Season 25-26: The Documentary would have been incredible. It’s a shame we’ll never see it.

Last week I read one of those wonderful, wonderful stories which make Scottish football and Celtic social media such a fantastic place.

An online Hearts supporter claimed there had been Netflix interest, and interest from other parties as well, in making a documentary about last season’s title race and the way it went all the way to the final day.

Who knows whether the story is even true?

But I do know this: the person pushing it has completely misunderstood the nature of what such a documentary would actually have been about.

According to him, the SFA turned the idea down flat. And because he believes that happened, he has also decided he knows why.

The SFA supposedly turned it down because it had something to hide, and because any documentary would have ended up fixated on the idea that the title race was somehow thrown in Celtic’s direction by nefarious means.

It has apparently never dawned on him for even a second that the actual story was already extraordinary enough.

Hearts came from nowhere at the start of the season and ended up leading the title charge until the final four minutes of the final day. They usurped the Glasgow clubs, finished above one of them. This is mad enough on its own, but the side-plots (or what look that way but are actually essential to the full story) would have been just as engaging.

For a start, the Glasgow club that finished third, the one at Ibrox, collapsed in spectacular fashion not once during the season but twice.

Celtic suffered its own internal detonation. We brought Martin O’Neill in to fix the problem, then replaced him with a guy who lasted eight games, then brought O’Neill back again, only for him to snatch the title on the final day.

You do not need to embellish that. You do not need a conspiracy to sell it.

Last season was already a fairy tale. It was a fairy tale for Celtic and a fairy tale for Martin O’Neill, and that is the part which some people have been pissed off about ever since because they either cannot understand it or do not want to.

They have decided that the only fairy tale was Hearts. It was not. There were two fairy tales running simultaneously, and only one of them could prevail.

It happened to be ours.

That does not make it any less of a fairy tale because it ended theirs.

If anything, that collision between two competing stories is exactly what would have made the whole thing such fantastic television. I can understand why documentary makers might have been interested.

I can also understand why the SFA and the governing bodies of Scottish football might have wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

Because if there was even the slightest suggestion that the filmmakers intended to imply the title race had been settled dishonestly, that is not simply criticism of one referee or one decision. That is a smear against the whole game here.

No governing body anywhere is going to willingly attach its name to a project which suggests its flagship tournament may have been fixed. If somebody wants to make that documentary independently of the SFA’s help, fine. Go right ahead.

But if they make serious allegations they cannot substantiate, they will have a legal problem long before they have a distribution problem.

I have always been fascinated by the modern football documentary.

Last week, for example, I wrote about Charlie Methven and Sunderland ‘Til I Die and why his contribution to the debate over the Celtic board was one of the best and most welcome anyone has made. It was honest, straightforward and insightful precisely because Methven has actually been on the inside of a dysfunctional football club.

Whatever people think of him personally, he and Stewart Donald walked into a deeply unstable Sunderland and did the dirty work required to stabilise it before their shareholding eventually passed on to people with the money to take the club forward.

Welcome to Wrexham is fantastic television as well. But I am less in love with it than I am with Sunderland ‘Til I Die, which I have probably watched ten times from start to finish.

The two shows tell entirely different stories. One is the story of a rise. The other, especially in its first two seasons, is the story of a fall and then the desperate attempt to arrest it. And I find the ugly stuff more compelling.

Watching something come apart has a different fascination from watching something being built. With Wrexham, you can admire it, enjoy it and even envy parts of it, but another club’s success story never quite becomes wish fulfilment because the only club football supporters really want to see fulfil their dreams is their own.

Sunderland ‘Til I Die has something different. It has that “there but for the grace of God” quality. You can watch it and imagine your own club trapped in that nightmare.

That is why I have long been fascinated by the idea of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Scottish football and about Celtic in particular.

But there have been seasons where I would not have wanted to know any more than I already did. Take Brendan Rodgers’ first departure.

I knew long before it happened that something was badly wrong.

I was at Celtic Park on the day John McGinn signed for Aston Villa, the day after we had played AEK Athens there, and everything about the surreal nature of the way Peter Lawwell spoke about Rodgers convinced me that whatever relationship had once existed between the two men was already dead and buried with a headstone on it.

That was enough to know. I did not need more. What additional information could possibly have made that situation more palatable?

All it would have done was confirm in granular detail that your football club had become a dysfunctional nightmare and that the clash of egos behind the scenes was every bit as poisonous as it looked from the outside.

Too much information can damage the way you see an institution. It can strip away illusions you may actually prefer to keep.

Ironically, much of that damage has already been done over the past year by the current board of directors and by the circumstances surrounding the second departure of Rodgers himself. The difference is, in terms of what happened last season, I would have wanted to know everything.

A retrospective documentary about that campaign would have been incredible. But it would only have been incredible if it told the real story, and I do not think it ever could. You would never get the people inside Celtic to talk properly about what happened to us.

