The Ibrox fans are raging at their new away shirt. Fools and their money …

I was incredibly amused today to read the story about Ibrox fans lobbying their club over the brand-new away kit that has just been released.

It brings me back to something we said in 2023, when the new extension to the Castore deal was signed but dressed up as something else entirely. It was later presented as a deal with Umbro, and oh, how we laughed.

Because it was never a secret that this was Castore with an Umbro coat on.

They were given a licence to use the Umbro brand name on their own gear, and we said at the time that the media misreporting it as a deal with Umbro were doing the club a disservice. They were doing the fans a disservice too. Those supporters and supporter groups pushing the line that this was a better manufacturer were being flagrantly dishonest.

Ibrox’s own site has since described the new Umbro kit as being “under our partnership with Castore.”

Reports have also stated that the club extended its Castore contract until 2030, while kits would carry the Umbro logo because Castore had acquired rights to sub-license the Umbro brand for professional teams.

And still you had people denying this! You had the media refusing to mention it!

Castore with a different badge.

The whole Castore thing has been weird from the start, and hilariously weird at that.

Of course, nobody really knows who Castore are in the fuller sense. We know who founded the company, sure. But during that last round of fundraising, when they were going big into the football market, nobody really knew who was providing the cash.

Some of us have always had a sneaking suspicion that there are links in there somewhere to Mike Ashley.

What I do know is this: almost every aspect of that deal looks eerily similar to the one Ashley had, including the long extension signed in 2023 and later branded as an Umbro revival.

Now the Ibrox fans are furious because their new away shirt is basically plain white with some odd-looking blue trim on it. I laughed at that because the same people complaining about it are also getting awfully excited about when the new home kit comes out.

That amuses me no end.

It always has.

Because, after all, Celtic have one of the most distinctive football shirts in the world. There are little tweaks and changes you can make every year which make each version slightly different from the last.

Not all those choices have been good ones. Not all the changes have been positive.

Sometimes the design goes severely awry, as it did a few years ago, and sometimes Adidas hit the mark perfectly.

But it remains an iconic football shirt.

It remains recognisable throughout the world.

The Ibrox home shirt is just a blue jersey.

That’s it. Just a blue top.

There are no adornments you can make to that which are going to make it any less boring or any less ordinary.

There are hundreds of teams out there who play in a blue jersey.

Here’s one for the old-timers.

Before EA Sports and video football games, we used to play Subbuteo, which must now seem rather quaint to the current generation. Hobbyists have dabbled in the game and maybe even enjoy it, but if you wanted recreational football in your own living room once upon a time, that was what you had.

If you bought Celtic for that game, you had to take care of those pieces so carefully because there were literally only a handful of clubs who could stand in for them if you broke a player or lost one.

But you didn’t even have to buy Rangers.

As long as you had Leicester City or some other side that played in blue, you were fine.

If you had another blue-clad team, you could swap pieces out and barely notice the difference.

So I have always laughed at the idea that there is anything distinctive they can do with that shirt.

There is nothing iconic about it apart from the number of times you have seen it on Crimewatch, wrapped around the fat gut of some loyalist paramilitary or protester. In those circles, I suppose it is sort of iconic, with certain years standing out because of the logo and whichever sponsor was emblazoned on the front.

Their shirt-deal situation has been a shambles since they crawled out of the grave of Rangers, and any goodwill or sense of professionalism they might once have had disappeared the minute Dave King came in and started tearing up contracts he did not happen to like.

That resulted in all those notorious legal cases they had to endure, which led to Celtic fans joking that they were at the High Court more often than they were at Hampden.

Although there has been less of that lately, I still think High Court appearances run Hampden appearances pretty close on an annual basis.

All this is to say that I found today’s stories amusing for any number of reasons, not least because we flagged these very issues when the deal was signed, in spite of all the media hype about how brilliant they were.

It turns out the Ibrox fans now disagree rather strongly.

Their Fan Advisory Board is due to discuss the matter with the club, although I do not know what result they expect to get. The irony of ironies, of course, is that the Americans would have been free to negotiate their own deal had the previous board not signed a seven-year contract.

That means they are locked into this for the next four years, whether they like it or not.

And since I believe the Castore deal is even more ironclad than the seven-year contract would suggest, breaking it, if that is what they were inclined to do, will probably be more hassle than it is worth.

It is always nice to have a reminder that while we shamble through life continuing to win titles and trophies, they shamble through it continuing to win nothing but the derision of their own supporters.

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