Celtic knows that further talks with Ibrox are pointless. The ticket fiasco is over with.

Way back when I was politically active, I never wanted to be a politician, but I never particularly wanted to be in and around certain other aspects of politics either.

Take the Civil Service. I never considered for one second joining it.

Where would I have wanted to work? The Treasury sounds boring. The Home Office sounds soul-destroying. Of the so-called great offices of state, that leaves Defence, where there are so many reasons not to do it that it would probably be quicker to list the positives, which I am not even going to bother with.

Then there is the Foreign Office.

That is simultaneously the most interesting, the most daunting and the one to which I am least temperamentally suited.

If you have ever read a book written by a senior diplomat, watched diplomatic talks when cameras have occasionally been allowed into the room or listened afterwards to people describing what actually happened during major negotiations, it is almost incomprehensible that anybody who swiftly tires of bullshit could survive the job.

You have to sit through diplomatic niceties and the pretence of mutual respect with people who may blatantly hate your guts and who may be openly lying to your face.

But you cannot say that. Not in a diplomatic setting.

You have to pretend to believe in goodwill.

You have to make an attempt to reach an accommodation even when you know in your gut that one may be impossible, because there are protocols and procedures and a weird sort of tap dance built into the whole process. Anything involving diplomacy would have a half-life of interest for me of about five minutes.

Diplomatic language is such bullshit. It is such bakery-window nonsense that I sometimes wonder whether it is even designed to be processed by the human ear and brain in the same way as ordinary conversation.

That is why, at all these high-level summits, there are usually smaller groups meeting somewhere else where people can have what are euphemistically called frank exchanges of views. But when everybody gets into the main room, where the decisions are actually supposed to be made, they play the same shitty game.

Which is why, when I hear people around Scottish football saying that Celtic and the Ibrox club simply need to get around a table and sort out this ticket problem, it makes me want to laugh. Martin O’Neill and Derek McInnes have now added their names to that general noise.

But this thing has been going on for years.

Anyone who seriously believes there have not already been discussions is either not paying attention or is being deliberately misleading for reasons of political expediency. Perhaps they do not want to say too much. Perhaps they do not want to inflame a situation which already has enough petrol poured over it.

I understand that. I even sympathise with it. But I cannot imagine what my attitude would be sitting inside one of those rooms.

Because I know Celtic has been willing to compromise. Celtic has repeatedly stated that it is willing to compromise. The problem is that if you are negotiating with a side which does not want to compromise, which increasingly regards compromise itself as defeat and which is under enormous pressure from the most strident elements of its own support, then you are not conducting the kind of negotiation where a good-faith solution is necessarily possible.

Almost every meeting between these two clubs over this issue appears to have been a colossal waste of Celtic’s time.

I see little reason for another one any time soon, except perhaps if somebody is there to document exactly what is said, because then we might finally be spared the lazy media narrative that both sides are equally culpable and equally opposed to a sensible solution.

Celtic has spoken publicly on this issue many times.

The media tends to take whichever parts of those statements suit the story it wants to tell and ignore the rest.

One of the passages which repeatedly gets ignored is that Celtic remains open to discussions with all relevant parties, that it wants a fair and equitable solution and, ideally, would favour restoring a meaningful reciprocal away allocation.

That has consistently been Celtic’s stated position. I have lost count of the number of pro-Ibrox commentators I have heard saying they want to see an appropriate number of away supporters at these fixtures, before immediately going off on a tangent about “both clubs” as if both clubs are equally opposed to such an outcome. They are not.

Only one of the clubs decided that 300 tickets was an appropriate offer for the forthcoming League Cup tie. Only one club took an existing reciprocal framework and decided to drive a coach and horses through it.

And only one club appears determined that no settlement can ever be allowed to look as though Celtic has gained anything from it.

That matters. Because once compromise itself starts being regarded as surrender, negotiation becomes almost impossible.

There are some extraordinary accounts in some outstanding books about how the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated. Again and again, the negotiating teams ran into a basic political reality: representatives at the table were not always free simply to agree something because they had constituencies outside the room which could veto what they were doing.

Mo Mowlam famously went into the Maze prison to speak directly with loyalist prisoners because their consent mattered to whether the political process could move forward. That is an extreme historical example and obviously this is football, not a peace process.

But the negotiating principle is relevant.

Sometimes the person sitting opposite you is not actually the only person you are negotiating with.

