Anyone expecting a severe sanction for Celtic today were always heading for disappointment.

Today, the SPFL published its verdict into a handful of recent games, some of them involving Celtic, and the judgement it rendered was that Celtic had been naughty boys and that Celtic fans had been naughty boys and girls.

This was not exactly breaking news.

We knew there would be a sanction. We knew the media outcry had been whipped up to fever pitch. We knew there had been all sorts of crazy talk about what the punishment might be.

But most of that was abject whining from losers who could not handle losing.

There was never any realistic prospect of the kind of serious sanction some people had convinced themselves was coming. There was never going to be a points deduction. There was never going to be some league-table-altering punishment. There was never going to be the kind of earth-shattering verdict that would retrospectively transfer glory and honour to Hearts.

Scottish football does not sanction clubs to that degree.

It never has.

Instead, Celtic received the kind of punishment a lot of us expected: financial penalties and suspended ticket or capacity reductions which the club can absorb comfortably, without any serious material impact. The fines are paltry in the context of Celtic’s finances. The suspended punishments are warnings rather than immediate blows.

It is a slap on the wrist. A public telling-off.

A “back to your corners and do not do it again” verdict.

Of course, one wonders whether the people running Celtic have decided that since Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham were partly responsible for the success, they should also be responsible for the celebrations afterwards. I am kidding, obviously, but this is the kind of bizarre logic you start to expect from Celtic these days.

The verdict has come only a handful of weeks after the game, and the fact that it has arrived relatively quickly does raise questions about the SFA and where its own so-called independent panel report is. Especially when we were told that it would arrive in short order several weeks ago.

Frankly, none of us knows what is taking so long.

All of us are looking forward to seeing it.

Perhaps that is why it has taken so long. There is a pretty universal belief among Celtic fans that it too will vindicate us. We have already been vindicated over events during the Hearts and Motherwell games in several important respects. The wildest claims have not survived contact with the evidence. The hysteria has not been matched by the facts.

Any independent report which does not strongly condemn the Ibrox club for the behaviour of its supporters and for the attitude it took in the aftermath of the game, where it defended them, will not be worth the paper it is written on.

I say that because I believe absolutely that it will hammer them.

Because it has to.

Today’s verdict brings an end to the fleeting, faint hopes of a number of people connected to Hearts and Ibrox who had hoped Celtic would suffer some severe sanction as a result of the events at Celtic Park.

I know Brian Wilson has come out tonight and made a statement, but I will address that tomorrow. I have no interest in addressing anything Brian Wilson has to say at the moment.

If you guys have noticed a slight lessening of work on the blog this week, it is because I am on holiday.

That does not mean there is nothing to write about. It does not mean there is no news to discuss. When something piques my interest, I will drag myself from the poolside bar to the nearest internet café and get on with it.

For the moment, I simply want to address those people who put great store in the idea that there were going to be heavy sanctions against our club as a result of what happened at Celtic Park.

I do not know how they could have clung to that hope for this long, especially when the events at Celtic Park have been so thoroughly discussed and the lies told about Celtic fans so thoroughly dismantled.

Do not get me wrong. Had players actually been assaulted, had there actually been serious incidents of the type people alleged, then a more substantial punishment could have been coming our way. But even then it would almost certainly have fallen well short of what some people were fantasising about.

Some of those fevered individuals were talking about points deductions, which would have flipped the league table. Others talked about ground closures, which would have impacted us next season. But none of these things was ever likely, no matter how bad things on that pitch had ended up.

Bear in mind here that Celtic officials and players have been hit by objects at a certain ground in Scotland over and over again. A Hearts fan ran onto the pitch and attacked Neil Lennon in full view of the Sky cameras and was found not guilty in court.

In none of those incidents was there a ground closure, a points deduction or anything close to that level of punishment.

These things just do not happen here.

Maybe you can mount an argument that says they should happen here. I would be reluctant to agree, but I am happy to hear the case. The fact remains that, as things stand, no such sanction has ever been imposed upon a club in this league.

It would have been without precedent.

That means it would have been challengeable.

If the SFA and SPFL want to get serious and toughen the sanctions regime, then perhaps in future, if they stick to their guns, you might see a sliding scale of punishment. But that is not the system we currently have.

What we have is what we got today. Warnings.

Fines. Suspended punishments.

A strong statement wrapped around very limited action.

Ibrox fans are doubtless indulging in their favourite subject tonight: conspiracy theories. They will be saying it is not a coincidence that Michael Nicholson gets elected to the SPFL board one day and this verdict is published the next.

They really do see the strangest things in the strangest places.

The idea that Michael Nicholson, a man who can barely run a bath let alone the whole of Scottish football, is somehow behind this is laughable. It takes absurdity to brand-new heights.

Still, some of them will believe it.

The truth is much simpler and much less fun to write about. If there were some gigantic conspiracy at the heart of the game, that would at least be worth my time. That would at least be worth the effort.

But this is just another example of an association that is bereft, clueless and weak.

How do you think Michael Nicholson gets onto the board in the first place? A guy who should be run out of Celtic Park for basic incompetence now has a senior seat at the table in the game.

That tells you everything about Scottish football.

If you were hoping for some earth-shattering verdict here, if you were hoping for something that upended the league table and gave Hearts a trophy they failed to win on the pitch, you were always going to be disappointed.

You were mad to believe anyone had the stones for that.

This is Scottish football. It does not have governance of any serious sort or description. That is why it is so easy to dismiss all theories that Celtic run the game.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone runs the game.

I know that those who do run it do not want to be seen making tough decisions. Even if there had been a proven case that Celtic had done something deserving of punishment at the upper end of the scale, I do not believe anything dramatic would have happened.

Anyone who believed otherwise was basically kidding themselves.

We got the result we were always going to get. Celtic got their wrists slapped. Other clubs got their wrists slapped. It was all naughty boys, boys will be boys, back to your corners and do not do it again.

Even the punishments for further infringements are pitiful and unlikely to stop anyone who is thinking about entering the field of play. Celtic would lose 100 tickets from an away allocation. Celtic would lose 1,000 seats from a 60,000-capacity stadium at home.

For those out there who believe these verdicts are perverse, I may even agree with you to an extent. But the idea that Celtic should have been subjected to anything more than a minimal punishment is itself pretty ridiculous.

It is not a shock.

A lot of us said for weeks that people should not get their hopes up.

Still, I would imagine some of them did.

They must be having a pretty bad night.

My sympathy is minimal at best.

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