The individuals responsible for this Celtic “virtual pitch” scandal need to be kicked out the club.

I am always sympathetic—if that’s the right word—to the challenges faced by our marketing department. Their job is massive.

It’s not easy to keep our name prominent when there’s so much stuff floating around in the football world, and when even the most pitiful clubs in the English Premier League get 30 or 40 times the income Celtic earns as champions of Scotland.

It’s a battle against the tide, and there’s little they could do that I’d ever find distasteful—there are exceptions, of course, but you’re trawling in pretty despicable waters and thankfully, as a club, we’ve never dabbled in such things. But when it comes to this NFT nonsense, I wish to God we’d steered well clear.

Last night, I saw an ad doing the rounds on Twitter. It’s for a product currently sold in the Celtic store, and to call it grotesque is to fail entirely to capture the sheer stench of how rotten it is.

The blurb read: “Own a virtual piece of the pitch and own part of the action. Buy for yourself or gift to another, for the fan who has everything!”

For the fan who has everything. Right.

So why not buy them a little slice of… absolutely nothing?

Years ago, someone at a political meeting I was at joked that the Tories would have privatised fresh air if they could have quantified it. A couple of years later, I heard about people selling bottled “air” from the top of Everest. Turns out, the Tories weren’t imaginative enough. You can sell anything if there are people gullible enough to buy it.

But this? This is taking the piss.

A virtual piece of the pitch? Whoever thought of this should have been told to get so far to hell away from this club that they’d need a passport to find their way back.

What in God’s name were we thinking? What are we doing involved in this shit? Whoever signed off on this ought to be kicked right out the door of Celtic Park.

The company behind this scheme is called Stadium Sport Limited. They were incorporated in October 2023. They have three directors, no financial history online, and have already undergone a name change—from Stadium Sports Limited to Stadium Sport Limited.

Make of that whatever you will.

As a Celtic fan, I want answers and I think all of us should, and here’s question one; how did a company with no track record and £100 in starting capital, whose three directors don’t exactly have the sort of histories which justify it ever get the rights to use our name and logo? Are those rights going this cheap? Because if this is our level we might as well let every fly-by-night boyo with a market stall sell branded merchandise on our behalf.

How did this lot get our management to sign off on it? That’s question one. Here’s question two; one of the things you get for your money is a letter with Brendan Rodgers’ name on the bottom of it. Did he honestly sign off on this? How the Hell did that happen?

This makes me physically sick. It’s shocking.

I’ve written about NFTs before, back when the Ibrox club got involved with a similar grift. I knew enough about it to understand the basics, but it wasn’t until I heard them being discussed on a Guardian football podcast that I fully grasped the absurdity of it all. One guest explained NFTs to another, who laughed so hard he could barely get his words out. The guest revealed that financial experts had flat-out called them a scam.

I didn’t want Celtic anywhere near this trash.

Let me explain what Celtic has gotten itself involved in. An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token. Non-fungible means it’s unique—there’s only one of it. That’s supposed to be the selling point. But what exactly are you buying?

In this case, a big pile of nothing. That’s what’s being sold: nothing at all.

Here’s what you get for your money: they’ve created a “virtual representation” – it exists only in the virtual i.e. imaginary world – of the Celtic Park pitch and they’ve split the pitch into a giant grid, each square of which is represented by a set of coordinates .

That’s what you’re buying, the little square on that set of co-ordinates … which, don’t forget, don’t represent the actual Celtic Park pitch but something completely made up.

Here’s the best bit, or perhaps the worst bit, it depends on how much you can stomach of this; it’s not yours—it’s not physical, and it never will be, but even so, you’re only “licensing it” for a set period of time.

For £30, you can rent this “piece of the pitch” for a year.

For £50, you can rent it for three years.

As a friend said to me last night, the only people who should be getting three years here are the ones behind this sham. And shame on Celtic for licensing our name, logo, and reputation to this kind of sordid business activity. I’d rather the logo appeared on something cleaner, something that’s at least regulated, like a cheap wine bottle or the side of a packet of fags.

Get that. Read that again. They are selling you a license for something that doesn’t even exist. It’s hard even to contemplate sober how seedy and shady that actually is. This isn’t even Everest air in a bottle; it’s worse. It’s nothing at all.

And because this is marketed at our supporters, as some sort of expression of support for the club, I find all of it to be utterly grotesque. Seeing our club’s name tied to this kind of scheme is nauseating. I can’t begin to imagine what was going through Rodgers’ head when he was asked to get involved in this.

Seeing his signature attached to it makes my skin crawl.

You want a little more about the company we’ve thrown in with?

Their website boasts partnerships with Celtic, Dundee United, Livingston, and the Scottish national team. They advertise that “more clubs will follow”; shame on them too, all of them, whoever they are. As you can see, we’re not dealing with the elite here, this is a small time operation, and we’ve lent our name and logo and everything else to this … everyone at Celtic Park who played a role in this should be ashamed .

This is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. This is worse than that.

With £70 million sitting in the bank, we’ve no need to be dabbling in this kind of shady dreck. Almost anything else would be more respectable.

Almost every legal business would beat this and there are some which aren’t even legal that I would prefer to have our name associated with.

My sincerest hope is that this whole enterprise crashes and burns.

That the company behind it makes nothing and goes bust.

That all involved wrack up debts that ruin them for life.

I hope not a single fan is foolish enough to waste £30 or £50 on this nonsense, and nothing, not even the promise that some of the proceeds – about £1 I hear – goes to the Celtic charities can make shit like this smell even a little bit better.

Frankly, if anyone reading this does have that kind of money to spare, send every penny, all of it, directly to Celtic’s charities instead.

You’ll know your money has gone to help someone who actually needs it, someone deserving, to a good cause instead of feeding the kind of leeches that prey on people in the way the authors of schemes like this do.

If these people had actual bottle they’d be stealing for a living.

I am aghast—absolutely aghast—that we’ve allowed our name to be tied to this.

The whole sordid affair is a disgrace, and whoever negotiated and signed off on it has shamed this club and that person needs to be ejected from the building, the advertising of this cut off immediately and this tie-up shredded and slammed into the nearest bin as quickly as humanly possible.