Nick Walsh for Sunday. No wonder nobody is happy.

Two things about referees in Scotland have always made me laugh. The first is the idea that they are somehow the most honest people in world football. The second is the idea that the more supporters hate them, the better they must be at the job.

The first is preposterous. The second is just idiotic.

I do not like exceptionalism, and the SFA’s version of refereeing exceptionalism has always struck me as one of the most arrogant and self-defeating examples anywhere in football.

The idea that Scottish officials should somehow be beyond serious scrutiny, that we should simply place blind faith in them and trust that everything is fine because they tell us it is fine, has never made sense.

That is not to say referees are corrupt. It is to say they are human beings operating in an industry where enormous amounts of money, pressure and emotion are involved, and human beings should be subject to scrutiny.

That is normal. Tell somebody outside Scottish football that the answer to concerns over officials is simply, “Trust them,” and I suspect they would wonder what sort of system we were running.

But it is the second mantra which makes me laugh most.

I have already heard variations of it today following the news that Nick Walsh will referee Sunday’s cup tie at Ibrox. Celtic supporters are unhappy. Ibrox supporters are unhappy. Each support can point to decisions involving Walsh which still infuriate them. Each can point to incidents they think he got badly wrong. Each has its own theories about particular calls.

And this is where the familiar media line arrives. If Celtic supporters hate him and Ibrox supporters hate him, he must be doing something right.

Really? Why? There is another possible conclusion here.

If everybody thinks you are bad at your job, perhaps you are bad at your job.

That possibility never seems to occur to some people. The assumption is that universal dissatisfaction somehow proves neutrality and competence. It proves no such thing.

If supporters on both sides of the city consistently distrust the same official, why must that automatically be dismissed as rival paranoia? Why can it not be about performance? Why can it not mean that the referee simply makes too many poor decisions?

Nick Walsh is officially one of Scotland’s top referees. In fact, the SFA announced in December that he had been promoted to UEFA’s Elite Referee Category. I read that and my toes curl. Because if Walsh represents the elite standard of Scottish refereeing, then the obvious question is what standard sits beneath him.

Now, to be fair, “Elite” in this case is not merely some flattering phrase invented by the Scottish media. It is an actual UEFA classification.

But there is another international benchmark worth considering. Scotland did not have a referee or dedicated VAR official selected for the 2026 men’s World Cup.

Not one. The tournament contained referees and VAR specialists from across Europe and the rest of the world, but nobody from Scotland was chosen in either of those roles. That does not prove every Scottish referee is hopeless. But it should end any pretence that the standard here is beyond criticism.

Walsh is not a referee whose appointment fills me with confidence. There is nothing particularly reassuring about getting him except for the knowledge that Scottish football contains officials I would be even less happy to see.

That is not praise for Walsh.

That is an indictment of the wider standard.

The supporters across the city have their own complaints about him. One of the most famous involved Alistair Johnston in the December 2023 derby at Celtic Park, although interestingly that is one incident where I think the officials got the central issue right. The controversy centred on an alleged handball by Johnston, but the VAR review established that Abdallah Sima had been offside in the build-up anyway. The Ibrox club subsequently demanded the VAR audio.

That is important because it underlines another part of the problem.

Walsh is not operating alone anymore.

VAR exists. And sometimes criticism of the referee ignores the fact that another team of officials has checked the same incident. But VAR has also created another weakness.

Some referees increasingly look as if they are waiting for it.

They hesitate. They avoid making the decisive call. They appear to trust that somebody sitting in front of a screen will rescue them if necessary.

That is not what VAR was supposed to create. VAR should make referees more confident. If you know there is someone watching every major incident and capable of correcting a clear mistake, you should be freer to make the decision you actually see.

Instead, some officials look paralysed by it. And Walsh, at times, looks like one of them. He is not a referee I associate with decisive authority. He often appears reluctant to make the biggest calls unless VAR gives him a steer.

The irony is that this reluctance can then be interpreted as restraint, as though not making decisions is somehow evidence of superior judgement. It is not.

Sometimes not making a decision is itself a bad decision.

One of the recurring complaints about Walsh is that he is reluctant to show red cards. That complaint is certainly not exclusive to Celtic supporters. And for us, the frustration comes from the number of games where our players have been subjected to extremely heavy challenges and the punishment has felt inadequate.

There have also been fixtures involving the club across the city where challenges have escaped the sanction Celtic supporters thought they deserved.

Again, you do not need a conspiracy theory to explain that. You can simply believe the referee is inconsistent, or rather to put it differently, that he is consistently bad. That is the point people constantly miss in Scottish football.

You do not have to believe an official is corrupt in order to believe he is poor.

Those are completely different accusations. An incompetent referee can produce bad decisions for everybody. In fact, that is exactly what you would expect.

If the same official repeatedly irritates Celtic, Ibrox, Hearts, Aberdeen and everybody else, the logical response should not automatically be, “Excellent, he must be perfectly impartial.”

It might be. Or he might simply be getting decisions wrong all over the place. The idea that the dissatisfaction itself is proof of quality is some of the most backwards logic in football.

The standard line is that every club complains when decisions go against it. Of course they do. Football supporters are partisan. Managers are partisan. Players are partisan. That is built into the game.

But when the same names repeatedly generate criticism from different clubs, different managers and different groups of supporters, surely at some point you investigate whether there is a common denominator.

That is what proper scrutiny is for. Not to prove corruption. To measure competence. To identify patterns. To understand why particular officials are consistently involved in controversy. And to determine whether they actually deserve the appointments they keep receiving.

Scottish football is desperate to make refereeing criticism about morality.

Are you accusing them of cheating? Are you saying they are biased? Are you questioning their integrity? Sometimes I am doing none of those things. Sometimes I am simply saying the guy is not very good.

This is why the foreign-referee argument refuses to disappear.

If you asked Celtic supporters whether they would be comfortable with high-level foreign officials taking charge of these games, I suspect the answer would be overwhelmingly yes. Ask the other side and I suspect you would get much the same response.

That is remarkable in itself.

Here are two supports which agree on almost nothing, yet I think you could get substantial agreement on bringing in officials from elsewhere for the biggest fixtures. If that level of support exists, why would the SFA not at least examine it?

Look at leagues producing officials trusted with World Cups, European Championships and Champions League knockout games. Look at whether exchanges could work for major fixtures. Look at whether outside referees might actually reduce pressure instead of increasing it. At the very least, study the idea.

Because the current solution is apparently to appoint Nick Walsh, remind us that he is “elite”, listen to both sets of supporters complain and then announce that their mutual unhappiness proves he must be excellent.

Maybe Walsh has a brilliant game on Sunday.

I hope he does. I hope nobody is talking about him afterwards. That is the best outcome any referee can have in a match like this. But his appointment should not be defended on the basis that everybody dislikes it.

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