The SFA statement condemned the hysteria, but it won’t admit its share of the blame.

Tonight, the SFA released a flamethrower of a statement standing up for John Beaton. I found myself agreeing with an awful lot of it.

That might surprise some people, but it should not. No referee, no official and no family member should ever be threatened, harassed, doxxed or placed under police protection because of a football match.

Anyone involved in leaking personal details should be prosecuted. Anyone issuing threats should be prosecuted. Anyone encouraging others to intimidate officials should be prosecuted. There is no qualification to that.

No “but.” No excuse. No football grievance justifies it.

According to the SFA statement, Beaton spent last night under police surveillance because his personal details were leaked online. I am not going to point fingers or make allegations about where that happened, but we all know this sort of thing has happened before.

We all know there are certain places online where that kind of material is circulated and treated as fair game. It is not fair game. It is beyond irresponsible.

It is criminal behaviour, and it should be dealt with as such.

We are in a deplorable place right now, and it is not difficult to understand why the SFA is taking the threat level seriously. The threat level is serious. The threat level is high. The atmosphere around Scottish football has been getting worse all season.

A lot of that is down to the gross irresponsibility of certain people in the media, certain people around clubs and certain people who have been allowed to indulge grievance culture without consequence for far too long.

This does not just manifest itself in criticism of referees. It manifests itself in the way our club has been spoken about, even when it has been in the right. It manifests itself in the endless excuse-making for vile bigots across the city, even when their own behaviour has raised serious questions about safety and disorder. The temperature is high because too many grievances have been indulged for too long.

If the SFA got one thing absolutely right tonight, it is that some people in the Scottish game have consistently used deflection, excuses and conspiracy narratives to cover for their own failures. One specific club has become notorious for it.

Nothing ever seems to stop them.

The SFA has a sanctions system which it has too often refused to use. Yet it somehow found the will to ban Michael Stewart from Hampden. That is where the problem begins.

Because the narrative pushed over the last 36 hours has been poisonous to the nth degree. It has been highly personalised, highly vindictive and highly inflammatory.

If Michael Stewart is banned from Hampden, then Ally McCoist should certainly be banned from Hampden. If people have been sanctioned for making inflammatory statements about officials, including Neil Lennon and Brendan Rodgers, then it is beyond comprehension if Derek McInnes escapes scrutiny. It is beyond comprehension if Motherwell as a club escapes scrutiny. Their own manager may also have put himself in the dock.

The SFA cannot talk about tone and responsibility in the abstract. It has to apply those standards consistently. Either inflammatory commentary matters or it does not. Either public comments which poison the atmosphere are sanctionable or they are not. There cannot be one rule for Celtic figures and another rule for everyone else.

Some of the supporter discourse over the past 12 months has been heavy. There is no point denying that. It is not difficult to point fingers at some of us who have suggested that certain Scottish officials are not operating on the level.

But let me repeat what I have said over and over again; the way to solve that problem is to remove those questions from the table.

Officials with publicly known allegiances or connections should not be placed in matches involving those clubs or their obvious rivals. That is not a radical proposition. That is common sense. It protects the integrity of the game, but it also protects officials themselves.

John Beaton should never have been placed in this position. That is not because anyone has the right to threaten him. They do not. Nobody does.

But because the SFA’s refusal to remove publicly compromised officials from matches involving clubs with which they are associated creates avoidable suspicion and puts those officials under unnecessary scrutiny.

Everyone in Scottish football knows certain officials support certain clubs.

This is not a secret.

It is preposterous to pretend that this is something we should simply accept. It leads to precisely these kinds of situations. It has been obvious for a very long time that Beaton should not be involved in officiating games involving the Ibrox club or Celtic.

By putting him in this position over and over again, the SFA is needlessly putting him in the way of scrutiny that could easily be avoided. It would be better for all concerned if he was not involved in these games. It would be better for all concerned if certain other officials were not involved in these games either.

Everyone knows this.

The rules that exist elsewhere do not simply exist to protect the game. They exist so officials are not placed in impossible situations. You cannot claim to be standing up for officials while continuing to put them into fixtures where avoidable questions about perception, allegiance and trust are guaranteed to follow them.

There is information in the public domain which cannot be removed from the public domain. It exists. It is known. It is accepted. If the SFA continues to expose these officials to these matches, then this cycle will continue.

It is deplorable and obscene that referees and their families do not feel safe. But it is also true that distrust in the present system has contributed to the climate in which every major decision becomes another spark thrown into dry grass.

There is only one proper way for the SFA to respond to that criticism. Reform the system that allows those questions to exist.

Nor can the SFA preach from a high horse about what clubs, managers, pundits and media outlets have done if it has not punished those things before now, and may not punish them even now.

If the SFA believes certain clubs have overstepped the mark, act. If it believes certain statements have helped create this atmosphere, act. If it believes certain journalists and outlets have stoked resentment, conspiracy and paranoia, act.

And it should have acted months ago.

The media narrative has been hysterical. We have all said this. But this is not the first time that a hysterical media narrative has surrounded decisions which have gone in favour of Celtic this season.