And it increasingly seems to me that Celtic finds itself sitting across the table from an Ibrox board which has to consider how every agreement will be received by the most militant and unreasonable section of its support. If that section regards compromise itself as capitulation, what exactly is the other side supposed to offer?

There is a mindset around Ibrox which seems increasingly difficult to escape, a hardcore determination that Celtic must not be seen to have the upper hand in anything.

Even without supporter pressure, I am not convinced some of the people sitting at that table are naturally predisposed towards compromise anyway. But the moment the loudest section of the support becomes the unspoken third party in the room, and policy starts revolving around what it will tolerate, the negotiation becomes close to pointless.

Now, obviously, there are meetings which have to happen.

There are procedures which must be followed between the clubs, the SPFL, Police Scotland, councils, safety authorities and everybody else involved in preparing and running these fixtures. Those meetings are necessary. They are essential.

They concern basic organisation, safety and the practical things without which these games cannot take place. Those meetings go ahead because what alternative is there?

But beyond that, it is naive to keep saying that all Celtic needs to do is attend another meeting and somehow a breakthrough will materialise.

The truth is that Celtic actively wants this resolved.

The club has said so. It has publicly indicated the sort of resolution it wants. It is willing to engage everybody involved in getting there. The problem is that the Ibrox club does not want to go to that place.

And fair enough, they are entitled to take that position.

But there should still be some middle position where both clubs can find a settlement. The problem is that they do not appear to want that either.

So, what exactly do you do except eventually walk away from the table?

And it gets worse when you consider another situation diplomats encounter constantly: arriving at a meeting with a previously negotiated agreement in front of you which is suddenly worth considerably less than the paper it is printed on because the people sitting opposite you have decided to reinterpret, circumvent or discard it.

Diplomats are expected to sit through that and continue acting as though another accommodation can somehow be reached.

You can see versions of this every day in international politics.

Look at the difficulties governments have had trying to negotiate with Donald Trump’s administration when agreements, understandings and policy positions can change abruptly according to whatever the president decides matters that day.

If you are a diplomat representing another country and an agreement you thought you had is suddenly shredded, you cannot walk into the next meeting and say, “Your boss is a maniac, you know he is a maniac, and this entire discussion is fantastical lunacy.”

Even if everybody on your side privately agrees with every word, diplomacy requires you to sit there and continue talking. I could manage that for about five minutes. My career at the Foreign Office would have ended before the biscuits arrived.

Now imagine being the Celtic representatives sitting in a room with the SPFL and the Ibrox club over this. Imagine listening while the other side complains about what happened during last season’s Scottish Cup tie and uses that as justification for offering 300 tickets for a completely different competition.

Imagine being told that they are simply following the rules while knowing that the Scottish FA and the SPFL operate separate competitions under separate regulations. Imagine knowing that a reciprocal arrangement had already been established for league fixtures, only for the League Cup situation to become the loophole through which the entire spirit of that agreement could be attacked.

That is the reality Celtic has been asked to navigate.

The previous reciprocal framework was around five per cent of stadium capacity, roughly 2,500 visiting supporters at each ground. The Ibrox club proposed 300 for the League Cup quarter-final. Celtic refused.

Celtic then sought a determination from the SPFL.

And today the SPFL announced that there will be no away supporters at any league or League Cup fixture between the clubs for the remainder of this season. The SPFL’s own statement confirms the sequence. Ibrox proposed the reduced allocation, Celtic rejected it and asked the league body to determine the matter. After further discussions, the outcome became zero away supporters for both clubs for the rest of the season.

So Celtic was being asked to negotiate with people who follow one set of rules when it suits them, point towards a different set when that suits them and exploit the distinction between competitions when doing so provides leverage.

And Celtic is then supposed to sit there and accept the media’s moral-high-ground nonsense about how everybody should just be reasonable. Reasonable about what?

There was an agreement. It took a long time to get there. The SPFL itself had become involved in establishing that framework. Celtic accepted it. Then an opportunity arose to offer Celtic just 300 tickets because the upcoming fixture happened to fall under a different competition albeit under he same governing body. And the Ibrox club took it.

And once that happens, what agreement do you actually have?

This brings us back to diplomacy and, more importantly, to negotiation itself. Because the people Celtic sends to these meetings are not professional diplomats. They are not obliged to sit there indefinitely pretending that being gaslit, sneered at and treated with obvious hostility represents some sophisticated form of dialogue.