If Brendan Rodgers went on the record, he might talk around it, but I cannot imagine him disclosing the full picture. Wilfried Nancy probably would talk, and I suspect what he had to say would be absolutely fascinating.

But again, you would never get anyone from Celtic to engage publicly with the internal politics in any serious way.

The Ibrox club would be different. Their contribution would probably be fascinating simply because of the nature of what would come out of their mouths. You would get the full gamut of grievance. You would get the anger, the paranoia and the sense of having been wronged.

And in some ways that would make Celtic’s decision to remain quiet about its own internal politics look more credible, because an international audience listening to that material, and quite possibly some of what came out of Tynecastle too, might simply conclude that silence was the wiser option.

The SFA side would be highly entertaining as well.

And I am not remotely concerned about how they would handle the closing league games, what happened at Motherwell or what happened at Celtic Park.

Far more interesting to me would be the Scottish Cup game at Ibrox and whether, knowing that a worldwide audience was about to watch armed and masked men enter the field of play and attack rival supporters, the authorities could maintain the familiar plague-on-both-their-houses narrative without an international audience simply laughing at it.

Martin O’Neill would talk. He is probably the one Celtic figure who would be asked and who might actually say something memorable. And he would have quite the story to tell.

I think an international audience would love him.

I suspect they would like Derek McInnes considerably less.

I have no idea what they would make of Russell Martin or Danny Röhl.

Martin would probably come across as an oddball who wandered into the wrong film. Nancy, in a very different way, might too. Röhl would perhaps be interpreted as a guy who did not get a fair shake.

But the central character would always be O’Neill. He would be the hero of the thing. McInnes, in contrast, would probably come across as angry, bitter and entitled.

What would not survive contact with an international audience is the claim that refereeing decisions somehow swung the title race.

Because hanging over all of it would be the central fact which we have repeated over and over again. Hearts only had to come to Celtic Park and draw. That is it. The fact that they lost was one of several terrible away performances and terrible away results which contributed to the final-day drama.

The league was not decided at Fir Park. The idea that it was is nonsensical. Even if we’d drawn that night, I am convinced we’d have still won it anyway. Celtic would simply have needed more goals, and who watched those final seven matches and does not believe we would have gone looking for them?

I always believed we would. I will never waver in that belief.

We went a goal down in the decisive game and equalised within minutes. As that match wore on, the sense that the winner was coming became overwhelming.

Had Celtic needed a major victory from the start, we would have gone hell for leather from the first whistle and if we had scored early, I think Hearts would have collapsed under the psychological weight of it.

They were already cracking under pressure before they even arrived. They behaved like a side which felt the league slipping away. By the time they reached Celtic Park, I thought they looked beaten in their own heads.

Even if we had needed a bigger margin, I believe an early goal would have had exactly the same impact on them. If we’d scored early, you’d have seen them collapse the way we did recently in Linz and it would have been a rout.

That is why I would have loved a proper documentary about last season.

It would have offered a sweeping view of all the chaos. The two Glasgow clubs, both expected to dominate the season in one form or another, collapsing internally and spectacularly. Managerial upheaval in the middle of the campaign. Two managers sacked in extraordinary circumstances.

Hearts coming through the middle and taking full advantage to spark a title race which remained alive until the last minutes of the final weekend.

That is a phenomenal story. It does not need “and then the officials stole it from Hearts” pasted on top of it to make it interesting.

In fact, here is the thing. From around the turn of the year, I argued that the governing bodies of Scottish football would have loved Hearts to win that title.

Of course they would. It was the outcome with the greatest upside for them. They did not want to see Celtic domination stretching into the middle distance. They did not particularly want the Ibrox club to put together a run and take the title either, because that would merely have represented the continuation of the same Glasgow duopoly which has dominated Scottish football for decades.

Hearts winning it would have shattered the paradigm. It would have made Scottish football a far more saleable product. It would have allowed the league to tell the world that something genuinely different had happened.

A Celtic title win was nobody’s preferred outcome outside Celtic Park.

We were the people who wanted it. Hibs supporters probably enjoyed it too, for obvious reasons. But the idea that the SFA, the mainstream media and Scottish football somehow got together to hand the title to the team almost everybody outside our own support least wanted to win is preposterous.

Anyone trying to sell that version of events to a serious international audience would be laughed out of the room. And yet people have convinced themselves ever since that the whole world knows it was a scam.

The whole world supposedly believes Celtic cheated. There is apparently a vast army of documentary makers, journalists and investigators desperate to expose the truth. If it was that obvious, somebody would have done it. If the evidence was there, somebody could have. But there is no convincing argument.

There is no evidence which demonstrates a conspiracy. There is supposition. There is theorising. There is grievance. But none of it makes much sense when you put it next to the alternative explanation.

The alternative explanation is that last season was fucking insane. That is all. And because it was insane, that would have been enough to make it box office.

I predicted weeks and weeks before the finale, before we even reached the split, what would happen if Celtic snatched the title. I said we would be painted as the bad guys because we would be the team which ruined the fairy tale. We would be the spoilsports. The party crashers.

