Celtic Fans Do Not Want A Cheerleading Media, Just One That Reports The Facts.

Yesterday was another red-letter day for the Scottish press and for the club at Ibrox. Just when you thought the situation over there couldn’t get murkier, crazier, or more complicated, the Elite case has reared its head yet again.

And amidst all this are player interviews detailing dressing room summits, which have frustrated and angered a fanbase that was already on edge. Theirs is a club right now that is locked in a doom spiral—a club that cannot seem to get out of its own way, and one that you cannot view from the outside without the clear belief that it’s coming apart at the seams.

But one of the big stories, of course, is the Celtic ticket standoff and how that story has grown and swelled, although this issue was meant to be settled.

This website wrote a piece on this yesterday, and we laid out once again the work our club has done behind the scenes to sort this matter out and bring it to a conclusion.

In spite of all our best efforts, the Ibrox club refuses to negotiate in anything like good faith, and this has led to yet another collapse in talks and the voiding of an agreement which everyone thought had brought this to a close.

One of the problems that Celtic has with sorting this situation out is the attitude of the mainstream media. And yesterday, Celtic fans embarrassed these guys again with a series of articles, including the one on this site, which defended our position as a club and presented the facts in their full context.

We wouldn’t have to do this if the mainstream media were better at doing its job.

And last night, on the website Celts Are Here, the full measure of the media’s incompetence and bias was laid out clearly when they produced an outstanding report on exactly why Celtic are angry and how little concern Ibrox has shown for the agreement the clubs had reached.

Celts Are Here’s article laid out Celtic’s efforts in documents and pictures, showing that we applied for planning permission from the council to put in place additional measures to guarantee safety and security months ago.

Not only is the planning permission report in the article, but the pictures of the work that Celtic did at the ground—work which is already complete—are also in the piece.

What makes this absolutely incredible, and leaves the media with no place to hide as they look to turn this into a piece of mutual tit-for-tat, is that Celtic has unarguably complied with our obligations and even spent serious money putting those measures in place.

In contrast, the club from Ibrox has done the sum total of nil.

This agreement explicitly committed them to put in place measures similar to ours, which guaranteed the safety of our visiting fans for when that game takes place in January, and it explicitly commits them to do that work in an appropriate time frame. According to the documents that were published online last night by the Celts Are Here website, they have not even applied for permission to do the work, far less got it underway.

The Ibrox club’s statement on this, which the Scottish media has treated as fact, has claimed that they are in the process of that work. And this, as Celts Are Here has revealed, is misleading if we’re giving it the most generous interpretation.

Ibrox is lying dormant at the moment. Games cannot be played there because of the Copland Road stand shambles. This work should have been proceeding in tandem with that. This work should be far advanced by now, and they haven’t even applied for permission to get it started. They have blatantly violated the agreement in both word and spirit.

And look, the guys at Celts Are Here, they don’t have special investigative powers.

They’re just like me and the rest of the bloggers—just hard-working guys who care about our club and want to give the fans as much information about the goings-on there as they can. The mainstream media used to have that role, and it is not beyond the skillset of anyone in a mainstream media newsroom to check this stuff out for themselves before they publish Ibrox’s self-serving, dissembling statement and accept it as fact.

As I said yesterday, that statement made no attempt to deny that Celtic have worked on this and got our house in order, whereas they are still behind.

But that’s only half the story, and Celts Are Here have filled in the blanks. Ibrox also claims that they have triggered the reciprocal clause which denies us tickets for their ground. And this is also a piece of typical sleight of hand, which a better media would be calling out.

They aren’t denying us tickets for Ibrox at all.

They know, in fact, that if their security and safety measures aren’t in place, Celtic will refuse the allocation. And as things stand, we would not allow our fans to be subjected to the level of risk that ground still represents. They can call this whatever they want, and the media can report it however it likes, but this is first and foremost about safety, and our club will not compromise on that, whether the media is writing the truth about it or not.

To be blunt, this situation might not have lasted quite so long if the media had presented this in its proper context from the start. But from almost the minute we cut the Ibrox allocation in response to their cut to ours, the press has tried to maintain that both clubs are equally to blame, although this is not the case and has never been the case.

Even the decision to refuse tickets for Ibrox was spun as an escalation, although at that time we had not yet banned their fans from Celtic Park.

We only made that decision when it became clear that they had no intention of taking our concerns seriously and, in fact, intended to spin our decision as some kind of victory for them to their own supporters.

And after many weeks and further efforts on the part of our club to negotiate a settlement that made sense and protected our fans from future harm at that ground—efforts which were rebuffed—then, and only then, did we take the decision that their fans would not be welcome at Celtic Park.

That was the point at which the press should have come down on our side and made it clear that the safety of supporters was the paramount consideration, and that any scenario where Celtic believed that our fans were in an unsafe environment was unacceptable.

It should have been the point where the media demanded that the Ibrox club get its house in order and started to call for action from the governing body.

The media’s role in this should not be ignored or underappreciated. They have been a lamentable failure right from the start, and it shouldn’t surprise any of us that they’re still failing to do the most basic parts of this job, even now.

Congratulations to the Celts Are Here website for their outstanding piece last night, which laid out the facts on this situation for everyone to see.

It’s a job that any mainstream journalist in this country could have done, that all of them should have done, and that none of them bothered to do.

You can read the Celtis Are Here piece at the link below.

The Real Story Behind the Derby Allocation Cut