Scottish football is facing a major change. Celtic should try to get in front of it.

I am not naive enough to think Scottish football needs another problem. Scottish football has problems galore, and I am going to talk about a very familiar one later today. But before I get to that, I want to talk about something that has cropped up in a Scottish Parliament manifesto, because it will have a pretty big impact on Celtic depending on how the political landscape looks after the election.

We are just weeks out from the Scottish Parliament elections, and I am quite looking forward to them. I have looked forward to these for the last year in a way I have not looked forward to any UK general election in a while. It feels as though I have a little skin in the game this time, because I am very pro-independence and it looks as though we may get a pro-independence majority in parliament again.

That is what makes the Scottish Greens’ announcement interesting. Their manifesto includes a policy to ban health-harming industries, including alcohol and gambling, from sponsoring sport. They have singled out football as part of that wider debate, and if this ever becomes law, Scottish football clubs will have a couple of years at most to get their acts together and find new sponsorship deals.

Clubs will not be the only ones affected. Scottish football depends heavily on gambling and alcohol money, and both now sit firmly in this debate. Gambling sponsorship may dominate the headlines, but alcohol already falls within the same policy framework. If a ban comes in, existing deals will likely run their course, but the direction of travel is obvious.

Of course, we are not there yet. The Greens still need to enter government, or at least hold enough influence over the next one, before they can push through this kind of policy. A manifesto alone does not deliver change. You still need the votes and the parliamentary arithmetic.

At the moment, some polls favour the SNP. If they win a majority, they can govern alone. Even then, they may still seek support from smaller parties to get key measures through. That is how they have governed for years, and it has worked. Scotland remains a stable and generally sensible democracy.

But if the SNP falls short, it has two options. It can try to govern through confidence and supply, or it can make a coalition deal. Confidence and supply can be risky. A formal deal gives you more security. But every coalition has a price, and that price usually includes adopting some policies from the smaller party.

This would be a relatively easy policy for the SNP to take on board if it needed Green support. It has no direct cost to government. It can be presented as a progressive public health measure. The only people likely to be outraged are football clubs, and football clubs are not exactly among the most universally loved institutions in Scotland.

So, this is not a done deal. It depends on the parliamentary numbers.

But the Greens have put this in their manifesto, and that acts as a warning shot. I talk about warning shots a lot. Too often, people ignore them. This one should not be. It now sits on the table in Scotland. A party has proposed it as policy, and it could easily feature in coalition talks. And because the Scottish Parliament was designed to make majority governments rare, coalition politics always comes into play.

The SNP may win a majority. It may not. If it does, the margin will likely be tiny, perhaps a single seat. So if the numbers shift even slightly, the Greens move back into the discussion. That means this issue is here to stay.

Sooner or later, the parliamentary arithmetic will favour it. Pressure will build on gambling and alcohol sponsorship in sport in Scotland. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not in this parliamentary term. But the direction of travel is clear.

This is not speculation. You can take it to the bank. When you know how to read the landscape, you can spot these things a mile down the road.

Back when I was a first-year student at university, people had just started the first serious discussions about a UK-wide smoking ban. A mate and I tried to convince the Stirling University Student Union to adopt a no-smoking policy on its premises before primary legislation even reached the table. We wrote a student council motion to push that idea.

We had read the draft documentation and knew it was coming. The talk had already hardened into serious discussions with real intent behind them. Public health organisations had already weighed in, and they were overjoyed.

The general manager attended the meeting and gave us a list of reasons why it was a bad idea and why it could not possibly happen. The motion was voted down. We both said that was a colossal mistake because we had missed the chance to get ahead of the issue. Within two years, the ban was in effect and we had done nothing to prepare for it.

One of the reasons this is inevitable, not merely possible, is that the English Premier League can already see it coming down the road at Westminster. That is why it has voluntarily adopted a front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship ban from 2026-27. It is getting ahead of the legislative juggernaut before it arrives.

Some English clubs are already having problems because they cannot find sponsorship deals at the same level as the betting firms. Yet nobody is seriously talking about ditching the policy. Why? Because they know it is going to happen anyway. All the league is doing is moving before it gets pushed.

This stuff is already restricted in European competitions. The rest of football is slowly coming into line. The UK, as usual, is bringing up the rear, but it will happen.

That means Scottish football needs to start transitioning towards it now.

Whether the ban comes through Holyrood or Westminster, the direction of travel is clear. This is not only about gambling sponsorship. Alcohol sponsorship is already part of the same public health argument.

People can shout about the nanny state all they like, but it will not stop the trend. Read the statistics on problem gambling, and look at the wider public health debate around alcohol, and you can see why more legislatures are moving in this direction.

The change is coming.

Every month Scottish football wastes on navel-gazing, and every month the SFA wastes throwing numbers around to justify inaction, is time we will never get back. The argument, in all the ways that matter, has already run its course. People have fought it, and it is done. This is not idealism. This is realpolitik.

Celtic should not wait for this to hit at full force before acting. The current sponsorship arrangement should be the last of its kind. We should not extend it before the legislative moment arrives. Instead, we should treat this as an opportunity to get ahead of a change that is already coming.

The Greens have done Scottish football a favour. They have shown us the future, and it is coming whether we like it or not.

Smart organisations move early. The English Premier League is already ahead of us because it sees the reality clearly. Even with all its lobbying power and money, it knows it cannot put this genie back in the bottle.

Change is on its way. If we wait for it before we prepare, we will waste the time we have.

That would not be new, but with this so clearly coming, only a special kind of stupid ignores it.

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