Where is the middle ground supposed to be? Where is the foundation for a mutually beneficial agreement?

And for a moment, let’s talk about what a mutually beneficial agreement actually means.

Because this is another area where the Trumpian “Art of the Deal” mentality has poisoned people’s understanding of negotiations. One side wins. One side loses. That is supposedly what a deal is, in the world these morons inhabit.

Except that serious deal-making does not have to work like that at all. In fact, the modern theoretical framework for bargaining is much closer to the Nash principle I wrote about earlier today in relation to Celtic’s transfer business.

Nash bargaining is about cooperation.

It starts from the idea that two parties may have different objectives and different fallback positions, but that there can be a range of outcomes in which both sides are better off by agreeing than by walking away.

The job is to find one. That is negotiation. That is cooperation.

The idea that every deal requires a winner and loser has no serious place in that framework, or, indeed, in much economic theory.

Both sides can win. There is absolutely no reason why Celtic and the Ibrox club cannot, in principle, reach a mutually beneficial ticket agreement. Indeed, Celtic believed that was what the reciprocal framework had achieved.

Celtic did not get everything it might ideally want. Ibrox did not get everything it might ideally want. But somewhere between those two positions was an arrangement which gave each side something valuable.

Away supporters returned in meaningful numbers. Both sets of fans got access to the fixture. The atmosphere improved. Broad reciprocity existed. Neither side needed to call itself the loser. That is bargaining. That is the point.

But it requires both parties to recognise that the objective of negotiation is agreement rather than victory. And that no longer appears to be the mindset we are dealing with, if indeed it ever was to begin with.

It took long enough to reach the previous arrangement in the first place. The SPFL had to become involved. A five per cent framework was eventually established. Our side was willing to live with it. Their side never seemed particularly comfortable with it, and when the first obvious opportunity arose to depart from its spirit, they did.

The Scottish Cup situation then became part of the explanation for why Celtic should receive 300 tickets for the League Cup.

But the Scottish FA and the SPFL are two different governing bodies.

That is simply a fact. They run different competitions under different regulations. That distinction is precisely why the league allocation framework did not automatically determine the allocation for last season’s Scottish Cup tie.

So, the suggestion that today’s SPFL position is somehow simply the automatic consequence of the SFA’s disciplinary process – which is the line some in the media are desperate to push; that away fans are “banned” because the SPFL grew some balls – is simply not true.

And this is where the SPFL’s performance deserves serious scrutiny. The league body wants today’s announcement to look decisive.

It does not look decisive to me. It looks weak.

When Ibrox offered 300 tickets, it clearly violated the spirit of the reciprocal framework which had been established for these fixtures, whether or not the technical wording of that agreement applied automatically to a League Cup game.

Celtic refused the offer and took the matter to the SPFL. The SPFL confirms that Celtic sought a determination. So, why didn’t the SPFL determine it? And on no account do I believe that they did and came up with the zero number.

Instead, they called a meeting.

They tried to get the very agreement to compromise that we’ve spent this article talking about. And we all know which side didn’t want to make a deal or change its mind. Now neither club will receive away tickets for SPFL fixtures for the rest of the season. That is not, in my view, a strong governing body imposing a settlement.

It looks like a governing body accepting that the positions could not be reconciled and dressing the resulting stalemate in the language of one.

The SPFL says “agreement has been reached”.

But agreement that neither support gets anything because the original arrangement has collapsed is hardly evidence of successful arbitration. It is evidence that the arbitration failed. At some point in those discussions, Ibrox clearly remained unwilling to offer Celtic anything approaching the previous reciprocal allocation. Celtic clearly remained unwilling to accept 300. What other position was Celtic supposed to adopt?

Accept the tickets and validate the entire exercise? Tell its own supporters that 300 was now good enough? Then turn around a week later and hand the Ibrox club thousands of tickets for Celtic Park? Of course not.

This site predicted where the road Ibrox willingly walked down would lead. If the agreement was effectively being abandoned from their side, Celtic would return to zero, and it’s perfectly clear that it was our club who finally accepted that the previous agreement had voided and, however reluctantly, have acted according to their stated intentions right from he start. To treat Ibrox with the respect it shows us.

That is where we are, and the SPFL has now accepted it.

The media will dress that up as the league body acting firmly.

