Celtic’s Decision To Withold Ibrox’s Tickets Was Always In The Cards. We Don’t Trust A Word They Say.

Yesterday was an almost perfectly surreal day in SevcoLand.

It had it all. If you’re a Celtic fan looking for the full gamut of Ibrox pain and torture porn, then yesterday was a day to remember and treasure.

It started with the aftermath of the game the night before; the interviews, the fan reactions, the hysterical behaviour of the BBC Scotland anchors, and the counting of the momentous costs and lost revenues and the knock-on effects in their transfer dealings.

And then, of course, the almighty additional boost to Celtic’s finances.

Next, we had the story of Dessers falling out with his own fans. Then there was the tale of the defender who changed the team’s tactics on the fly, moved out of position, and cost them the second goal. And let’s not forget the incredible spectacle of them sacking one of their own staff because he had once worked for Celtic, was a diehard Celtic fan, and had made some rather unsavoury comments about the Ibrox club on social media in the past.

I mean, yesterday had it all. You couldn’t have made it up. And on top of it all, Celtic chose that very day to announce the record signing of Adam Idah, paid for in part by the £4 million boost to the coffers we get from being the only Scottish team in the Champions League Groups.

The day was so full of great stories that I didn’t even have time to fit in the last of them, the final slap in the face delivered to their club and hilariously administered by ours. Shortly after the Idah announcement, Celtic sites broke the story that the Ibrox fans would not be getting their tickets for Celtic Park for the match at the start of next month.

Regular and careful readers of this blog will be aware that this was always on the cards because the agreement struck between Celtic, Sevco, the SPFL, and the SFA was contingent on certain conditions being met in a timely fashion. One of those conditions was that both clubs get their safety measures in order before a single ticket was handed out.

I’ve never been convinced that these first games would be played in front of both home and away fans because Ibrox has never done anything in good faith. This has been clear for a very long time. At every stage in this ongoing affair, they have attempted to gain whatever advantage they could, using every cynical trick imaginable.

The simple fact is that Celtic’s patience on this matter was exhausted a long time ago. This club grew tired of the evasions, the obfuscations, and all the slippery efforts to play the media and put us on the wrong side of this, even as they were willing to jeopardise our supporters’ safety by showing a casual disregard for it right down the line.

We have warned them at every juncture that our tolerance for this had a very limited shelf life and that we would simply not accept any scenario which compromised the safety of our fans. At every stage, our wholly reasonable requests have been ignored, brushed aside, or hand-waved away.

Finally, we resorted to drastic measures and, for the first time in living memory, violated an SPFL regulation to bring this matter to a close by withholding tickets from their fans and refusing an allocation for their ground.

Celtic has tried to play fair, and had they stuck to the letter of the agreement that was reached between the clubs and the governing bodies, we would not be taking this action.

The agreement bound both clubs to take the necessary security and safety measures in tandem. And although Celtic has taken those steps, the club from Ibrox has not—a fact they freely admitted in their dissembling statement last night, which seeks to blame Celtic for this even as they carefully word it to admit that they haven’t yet done what they were obliged to do.

And that’s the key here.

They were obliged to have those measures in place at the same time as us. And the reason for that is simple: Celtic does not trust that after it has given their club tickets for Celtic Park that the necessary work will be carried out before we get to Ibrox.

Although that game is not for several months, the only way that Celtic can have that assurance is if the work is done now, and if the measures are in place before they come to Celtic Park. There is no excuse for them not doing that work; it would be in Broomloan Road end, not in the Copland, which is where they are currently in a disastrous state.

And that’s another thing; if you read between the lines here, you get the distinct impression that we’re not entirely convinced that the game will be played at Ibrox anyway; if they are offering us the same bland, meaningless statements they are issuing to their own fans then our club is perfectly entitled to dismiss anything they tells us as worthless.

Celtic does not have any confidence or put any faith in Ibrox’s cheap talk and bland assurances. We have no reason to believe any of it, because our club has been here before, and before, and before in the course of this. They have tried to duck out of their responsibilities at every single stage.

So that club can cry all it wants, express dismay, and rally its fans until the cows come home, but none of that will change the facts on the ground here, which are that their club has once again failed to meet its obligations and cannot be trusted to hold to any agreement, far less to keep its word.

This is the club that has benched one of its players because playing him in one more match will trigger a wage increase that they don’t want to pay.

A club that has misled its own supporters about the likely timeline of the Ibrox renovation.

This is the club that was recently in court being sued by a former commercial partner because it broke an agreement in violation of a written contract. A club that played a friendly match at Murrayfield against Manchester United in pre-season as part of another out-of-court settlement because they violated a contractual agreement to play the Australian tour.

And during this long-running ticket standoff, they have misled the media, lied to our club, and pulled tickets at the last minute, using the COVID crisis as a pretext, and over and over again refused to take seriously our very real concerns over the safety of our fans.

Put simply, they’ve given us no reason why we should trust them. And that’s why the agreement had ironclad provisions in it and clearly specified conditions which had to be met before they would get a single match ticket. And they have failed to do it.

Having spoken to people at Celtic on several occasions over the last few months, seeking clarity on where the Ibrox fans would be housed, I have received the clear impression over and over again that we were dissatisfied with their compliance—or lack thereof—and that something like this was more than possible and, in fact, increasingly likely.

I am not surprised in the least that this has happened, and I can only commend Celtic for doing what every other organisation that has done business with these people in the last few years should do, and that is make damn sure they are held to the letter of the agreements they signed. And if they don’t comply, to impose whatever sanctions are within our power to do. In this case, that means telling them that they will not receive a single ticket for the game.

So I am happy with this outcome, and its clear meaning; we are absolutely through with playing nice here, and that’s exactly how it ought to be.