It was easy to predict that without knowing what the final sequence of events would be, without knowing Motherwell would be involved and without knowing what controversies would later dominate the conversation.

The outrage at the ending came partly from a very real emotional place. People wanted Hearts to get their happy ending.

Celtic refused to write it for them. Because we are not in the business of writing somebody else’s happy ending. We were only interested in writing our own.

And ours was extraordinary.

Last season was the most shocking, event-filled, incredible, unlikely and utterly insane football campaign I have ever watched. It stressed me to the absolute maximum. There are still parts of it I cannot think about without feeling my blood pressure rise ten per cent.

But it was also one of the greatest privileges of my life to be there for those final five post-split games and to have the honour of writing and talking about them as part of my job and as a supporter. The ending was perfect.

Whether other people liked it or not, it was narratively satisfying because it always was the story of two fairy tales running in parallel.

Only one could win. Our fairy tale is no less magnificent because theirs lost. That is the part some people still cannot accept.

I understand why the SFA might not have wanted to cooperate with a documentary project, assuming the story about one being proposed is even true. It is plausible enough that I take it seriously because that season is exactly the kind of campaign documentary makers should fall over themselves to explore.

But even without some imagined storyline about Celtic and the SFA conspiring together, there was plenty of ugliness in there, especially around that Ibrox cup game and the SFA’s responsibility is to protect the reputation of Scottish football.

My guess is that they would not have wanted all of that ugliness displayed in glorious high definition to a worldwide audience.

But of course, for the conspiracy theorists, even that becomes part of the conspiracy.

The SFA is not protecting the game, they will say. It is protecting itself. The fact that it refuses to cooperate is proof that there was something to hide. And they will never let it go.

They are unable to let it go.

For some of them, especially Hearts supporters who genuinely believed they were watching the birth of a generational title victory before seeing it disappear in front of them, it has become a psychological crutch.

I understand why. If I were in their position, perhaps I would need one too.

But because I know a serious documentary would never have been built around the central premise that Hearts had the title stolen from them, I would still have loved to see it made. I would have loved the SFA to put aside its natural caution.

I would have loved Celtic’s directors to grow some balls and tell the world what it was actually like inside the club during that campaign.

Admit they fucked it up. Admit colossal mistakes were made. Admit the whole thing nearly came apart. Then tell the other part of the story.

A very special man came back and rescued it.

Lean into the fairy tale. Promote the story. Own the madness. It would have been fantastic.

And for every element which delighted people, there would probably have been ten things which left somebody else furious. Because even if the documentary simply showed the final matches, presented the incidents, showed VAR making decisions it was designed to make and allowed the audience to reach its own conclusions, the conspiracy theorists would still accuse it of pulling its punches.

The SFA would be accused of exercising editorial control. Legal threats would be imagined. Cuts would be analysed. Missing footage theories would grow and pass into folklore. Everything would be folded back into the theory.

That is how these things work once people become psychologically invested in them. Whether the documentary exists becomes proof. Whether it does not exist becomes proof. What it contains becomes proof. What it omits becomes proof.

There is no escape from a conspiracy theory built like that because every possible outcome is absorbed into it.

I would never want a Sunderland ‘Til I Die style documentary about Celtic itself. I never have. I do not want that much insight into what goes on inside this club. I have a feeling some of us would be even more furious than we already are if we ever got it.

But a retrospective documentary about last season? That would have been phenomenal television. Millions upon millions of people could have watched it and been amazed because the season had everything.

It had high drama. It had betrayal and backstabbing. It had calamitous decisions inside the major clubs. It had bitter rivalries and intense hatreds. It had the events of that day at Ibrox when our penalty shootout victory appeared to break them and helped send them into the tailspin which eventually saw them finish third. It had Celtic’s final winning run, which almost nobody outside our support thought possible.

One journalist famously gave us a zero per cent chance of winning the league.

There were enough twists in that campaign for an eight-part series, and I do not think anybody would have been bored for a second.

I am genuinely sad we will probably never see it. I am sad if the story is true and the project was proposed but never happened. And if the story is false, I am almost sadder that nobody appears to have seriously proposed it in the first place.

I will treasure the memories of last season forever whether there is a documentary or not. I have watched those final fixtures over and over and over again.

They will never get old. They will never become boring.

From ?van?ara’s penalty which won the cup tie at Ibrox, to Maeda’s overhead kick, to the incredible sight of young Callum Osmand back from serious injury running half the length of the Celtic Park pitch to roll the ball into an empty net, those images will stay with me forever.

My real regret is for the global audience which never got to experience any of it except in little flashes and little fragments. They never got to understand every crazy detail. They never got to see every twist in the road. They never got to feel the tension build week after week until the whole season seemed ready to explode.

I feel sorry for them.

They are the ones who really lost out. We got to live through it. And what we lived through was special. A special, special victory in a season so unbelievable that we may never see anything like it again.

It’s a story the world deserves to hear … it just would never have been the one some were desperate to have told.

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