Labour MSP Slates The Council As He Details Celtic “Frustration” Over Fan Zone Stalemate.

Yesterday, the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney spoke to the Herald’s Matt Lindsay about attending the women’s league decider and speaking to the Celtic board. The discussion he had was in relation to our title winning party, and the criticism that followed it.

As regular readers will know, at a time when we were being hammered by critics, Sweeny spoke out and his intervention was most welcome.

We were being hit from all sides, and he stepped forward to suggest that the council and the Scottish Government stop treating football clubs and fans like punching bags, and instead that they actually talk to us and help with these things.

I thought that not only was it the most supportive statement I had heard, but in fact it was the only supportive statement we got at a time when the media was pounding us and demonising our supporters. It was brilliant. That’s why when I read Matt Lindsay’s article yesterday that I wasn’t surprised that Sweeney wasn’t dropping this issue.

But I was very surprised by what he had to say in the interview.

Sweeny’s talks with our board left him frustrated, but not half as frustrated as our board was when he spoke to them. They described to him how our efforts to engage with the council on a Fan Zone were met with almost incomprehensible unhelpfulness and what even sounded to me like some low-level hostility. Honestly, I found it shocking … not half as shocking as our board though.

When our club asked them for help setting up a Fan Zone they asked us why we couldn’t just do it in our stadium. Read that again. In. Our. Stadium. The difficulties with this are so numerous and obvious that you barely know where to start. Sweeney and the board discussed the absurdity of this by going over just a handful of the problems, around just one issue; the issue of licensing.

The club is only allowed to serve alcohol in certain parts of the stadium, within specific set hours and that the ground regulations themselves – as enforced by the council’s own licensing department – prohibit alcohol consumption within the stands. Some party. Stuck in your seat, separated from your mates, drinking Coke poured from plastic bottles into paper cups.

““It is not a practical proposition to use the stadiums in that way,” Sweeney said. “It would not be compatible with the licensing arrangements that the stadiums have with their safety certificates and so on. That also doesn’t recognise that fans want to gravitate towards the city centre locations where the pubs are. It is not really going with the grain with what is going on out there … there needs to be a bit of a reality check and a bit of leadership shown to try and build something out of what is currently an uncontrolled and rather chaotic event that is taking place annually.”

They don’t want to engage with the idea of moving outside of the ground where they might have to take a lead in the events, in helping us plan and run them.

Councils all over the UK do this all the time, as a matter of course, for major public events … as this site wrote recently, there are over 100 sectarian marches pencilled in for the next two months and every single one of them required that the council take some sort of organisational role.

The Glasgow Green annual disgrace is an event on the scale of the title party, and these are nodded through without difficulty.

Why is it better for our city to stage these annual bigot-fests than to give football fans a day when they can celebrate the title? The anti-football snobbery of our governing class is appalling, and as I said in the piece on John Mason, it’s only heightened by our knowledge that a lot of those who complain most loudly are themselves football fans.

Paul Sweeney spoke during the party furore about the money football fans bring to the city, and I thought that his £250,000 estimate was on the extraordinarily low side.

Politicians don’t have to do a proper economic impact analysis on football fans because, unlike in the US, we don’t have “franchises” which are often moved between cities … so the idea of Celtic uprooting and going somewhere else isn’t something these people ever need to worry about, and so they never have to undertake a proper calculation about the true financial upside of having major football clubs within their geographic locale.

But that number has to be in the millions, especially in a city like Glasgow which lives and breathes this stuff and where not only are the local fans using the pubs and bars around the ground every second week but where our long-distance fans are also renting hotel rooms and stuff in the city centre. If you’ve ever tried to get a Saturday night hotel in Glasgow when there’s been a major game on you know how expensive that is, and there’s an obvious reason why.

For all that, we’re treated with contempt because football clubs are basically stuck in the cities where they operate, and there is no incentive for these people to do us any favours. We’re essentially hostage to their whims, and there are plenty of them who take advantage of that fact. I don’t even know how we’d begin solving that, although refusing to give any more complimentary tickets to elected officials until we get some co-operation would be a help.

What would also help is if the club urged fans to take their own action and to lobby their elected officials directly. Believe me, that stuff works and it always has.

To do that, the club has to open up a more effective communication strategy … and we’ve made a mistake by not doing so already. A good one would involve the club actually telling us what is going on here, making a public statement and putting all this stuff where we can see it. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad Paul Sweeney spoke to the board and then spoke to Lindsay about those discussions, but we need to do more, and we need to do better.

I expect that we will win the next title, and so we’ll be back to this discussion before long. Celtic should anticipate that and get us out in front of it beforehand.