Whatever killed the Dundee-Celtic SPL game abroad, let the idea stay dead.

Some ideas just won’t die, right?

No matter how often they’re smacked down, they claw their way back to the surface. And last night, one of these undead ideas raised its head yet again.

Dundee’s managing director has decided to resurrect the notion of playing a Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) game abroad.

He claims his club, and Celtic too, almost made it happen back in 2015 before the plan collapsed. That idea should have stayed dead, because I can say confidently that it holds zero appeal for most Celtic fans—or, I suspect, for Dundee’s either.

Here’s the first question that springs to mind: who’s paying for this kind of stunt? The idea will only work if there’s money to justify the trouble, but really—who would be financing this, and who’s keen to watch Dundee play Celtic abroad?

And let’s be clear about how this would work: Dundee versus Celtic.

Not the other way around. Let’s be blunt: 60,000 fans pack Celtic Park every home game, and I’d wager those would be 60,000 irate supporters if told one of our home matches was being shipped off in favour of this hare-brained scheme.

Are Dundee fans any more likely to be thrilled if it’s their home game we’re taking abroad? I doubt it, and we’d stand shoulder to shoulder with them in calling it a travesty.

Fans are already sidelined too often.

Television companies dictate when and where our games are played, with no regard for fan convenience. But this idea is a step too far—beyond anything we’ve dealt with yet. And there’s a reason it hasn’t been attempted in English football despite all the talk: no club has dared to tell its fans, “Sorry, that home game you’re looking forward to? We’re playing it overseas.”

Yes, the Spanish Super Cup is played abroad, and there are talks about playing a La Liga game in the US later this year; frankly, that’s an awful situation, one that Scottish football should never allow itself to copy. But Spanish football is peculiar, dominated by two clubs who largely write their own rules. In Scotland, the notion of a major game being held outside the country is unthinkable.

And we all know where this leads, of course. It starts with the notion of a Dundee-Celtic match abroad, but let’s not kid ourselves about where it ends: the big-ticket idea would be an overseas Glasgow derby. Their fans would reject that outright, and our fans should be just as firm in saying we wouldn’t stand for it either.

I almost have to admire how out-of-touch some people are, coming up with these schemes under the delusion that fan opinion doesn’t matter. Maybe this particular individual ought to take a look at the financial state of his own club and ask himself if he really wants to alienate the people who keep the lights on. Because in Scotland, without a billion-pound TV deal to buffer clubs, the fans are the clubs. Something like this has to go past us first.

Our board should count itself lucky that the proposed trip to Australia was scuppered by the club across the city, because a fair few of us were as angry about that idea as their supporters were. And we’d have been every bit as loud about it, if not louder.

Some of us spoke out against it from the very start. It might be one of the worst ideas Celtic as a club has entertained in years. I don’t care that we were to be the main event and they were just the support act—it was a misstep to agree to that game in the first place.

A suggestion like this would sink like a stone with our fans. It’s a dreadful notion without any benefit to it, or any merit whatsoever, and if it really was something people were once considering, then I’d question the sanity of everyone involved in promoting it.

This idea should be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere alongside Rangers, never to be seen nor heard about again. It’s one of those absurd fantasies people are entitled to entertain—just as they’re free to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. Just don’t ask the rest of us to tiptoe past for fear of disturbing them.