Rodgers was right to slap back at the gaslighting suggestion that Celtic caused the ticket standoff.

It took me a while today to realise what it was I wanted to say about the ticket dispute. I understand that our club has done its bit and has been willing to make compromises. I understand that we brought the Ibrox club kicking and screaming to the table on this, where they did not want to go.

And I understand that we have secured a much larger number of tickets than we otherwise would have, had we not acted as we did.

But I didn’t fully realise what it was I wanted to say about it until I finished the last piece and reflected on that grotesque spectacle in the Oval Office yesterday, which prompted that article. It made me want to elaborate a little further—not on the Oval Office spectacle itself, but on the gaslighting.

Probably the most appalling element of all this is the suggestion that Zelensky and Ukraine are somehow responsible for the mess they find themselves in—a mess created entirely in Moscow. A mess created entirely by the Russians.

That was the moment yesterday, I think, when Zelensky’s anger boiled over—being lectured on how his country had to do more to stop a war that the Russians started. In short, what Vance and Trump are telling him to do is to roll over, because that’s the only way there’s going to be peace on their terms.

Ukraine must give up more of its land and more of its natural resources, without even the slightest security guarantee that they can protect what remains, that’s the “peace” they are talking about.

I know there are a lot of Celtic fans out there who don’t pay that much attention to politics but who recognised immediately what Trump and Vance were doing. And instantly, they thought, “Well, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

And I’d like to think that some of them recognised that tactic because we’ve seen it ourselves. We’ve been subjected to it. And reading back on the last piece, I realised—we had our very own Zelensky moment yesterday.

Brendan Rodgers sat in that press room, in front of the hacks, and made sure we didn’t get gaslighted on the Ibrox ticket situation—something that people in the media have been doing from day one.

How many times have you read in the papers that this is our fault as much as theirs? That both sides should get round the table and sort it out, as if this was something we provoked, something we brought on, something we engaged in? That’s why so many Celtic fans, even those who don’t care about politics, watched that footage yesterday and thought, “Oh, I know what this is.”

Because we’ve been there. We’ve seen it.

And we saw it in this case. We saw it in the ticket standoff from day one. We didn’t start this. We were the ones pissed on from a great height. But we made it clear what would happen if they made their move. We tried our best to mediate, negotiate, and stop it from getting to the point where allocations had to be cut. And we made it clear that if they did it to us, we would have to do it to them. Reciprocity—that was our policy. And they knew full well what our policy was. They did it anyway.

And let’s not forget that we didn’t commit some egregious act here. We did to them exactly what they did to us. Not only did we pre-announce it to try and prevent it from happening in the first place, but our response was measured and proportionate. We didn’t go overboard. We mirrored their policy exactly. We gave them the same number of tickets we got—750 at the time.

Had we wanted to be nasty, we could have cut theirs to 250 just to make a point. But we didn’t. The point we chose to make was: we’ll treat you as you treat us, and although our policy was both incredibly reasonable and fair right from the start, we were still blamed for causing this.

One thing about Rodgers is that he has never accepted that. He has never allowed the media to get away with that narrative. Every single time he sits in front of them and this issue comes up, he makes sure to say, before anything else, “Bear in mind—we didn’t start this. This isn’t down to us. This isn’t a problem we created. They created it.”

And I’m glad that we have Rodgers at the helm. I’m glad that we have a guy like that sitting at the top of our club who’s not prepared to even allow these people the pretence that this is somehow a plague on both our houses. This is one area in which our engagement with other people in Scottish football gets my full approval and wholehearted support. Because in this case, we did what we had to do. We didn’t just sit back and accept. We didn’t just suffer in silence.

We made our position clear from the start. The moment they made their cut, we made ours. And when the situation at their stadium became manifestly unsafe, we were the club that said, “No away tickets until this is fixed.” And I know that the media lied about that, and I know they pretended it was some kind of mutual decision.

When their club announced that it was refusing an allocation for Celtic Park, the reaction of our club was to say, “Fine.”

When our fans returned to Ibrox, they were still subjected to the same harassment, the same attacks, and the same violent and deranged behaviour. We again took the decision to refuse an allocation, but this time made it clear that their fans were banned from Celtic Park. That’s what prompted their wailing, bitching statement to the media, claiming they had been somehow mistreated.

But Celtic’s position on this was reasonable at every stage. We expressed from the off a willingness to get round the table, sort the issue out, and restore their full allocation the minute they restored ours.

That is a matter of fact. It is on the record, there in black and white for anyone in the media who wants to go and have a look. Not that any of them do.

When our fans were subjected to violent attacks at their stadium because of the impossible policing situation their club created, we turned our allocation down for the next game. They then made the singular decision to turn down an allocation for Celtic Park. We didn’t tell them not to come.

