsible for that behaviour are a menace and I am sick and tired of writing about them because it only panders to their attention seeking.

I mean how do you expect Police Scotland to respond to some of this stuff? These guys don’t want a Hillsborough on their hands, and the more behaviour like this happens the more aggressive they have to be in trying to contain it. This thing is ugly and getting uglier and I am mystified by those who would seek to make matters worse.

I just don’t understand that at all.

And in the meantime, the people who run our club like it belongs to them and they can do as they please, and who have jeopordised this title race and are taking huge risks with the next one, sit in comfort and feel no pressure at all.

Where is their pressure on the board over the shameful state of the football department?

Are our fans really content with the cronyism and nepotism, or does that stuff matter less to them than other things, most of them nothing to do with Celtic? Why are our fan groups more interested in fighting with the authorities than gutting out their own club?

The worst of it is, this will damage any attempt to reform Celtic from the inside. It will stop smart, capable people from wanting to get involved in any campaign because of the very genuine fear that it will be hijacked for other purposes and in pursuit of other goals.

And that does worry me an awful lot, based on the reports back from last night’s meeting.

That endeavour will take serious, credible people and some of those who were the loudest voices at that meeting last night aren’t that, and any campaign which wants to elevate their cause as one of its objectives is not one that the club will take seriously.

There are good and dedicated people who want the things the majority of the fan-base want, and aren’t interested in seeing Celtic Park as a forum for geopolitics or picking fights with the council and the Scottish Government and certainly not with the police.

They just want Celtic to be all it can be.

And some of them were at that meeting last night, and some of them want to move forward in a positive and grounded way. I will do whatever I can to assist those people in that endeavour. I will keep on beating on this board when they deserve it, and for the things they’ve done wrong.

Some of the people at that meeting want to defend neds and even encourage ned behaviour; I’m not cool with that and I want no part of it. If you’ve ever seen Succession, you’ll understand what I mean when I compare them to the spoiled offspring of Logan Roy.

In other words, “not serious people.”

The other day, I wrote about how Hibs fans demanded their club cut our allocation for Easter Road at their AGM in part, they said, about the behaviour of our supporters.

And as I wrote last night they did that only for it to blow up in their faces when their fans made a spectacle of themselves at the derby.

But whilst I found that funny and I think their stance has got as much to do with them trying to gain a sporting advantage as anything else, the conduct of some of our fans doesn’t make our argument against that cut easier to sustain and in fact it runs counter to any attempt our club makes to negotiate a settlement on minimum allocations.

We will get nowhere with that whilst a section of our fan-base behaves as it does. Why, for example, would Motherwell entertain the idea of a minimum allocation guarantee after the pictures of all those broken seats from the weekend?

In their eyes the less of Celtic fans they see the better.

Try convincing them otherwise whilst this nonsense is going on; it’s a losing battle, and it’s not even fair to ask the club to fight it when they themselves know that there is a section of our support which is bang out of order.

All of this is to say that until folk get real there’s no point in having public meetings or anything else, and the idea of giving certain people actual power to dictate the policies of this club is even less appealing than leaving the current incumbents in charge, and regular readers will know full well how unacceptable I consider that scenario to be.

We badly need a Celts For Change 2 campaign. It’s imperative.

But you have to care who leads such a campaign, you have to care who you might be putting around that table and I cannot imagine some of these people in those roles, and before anyone makes the giant leap I’m certainly not suggesting that I should be because that is the furthest thing from my mind and I have exactly zero interest in assuming such a position.

We need leaders of gravitas, intelligence and a streak of pragmatism, people connected to reality, and who understand what’s possible and not.

When we have some, count me in and I’ll follow wherever they lead.