The SFA has been humiliated by FIFA’s World Cup officials list.

Celtic fan media is full of great writers, great articles and great contributors, and one of the longest-standing among them is Andy Muirhead, who once ran the Scotzine site and now has a Substack which I think should be required reading for anyone interested in our club and in the wider issues around Scottish football.

It really is that good.

Today, he has put up a piece which focuses on the SFA’s failure in refereeing, summed up in the publication of the officials list for the coming World Cup, in which not a single Scottish referee is included.

Every doubt we have about Scottish officials is echoed and endorsed at the highest levels of the game, and the complete absence of Scottish officials from the World Cup list absolutely proves it. It should be a source of major embarrassment to the governing body.

I don’t see any evidence that anyone at the SFA is particularly bothered by this stuff.

Because if they were, there would be major inquiries going on and major changes getting made.

Instead, we have this weird kind of stasis where nothing actually changes, where clubs constantly complain about bad decisions, about VAR, about all sorts of other issues, and where there are even the occasional hints of dark conspiracies being afoot, yet no one wants to do anything about it.

That is how you end up in a place like this, where Scottish officials are ranked so low on the FIFA list that not a single one of them will be present when the World Cup takes place in the summer. The tournament is bigger than it has ever been before. There are more teams and more games than there have ever been before, and that makes the snub even more severe and even more humiliating.

This is exactly what happens when an association becomes arrogant, complacent and convinced of its own brilliance. The same thing is happening at Celtic. You can see it clearly, where the people running things are so sure that they’re geniuses the idea that they might need to improve somewhere gets dismissed out of hand.

The SFA is very good at bringing in flashy PR innovations, like Willie Collum doing his little VAR show and the panel of bizarre characters and who knows who, which reviews all the major decisions.

On the surface, it looks like reform. It looks like change.

It looks like embracing the future. Underneath, though, is the same rot, the same crumbling structure, the same individuals who should not be near major football matches because they just aren’t good enough, even if there were no questions over their ability to act as neutrals.

This has become the standard defence, and the fact that it is offered as a defence tells you how bad things are. When you accuse officials in this country of perhaps being compromised by their allegiances or whatever else, you are consistently told that this is not the case and that they’re just not very good.

When “they’re just not very good” is being offered up as the explanation for dreadful decision-making, you are entitled to wonder what people intend to do about that. In Scotland, the answer is nothing.

It is the same mentality that refuses to tackle racist and sectarian singing from the Ibrox support. It is the same mentality that lives with shocking TV deals worth a fraction of what those on the continent get. It is small-minded, parochial, reactive behaviour rooted in protecting the status quo at all costs, and it is Scottish football itself, the wider game here, that pays those costs over and over again.

That might be why this particular embarrassment matters.

For once, the rest of Scottish football will not have to pay the price for the incompetence of the SFA.

For once, it is the SFA itself that will pay the toll. For once, it is their officials and their leadership who will be made to look ridiculous, who will be made to look slow and incompetent as a consequence of this news.

You know what? That is why I welcome it. It does no direct harm to the game here. Instead, it shines a light on why we are in the mess we are in.

Because it affects the SFA directly, because it affects their officials, because some of them might lose a few quid out of this and be denied their hoped-for holiday in the States, maybe this time we will see something change.

Maybe there will be an uptick in standards, although I doubt it.

Maybe we will see some moves towards genuine reform from within the SFA itself. We can only hope.

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