Celtic fans (and others) boo The Village Idiot because he’s a thick, bitter goon.

Today, the Village Idiot has been bumping his gums again, saying that he’s hated across Scottish football because he once played for the club from Ibrox. And I think to myself: is this guy for real?

Honestly, he ought to take a look around him at the Scottish media ecosystem. It is filled to the brim with guys who once played for one of the Ibrox clubs. It’s a long-standing joke on this site that the only qualification you need to get a gig with the BBC is to have worn that shirt. It’s the only qualification you appear to need to get a job with most mainstream media outlets, if we’re being truthful.

The BBC gets the piss taken out of it for natural and obvious reasons—it’s supposed to be the national broadcaster, and yet its pro-Ibrox slant is appalling. But they’re by no means alone in their Ibrox-first hiring policies.

Billy Dodds, Neil McCann, Alan Hutton, Derek Ferguson, Barry Ferguson, and a bunch of others have been earning their livings in the Scottish sports media for years. They go to away grounds with no difficulty at all when they’re on their media duties. No one cares. No one gives a damn about them.

The fact they played at Ibrox is neither here nor there—except when outlets like this one highlight them for indulging in bias.

Furthermore, although we’re not talking here about the brightest lights in the firmament, nobody refers to them collectively as The Village Idiots. That’s an expression reserved specifically for him. And not just any village idiot—The Village Idiot. The village idiot in a village full of other village idiots.

Stupid he may be, but not that stupid. He’s not so dense that he doesn’t realise he’s being singled out. But can he really be dumb enough not to get why?

Yes, of course he can. Like I said, he is thick.

Boyd is singled out because Boyd makes himself a target. He does it quite deliberately. Because he is, by far, the most nakedly biased and most openly antagonistic person in the entire Scottish media ecosystem. He’s also thick. The proof of just how loathsome he is? His confession that he gets booed at every ground, everywhere he goes. And it’s not just Celtic fans who are sick of seeing his face.

If Sky actually polled its viewers on this guy, the result would be a landslide: punt him.

Nobody wants this gurning twerp on their screen. Nobody wants to see that smug face when his team is on top, or that foot-stamping fury when they’re not. Nobody wants to listen to his biased take on events, or hear him shrieking from the rafters like a toddler denied his ice cream when things do go their way.

He is amusing when he’s like that. Up to a point. I’d rather not see him at all than watch him on those occasions. It means enduring him the rest of the time, and if I didn’t have to then missing out on his rage is a price I’d be willing to pay.

Most football fans don’t want to sit through that crap when they tune in for pre- and post-match analysis. What they actually want is analysis.

And he doesn’t offer any. He never has.

Instead, Boyd acts like he’s working for the Ibrox in-house media team, and nobody wants to pay a Sky Sports subscription to get Ibrox TV. The fact is—as he himself admits—it’s not just Celtic fans who feel that way. The fact he gets booed at every ground couldn’t make it more obvious. To pretend it’s just because he once played for an Ibrox club is laughable.

I don’t doubt that there are people in those grounds who aren’t keen on any of the ex-Ibrox players. I don’t doubt there are many fans in Scottish football who, like Celtic supporters, are utterly fed up turning on their TVs or radios and getting McCoist or Ferguson or Hutton pretending to be neutral.

But only one of them gets this level of stick. Only one of them gets this kind of abuse. And rather than look in the mirror, rather than consider his own behaviour and question whether he’s the reason for it, he defaults to that tired old standby: “Scotland hates Ibrox. I used to play for Ibrox. That must be why they boo me.”

And he does it entirely without shame, in the pages of a national newspaper which itself doesn’t do shame. But then, he doesn’t do self-awareness either.

It’s not for nothing that we can’t stand him. That he doesn’t understand proves that It’s also not for nothing that we call him The Village Idiot in the first place.