Celtic should not attend Ibrox’s self-serving farce dressed up as reform.

Regular readers will know that I have long bemoaned Celtic’s abject failure to take a lead on refereeing reform, and my anger that the Ibrox club seemed to be putting together a coalition to seek genuine change.

But of course, there was always a concern at the back of my mind; that this was nothing but an airing of their own grievances.

That’s confirmed. They have called the meeting. They are not using the official offices at Hampden, and they have asked other clubs to meet them at Ibrox. That puts the seal on it. This is every bit as self-interested as I feared.

There are two immediate questions we should ask about this proposed summit, and neither of them is really about refereeing.

The first is simple enough. Why are they holding it at Ibrox?

The second is just as important. Where are Celtic in all of this?

Those are the issues which matter here, because this is not some neutral gathering of the great and the good, convened in the interests of the game.

This is a meeting reportedly called by them at their own stadium, in the wake of months of noise, grievance and pressure over officiating. The reporting says Premiership clubs will gather in Glasgow on April 23, with the Ibrox club presenting it as an effort to discuss “long-term solutions” to improve refereeing standards.

It also says the Scottish FA will not be there, and that the list of clubs attending has not yet been fully confirmed. I’ll bet it hasn’t. I wonder if it ever will be. Hosted at Ibrox? This is one club’s mad campaign of objections and gripes.

If this was really about collaborative reform, there are a dozen neutral venues where it could have been held. Hampden would have made sense. A city centre hotel would have made sense. An SPFL venue would have made sense. Just about anywhere other than Ibrox would have made sense. Holding it there changes the character of the whole event.

It turns what should be a meeting between equals into something that looks suspiciously like a summons to the principal’s office.

That is not a trivial point. In Scottish football, optics are never trivial.

The venue is part of the message. Whether those involved admit it or not, staging this at Ibrox makes it feel less like a collective conversation and more like one club calling the rest of the room together to hear its case. It gives the home club the role of convener, host and moral authority all in one stroke. That is not neutral. It is political.

Nobody should kid themselves otherwise.

There is, of course, a serious conversation to be had about refereeing standards in this country. There has been for some time. VAR has been inconsistent. It has been slow. It has been clumsy. We saw again at the weekend that we have VAR-Lite, and that’s the generous interpretation.

When it is working, supporters have sat through absurd delays while officials seem to perform open-heart surgery on decisions that should take seconds.

Managers have raged. Fans have fumed. Clubs have paid heavily for a system that still leaves almost everyone unhappy. According to reports, clubs collectively spend more than £1.2 million each year on video technology, and any move towards more cameras or more advanced systems will push that cost even higher. Of course, that is exactly what the game now demands after yet another embarrassing incident at the weekend.

So let us not pretend there is no issue here. There clearly is one.

But let us also not pretend that the club from Ibrox is approaching this as some kind of neutral reform movement.

This club has spent a long time publicly agitating on this subject. Its supporters, media allies and public figures have worked hard to create a climate where officiating is not simply debated, but turned into part of an ongoing campaign. That does not mean every concern they raise is false.

It does mean we should be deeply sceptical of the framing.

This is not a neutral intervention. It is lobbying with an Ibrox club blazer on. They have long hated Willie Collum for a start, and that they first took their “proposals” to the Ibrox fan advisory board first for their rubber stamp gives you a fair idea of what will be on the table.

Which brings us to Celtic and what we intend to do here.

Are we attending this meeting? As things stand, I have seen no definitive confirmation that Celtic are going. The reporting remains frustratingly vague. It says there has been “positive interest and feedback” from other clubs, but that the number attending is not yet confirmed. That leaves a glaring question hanging in the air.

Has Celtic agreed to be there, or not? The club should answer that, because supporters have every right to know.

Personally, I don’t think Celtic should attend, because this club should not play our part as a supporting cast in somebody else’s production.

If Celtic attends, the Ibrox club will get to play the role they desperately want to play, the role of Scottish football’s self-appointed reformers with us in the room going along for, but not leading, the charge. The optics will stink. There is nothing to gain from us going there and lending that nonsense any sort of legitimacy.

Because without the governing body in the room it has none.

There is no way that this club should wander into Ibrox, take its seat politely and play along with the fiction that this is some noble summit convened in the interests of the common good. If Celtic does attend, in spite of how bad it would look, our representatives should be the first people in the room to ask the obvious question. Why are we here and not in a neutral venue?

The absence of the Scottish FA is the huge red flag.

A meeting about refereeing reform without the governing body present is not about reform.

It is a chance for the Ibrox club to posture, align, complain and perhaps try to build a bloc before taking demands elsewhere. That may yet prove useful, but let us call it what it is. Nobody is fixing anything in that room if the body with actual authority is not even attending.

Which is why Celtic’s role matters so much.

This is one of those moments where silence can be misread and attendance can be misused. Celtic should not let their club set the tone unchallenged, but neither should the club lend itself to a stage-managed spectacle.

The right move, in my view, is to non-attendance, and make it clear from the outset that no club gets to hold court over the rest of Scottish football. If we do go there the whole point should be ask awkward questions. Challenge the framing. Refuse to be window dressing and if necessary, expose the whole lot of it for the sham it is.

Most of all, make it plain that if we are talking about standards, we are talking about the whole game. We are not indulging one club’s latest attempt to cast itself as victim, prosecutor and saviour all at once. Because that is what this looks like right now.

A summit on refereeing standards, held at Ibrox, without the SFA, is a sham.

Being that it is convened by the club which has shouted longest and loudest, it is not a neutral event. It is a political one.

Celtic should understand that before deciding whether to walk through the door.

If this board has an iota of strategic sense, now is the time for it.

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