If the SFA had got a grip of some of these people, some of these outlets and some of these managers earlier, we might not be here now.

When Auston Trusty was sent off at Tynecastle, Derek McInnes said with the deepest sarcasm and bitterness about how surprised he was that his club got the decision. Even when one went in his favour he turned it into an attack on the integrity of the sport.

His comments, and those of others, afterwards carried an obvious implication, and no sanction followed. Numerous times this season, the Ibrox club has behaved in the same way, and no sanctions followed. Numerous times this season, the SFA has had to clarify decisions which went Celtic’s way because of hysterical media narratives.

Granted, none of that came close to the lunacy of the past few days.

But the pattern was there. The warning signs were there.

Certain people have behaved absolutely irresponsibly. Of course they have. But some of these people behave irresponsibly all the time. There are remedial courses of action available. The problem is that the SFA has not wanted to take them.

The most responsible course of action is to recognise the world we live in.

We live in a volatile climate. We live in a social media age of paranoia, rumour and instant rage. We live in a football culture where bad faith spreads faster than facts.

That means the structures of the game have to be beyond suspicion. Scottish football has a system which does not remove suspicion. It multiplies it.

Do not get me wrong. I agree with most of what was in that SFA statement. A lot of people should be thoroughly ashamed and embarrassed by their conduct over the past two days. That major mainstream media outlets have promoted some of the most loathsome and nonsensical commentary we have seen and heard and it is astonishing.

Whatever has motivated it, much of it is not remotely justified. But the SFA is doing exactly what it accuses other people of doing.

It is refusing to accept its own share of responsibility.

Our officials are so poor, and decision-making has become so mistrusted, that no Scottish referee was selected for the World Cup. That should have been a moment for sober reflection within Hampden. Instead, the knee-jerk reaction was to ban Michael Stewart.

That is not reform. That is not leadership. That is performative control.

The bizarre spectacle of officials taking major games with major implications, when their own allegiances or perceived allegiances are matters of public knowledge, is one of the most untenable positions in Scottish football. It cannot continue. It must not continue.

If that means that, in some weeks, we do not have suitable officials available for certain important matches and have to bring them in from somewhere else, then so be it. That is a consequence of where this game now finds itself.

It should not be ignored. It should be a reference point for the future. We should learn from it and improve. Pretending it does not matter has run out of road.

I also agree completely that we need to remove some of the hate that surrounds Scottish football. But again, this is not an original thought. Some of us have been saying this for so long that the words themselves have almost lost meaning.

One of the best ways to do it is obvious.

Start by eradicating some of the hate from stadiums. Stop pretending that the torrents of bile pouring out of certain stands at certain grounds, from followers of certain clubs, is not happening. It is happening. It creates the baseline for a hatred which is now threatening to get out of control.

Hatred has become the default position for too many people in this game.

It is not just fans in stands or forums thriving on it. It is also people in the media sphere who have spent much of this season broadcasting to colleagues, especially those south of the border, that the game here has a corruption problem because one club runs it all.

That narrative is toxic. Any outlet which repeats it without evidence is wilfully stoking the atmosphere of hate, especially when not one of them has ever offered a shred of proof to support the claim.

The SFA statement was necessary. I fear it may also be useless.

Because it is not backed up by anything serious. It is words added to tens of thousands of words already being spoken and written. Without meaningful action behind them, those words will have no force.

Without meaningful sanctions for clubs and club officials who have stepped over the line, nothing will change.

Without sanctions applied to outlets which continue spreading grotesque and intellectually incoherent ideas about the Scottish game, nothing will change.

Without naming and shaming individuals in the media who have pushed this stuff for months, nothing will change.

And without the SFA itself accepting that its structure is part of the problem, nothing will change.

If anything is going to change, the SFA has to start with itself.

The first thing it should do is make every single referee, assistant referee and VAR official sign a binding declaration of football allegiance. Then it should remove them from any part of any fixture involving their club or that club’s principal rival.

That has always been the most sensible response to all the conspiracy theorising. Scottish football has pointedly refused to take it.

Not doing so will forever subject certain officials to a level of scrutiny they should not face, and which no sane football association should place them in the path of.

People can cast around for others to blame here, and there is enough blame to go around. But the only way things change is if those responsible for spreading hatred are sanctioned, those responsible for stoking paranoia are made to pay, and some of the reasons paranoia exists are tackled head-on.

Everybody from here on in needs to take personal responsibility for how they conduct themselves and how they conduct debate.

Some of us will do that. Others will not.

But as long as we have hate in the mainstream media disguised as analysis, as long as we have hate pouring out of stands justified as cultural expression, and as long as we pretend our officials are inhuman robots whose personal allegiances or grievances can never influence perception or trust, we are not going to fix our problems.

The SFA was right to defend John Beaton. It was right to condemn threats. It was right to say the temperature has become dangerous.

But if it wants to be taken seriously, it has to do more than issue statements after the fire has already started. It has to ask who kept throwing fuel on it. And then it has to ask why its own house is still full of matches.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.