I see the complete opposite. I see the governing body failing to defend a framework it helped establish and ultimately allowing Ibrox’s behaviour to push this towards the worst possible outcome for supporters.

That is not leadership. It is an abdication of leadership.

Let me say again what I said at the start; I would have been a terrible diplomat.

The Civil Service held almost no attraction for me whatsoever, because the one part of it which genuinely fascinated me was the one job I knew I was least temperamentally equipped to perform. I am just a normal guy. Diplomacy requires an almost superhuman capacity for detachment.

Whoever Celtic sent into those meetings presumably has a considerably higher breaking threshold than I do. They would need one.

But everybody has a breaking point.

When you repeatedly sit across from people who do not appear willing to negotiate in good faith, eventually there comes a moment when continuing the conversation becomes a form of theatre which even high-level diplomacy can no longer tolerate.

And Celtic, which must already be sick to death of this whole sordid and shabby affair, appears to have reached that point.

There are plenty of well-intentioned people in Scottish football saying that all this needs is for everybody to get around a table and talk.

They are well intentioned. They are also staggeringly naive if they think merely arranging another meeting creates any meaningful prospect of success.

If they paid attention to Celtic’s stated position, they would know what it is.

Celtic wants this resolved. Celtic is willing to restore meaningful reciprocal allocations. Celtic has repeatedly shown willingness to engage in a framework which does that. The other club is not willing to do it on those terms.

So where is the middle ground? What half-measure remains which has not already been attempted? We thought we had one of those, and then Ibrox chucked it in the bin and set fire to the bin. That agreement is in ashes.

The 300-ticket allocation was a petty and needlessly aggressive act from a club which was desperately in need of a deflection tactic after its atrocious European exit and which also has to keep one eye permanently fixed on its own lunatic fringe.

Whether the motivation was self-preservation, grievance politics or another dose of “we are the people” supremacy hardly matters.

The outcome is identical. Cooperation and mutual benefit cease to matter. The conversation becomes extremely short. Take it or leave it.

Celtic left it. That was the only sensible decision available.

Accepting 300 potentially created safety concerns for a tiny travelling support.

Accepting it would have legitimised the destruction of the reciprocal framework.

Accepting it and then continuing to offer a much larger allocation at Celtic Park would have amounted to taking some imaginary moral high ground from which Celtic gained absolutely nothing.

And accepting it would have demonstrated that an agreement which took months to establish could simply be reinterpreted whenever Ibrox saw fit.

At that point, there is no agreement. There is merely whatever the Ibrox club decides the agreement means on any particular day.

One club brought us to this point. Just one. It is pointless pretending otherwise. The media will try. With no willingness to confront the side most directly responsible, it will fall back on the oldest cliché in Scottish football: a plague on both their houses.

The SPFL will present today’s outcome as evidence that it has acted.

But read its own statement. Celtic challenged the 300 tickets. Celtic asked the SPFL for a determination. The outcome of that process is that the reciprocal away-fan arrangement has effectively collapsed completely for the remainder of this season.

That is not a triumph of governing-body authority.

It is evidence that authority failed.

Perhaps both clubs will have issued fuller responses by the time you read this. Whatever they say, one thing is perfectly obvious. The previous agreement is dead. And I see no basis tonight for believing that another one can be negotiated on any foreseeable timetable.

Celtic will keep the door open. Perfectly willingly. Perfectly honestly. Celtic will continue saying that it wants a proper reciprocal arrangement because that is what the club has consistently said. Ibrox may even claim that it is willing to walk part of the way through that door, and people will pretend not to know what that means.

But nobody on the Celtic side has much reason left to believe it anyway. We are keeping the door open because that is what responsible organisations do. Call it courtesy. Call it procedure. Dare I say it, call it diplomacy.

But do not confuse keeping the door open with believing somebody is actually going to walk through it. Because negotiations require two parties who want an agreement more than they want to defeat each other.

That is the Nash principle. That is cooperation for mutual benefit.

But when one side becomes more interested in winning than settling, the entire process breaks down. You cannot negotiate a mutually beneficial agreement with people who regard mutual benefit as evidence that they have lost. You cannot bargain sensibly with people for whom compromise is surrender.

And you cannot keep pretending that another meeting will solve a problem when the people on the other side of the table do not actually want the solution you are meeting to discuss.

At some point you stop wasting your time.

Celtic has reached that point, and it is wrong to assume that we should keep trying forever, or that we under some moral obligation to do so.

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