Dundee Have Slightly Reduced The Celtic Fans Allocation For The Coming SPFL Fixture At Dens.

Celtic supporters’ clubs have been told that Dundee will be cutting our allocation for the coming fixture at Dens by around 500 seats.

It doesn’t sound much, but it reduces the total allocation for the game to around 3200. That’s still a lot better than other clubs are giving us, but there will doubtless be plenty of empty seats around the ground … so it’s a blow all the same.

The title race is close, and this is the first weekend of it. So, any cut is not what we wanted to hear, and you can bet that Kilmarnock, if they can, will slash the allocation for that game. This will be especially bad, considering that it could be a league decider.

It really is beyond a joke that we’ve gotten to this.

There needs to be some sort of system in place for away fans; the SPFL has been absolutely shocking in their response to this evolving scandal – and that’s what it’s become. This is now a clear-cut attack on sporting integrity, with clubs now using the lack of a proper away fan guarantee to tilt home games even more dramatically in their favour.

The selfishness of some of the clubs is off the charts here.

They claim to be putting home fans first; this would stand up to scrutiny if some of them had enough home fans to fill the seats, but the number of times we’ve played games away this season with a couple of hundred fans sitting in grounds with thousands of empty seats is a stain on the reputation of this league.

The governing bodies fail to govern, it’s as simple as that. Leaving it to the clubs is nothing but a cop-out. The clubs are the ones who have brought this in and so this system of self-regulation is absolutely farcical. What do we have ruling bodies for if not to intervene in matters such as this? What is the point in these people having authority if they won’t use it?

Celtic should be very concerned by all of this, and our fans already are. There are two away games left this season, but this will be waiting for us on the back end and as we move towards the next campaign, and you know that clubs are going to make ever deeper cuts into our ticket numbers, and especially when so many of them have complained about the conduct of certain supporter’s groups. Every season is going to get harder for away fans if this goes on.

The only positive – and it’s a small consolation to those who want to watch the team home and away – is that most of our away games are still live on TV, or available on pay-per-view. As I’ve written before, if we played in England this would not happen; we’re one of the few supports on this island who can virtually guarantee seeing all our games.

That doesn’t make this any better. In fact, the whole thing stinks. It is about time it was resolved properly, but as we head towards the end of this campaign there is no sign on the horizon that it will be; in fact, Celtic confirmed in their last Fan Forum meeting that there won’t be any change to it in the foreseeable future. That’s bad news for us all.