Celtic, Sevco and the Five Stages of Grief.

One of the best moments of the last couple of days was reading about Barry Ferguson and his obvious torment at being at Celtic Park at the weekend. I drank his tears like the finest wine. I love that he suffered through those ninety interminable minutes and that he’s still suffering just thinking about that ordeal.

The reason I find it all so funny is that Ferguson has brought all that pain and suffering on himself. In his article on the day before the game, he professed to be feeling excitement, not fear. He claimed to feel something in the city—something he sensed, and that I wrote about the night before the game itself; it was overconfidence.

I had no idea where he got that from. It seemed absolutely stupid to me. He didn’t draw that conclusion from anything anyone at Celtic Park said, nor from any words that came out of our head coach, Brendan Rodgers. He pulled it out of thin air. He believed what he wanted to believe, what he needed to believe. Because, as I said, the only thing that was going to result in anything other than a Celtic win was if we turned up with our minds not on the job.

What constantly amazes me about people in the periphery of that club over there is their endless capacity to lie to themselves and to each other about the realities they face in relation to us. I completely get where it comes from.

Not a single one of these people has grown up knowing anything other than a club which could spend what it wanted and buy who it wanted. Ferguson grew up in an era defined by their winning trophies and titles on a regular basis, and their entire philosophy is built on seeing the club across the city—ourselves—as less than they are.

It’s everywhere you look with them.

It’s plastered all over the dressing room and the tunnel walls: We Are The People.

It’s a supremacist slogan. It is vaguely racist, and it is the cultural foundation of everything they are as a support and everything they are as a club. It’s why they refuse to accept the death of Rangers as a fact. It’s why they refuse to acknowledge that we are simply better, and that we achieved it not through any illicit means, but by being smarter, working harder, and making better decisions.

The idea that this could ever happen is completely alien to them, because when they say “We Are The People”, they genuinely mean it. It isn’t just a slogan or meaningless words—they’ve been brought up to believe it. If they are “the people”, then we are lesser. We are not as good or as worthy as they are. That is entitlement.

When you grow up with that, it’s all you know.

So, when real life challenges that fantastical concept, it is natural to retreat into denial. That’s why Ferguson spent the week before the game living in that bubble of unreality. It was impossible for him to contemplate it in any other way. And he wasn’t alone in that; many of their supporters felt the same. They see only what they want to believe.

What is evident in the days since the game is that, for many of them, those 90 minutes represented an awakening from a dream—into a nightmare.

Most of them now seem to be processing it the right way.

In 1969, a Swiss-American called Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a book called On Death and Dying. As a therapist, she had worked with terminally ill people for years and was frustrated by the lack of a textbook describing the emotions that people went through after receiving a terminal diagnosis. She sought to create one herself, and in that book, she first outlined what we now know as the five stages of grief.

The Kübler-Ross model has undergone some transformation over the years, with some now recognising seven stages rather than five. But the five stages are still the most talked about: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages have come to represent not just the process of dealing with impending death but also any catastrophic life situation. It’s a perfect model for understanding what has happened across the city, and how their fans have tried to deal with the reality over the last 12 years.

The stages are not fixed in that order.

Although they are often discussed that way, the truth is they fluctuate and change. Some people start with anger; some start with depression; some start with bargaining. But acceptance is always last because it’s the point where you begin to move out of the grief process.

For a long time, many of their supporters have been stuck in the bargaining phase, not the denial phase. The bargaining phase is tricky because it’s most associated with hope.

It’s the idea that “If I change my life now, this might not happen” or “If I’m willing to make a compromise, we might avoid this outcome.” For their supporters, this takes many forms, like constantly talking about investment as if it’s imminent, or clinging to fantasies about court cases wiping our club out. That’s bargaining—a belief that some massive event, through action or karmic justice, will save them from their fate.

I understand why people talk about denial and their supporters being stuck in that phase. A lot of them are—many still refuse to accept the reality that we are now a bigger club, that we are on the brink of being more successful even if you count their old club’s existence.

For them, denial is a refusal to acknowledge that this is happening at all. At least those in the bargaining phase understand where they are and hope for some miraculous transformation. If you’re in denial, you’re stuck for a while.