They decided not to, perhaps because they knew the optics would be terrible for their club if ours was the only one saying, “We don’t want tickets for this fixture anymore because the ground is manifestly unsafe for our fans.”

When the two clubs managed to resolve that minor issue and our fans did return, they were subjected to the same treatment as before.

And that’s when Celtic took the decision to say, “No more of this.” They had not taken our concerns seriously. They had not worked to protect our fans. They had made no provision whatsoever to ensure our supporters were safe. So, we told them we were not returning to that ground until they did—and furthermore, that they would not be returning to Celtic Park until they did.

That’s the only time we escalated this. And we escalated it because repeated efforts to get them to take our security concerns seriously were flatly ignored. The SPFL had plenty of opportunities to step in and adjudicate this, and they chose not to—until finally, Celtic dragged them to the table too, with our decision to ban visiting supporters from our stadium. Something that no club in the country had done since regulations were put in place to explicitly prevent that.

Bear in mind that this situation was supposed to be resolved by the start of the season. Celtic extended the ban on their fans, and our own boycott of their ground, because they did not comply with the agreement made between ourselves, their club, and the SPFL. Another example of where we did everything we could to resolve this situation to everyone’s satisfaction, only for their club to behave in the most atrocious manner imaginable.

At every stage, this has been characterised by their vindictiveness and pettiness, such as after the Covid campaign, when our club expected to get 750 tickets for Ibrox—and they withdrew those tickets weeks out from the game on the excuse that we hadn’t given them any guarantees that we could provide them with an allocation for Celtic Park. But we couldn’t give them those guarantees, and they knew that full well because the country had already come out of several lockdowns and there was a chance of going into another one. And in fact, we did go into another one.

Our club rightfully saw that as an act of pettiness and spite. They knew full well that short of a lockdown, their fans would have been allowed back into our ground. But they saw an opportunity to simply give us a kick, and they took it. And Celtic responded by saying, “All right then, your fans are banned from Celtic Park.” And we ourselves were able to use the Covid regulations to make sure that stuck.

Yet at every single stage in this, we’ve been told that we have to make compromises, that we should be the bigger club, that we should take some moral high ground. We had the moral high ground.

Our position has been clear from the start: discuss this with us in good faith, take our concerns seriously, and we’ll restore an allocation when you finally get real. Let’s sit down and talk about restoring full allocations.

Our club is in favour of that. Our club is on the record as being in favour of that. So the idea that we should ever have had to tolerate anybody in the media suggesting that this was somehow our fault, that we were the ones being intransigent, I find offensive. And so does everyone inside Celtic.

And I’m glad that we have Rodgers at the helm. I’m glad that we have a guy like that sitting at the top of our club who’s not prepared to even allow these people the pretence that this is somehow a plague on both our houses.

As far as I’m concerned, our club has done the right thing from the start. We’ve been on the right side of this from the beginning. Our policy is to seek a full restoration of allocations. We would restore their full allocation tomorrow if they did the same for us. So we have been fair, and we have been reasonable. And yet Rodgers continues to get asked, “Are you happy that the clubs have sorted this out?”

But there was nothing on our end to sort out. There was nothing on our end that caused these problems in the first place. Every single solution the media claims to want is a solution we are on the record as supporting. Yet rather than place the blame where it belongs, the media and others choose gaslighting as their road.

Well, thank God for Brendan Rodgers, who simply won’t permit it. Thank God for Brendan Rodgers, who stands up and says, “Hold on. Don’t pretend we dragged the two clubs into this. We didn’t. This mess was created across the street.” He will not let them get away with portraying us as somehow responsible. He won’t allow journalists to sit in his press conferences and pretend this is Celtic “seeing the light” or “climbing off the high horse” or “making amends for past mistakes.”

This matter is not fully resolved. Celtic has compromised. We’ve come to an understanding on fan numbers for this season and possibly next, but we remain committed to restoring full allocations.

My preference remains that we take no tickets for Ibrox and they get none for Celtic Park. But I understand why the club has agreed that those who want to attend should be able to. The 4% allocation is a step toward resolving the bigger problem—other clubs refusing to give us viable allocations. It’s a step in the right direction.

But this doesn’t mean it’s resolved. It doesn’t mean our club is satisfied. It doesn’t mean we’ll tolerate further breaches of faith. We’ve shown all the good faith we’re going to. We’ve shown all the positivity towards a solution that we’re going to. And the next time this agreement is violated, we’ll respond just as we have before.

So what we have here is a temporary truce. We’ll see if it holds. And if it doesn’t, I know what Celtic’s reaction will be.

And the media can call it whatever they like. They will anyway.

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