Denial comes first because, for those who are stuck, they can’t get any further. It’s the first reaction most people have to terrible news: “This can’t be happening.” It’s the idea that some screw-up has occurred and that soon someone will call and say there was a mistake.

Some of them get stuck in anger.

These people certainly aren’t in denial; they radiate fury, and that fury must find an outlet. Across social media, you’ll find them pouring out their spleen. It’s why I write the “fear and loathing” pieces. For some, that anger is mixed with denial; for others, it is closely woven together with bargaining. And although anger is a horrible place to be stuck, it’s not the worst. It is a far better place than where some of them find themselves right now.

That place is depression. This is where Ferguson seems to have landed. His last flirtation with denial has ended, and he has jumped right over bargaining and anger. He’s proof that people go through these stages in different orders.

Personally, I think once you’ve moved past denial, you can get through the rest—perhaps not easily, but more easily than before. Once you know in your heart and head that what you’re going through is real, you can confront it on some kind of realistic terms.

For many of them, they need to believe there is still a solution, which is understandable. We all want to think there’s a way out in our darkest moments. But there’s a reason anger comes after denial. Anger is the rage against the dying of the light—the idea that you’ve been somehow cheated, that the world is a colder, darker place than you realised.

Bargaining is natural once anger passes. It’s the residue of hope. After denying reality and being angry, it’s natural to seek a solution. When you come out of that place and realise there is no hope, no solution, that’s when you start experiencing depression—and that’s natural too.

I find every phase they go through amusing, but the depression phase is the most interesting. It’s also the most dangerous for the club.

Ferguson, in his misery, seems to have grasped that, and others have too. Just listen to their fan podcasts—you’ll hear that many of them are in the depression phase. They have exhausted their anger and they have no more faith in solutions. They’re not living in denial anymore.

The danger of the depression phase is that it’s a kind of stopping point before acceptance. When you’re in depression, you are already starting to accept.

What does acceptance look like?

For many, they will still love their club, still go to games, still cheer on whatever version of Rangers remains. But for those in the depression phase, there will be a feeling of “I just can’t do this anymore.” The biggest problem will be with the younger generation of fans who have grown up in the shadow of a rampant Celtic.

How do you keep those people engaged? I don’t know. I do know that the longer our dominance continues, the darker it will look for them and the harder it will be to bring them back.

Ferguson sounds to me like a guy close to acceptance now, but I think he’ll backslide. There will be some bargaining and plenty of anger, but at least his denial phase is over and that’s something he has in common with large swathes of the support now. He realises that his optimism before the game is why he’s feeling such misery today.

Ferguson is a significant figure over there. He knows his voice matters to their support, and he might try to rally some hope. But once you’re out of denial and you accept that the situation is bad and liable to get worse, there is no going back.

Some of them have been in denial for all 12 years of Sevco’s existence.

It won’t take 12 years for most of them to race through the remaining stages of grief. The totality of Celtic’s dominance is apparent to nearly all of them now, and the quicker they leave denial, the more likely they will progress through the remaining phases to reach acceptance, whatever that means for each of them.

But don’t expect it to be quick. Don’t expect it to be easy. It will be a prolonged war of attrition. You only have to look at the continuing fury in some of the pieces in their press to know that. Many of them are still struggling with the stages, knowing that the old days of dominance aren’t coming back. Their stubbornness will prevent an easy road to acceptance.

In the meantime, we can watch them wallow in their distress as the reality settles in.

But here’s the thing, and this is the part I love: they do have to go through all of these emotions because there’s simply no way around it. This is the last battle we will have to fight with these people—the psychological war to break their spirits for good. And the beauty is that we don’t need to do much more than just keep winning.

The process will handle the rest.

They’re fighting themselves now, not us. They are fighting their natural inability, born from their culture, to cling to the idea that they are special somehow, and if you’re special how can this be happening to you? If you’re special, there must be a way that you can beat the odds and emerge from this darkness and into the other side, right?

Let them suffer. All we have to do is sit back, enjoy the ride, and let their emotional rollercoaster play out. There will be plenty more pain to drink down, just so long as we keep on winning. If Celtic does its part – and we show no signs of letting up – that’s exactly what I intend to do.