The Ibrox Fan Board’s whingeing at Celtic was hilariously deranged.

The Sevco Fan Advisory Board issued a statement last night about the restrictions on away supporters from Glasgow derby matches for the rest of the season.

It is a masterpiece of self-pitying whining. Apparently, this is a terrible outcome. Apparently, supporters are suffering. Apparently Scottish football is poorer. Apparently the SPFL has failed everyone and something must be done.

Isn’t it magnificent? Social scientists should study this lot as a classic example of mass psychosis and cognitive dissonance.

Because, of course, here is the bit which makes the wailing so manifestly ridiculous: the people around Ibrox helped start this entire process. Not merely the club. The supporters themselves. The Fan Advisory Board led the charge on it!

Go back to 2018. Before all this stupidity began, Celtic supporters used to get roughly 7,000 tickets for Ibrox. The entire Broomloan Stand. Ibrox supporters got a similarly enormous allocation at Celtic Park, and it was one of the things which made the fixture what it was.

Then the Ibrox club decided to slash Celtic’s allocation to fewer than 1,000. That was not something Celtic demanded. It was not something the SPFL imposed. It was not some joint initiative agreed between both clubs. It came from Ibrox.

The official explanation centred on huge season-ticket demand and the desire to make more seats available to their own supporters.

But it was supporter pressure driving that wider climate; they were tired of having us celebrate our superiority over them in their own house. It was just as simple as that, and everything else was tacked on later to justify it.

Celtic’s response at the time could not have been clearer. We did not welcome it. We said the previous arrangement had worked well. We said the decision had been taken unilaterally, and then we reciprocated because what else were we supposed to do? Continue giving thousands of Ibrox supporters access to Celtic Park while our own supporters were being squeezed into a corner across the city?

That was the moment the old arrangement died, and everything since then has been an attempt to manage the consequences.

The allocations dropped. Then they disappeared altogether when their club – not our club but theirs – refused to consider the safety of our fans. When they refused to make Ibrox safe for our fans we finally took the action of last resort.

We refused tickets entirely. We told them that since they had forced our hand, we would not give them tickets for our ground. At that point, the SPFL squealed after sitting on the sidelines the whole time, and out of that came a reciprocal agreement of around five per cent.

Now, after Ibrox decided to offer Celtic just 300 tickets for the League Cup game, the whole agreement has collapsed and we are once again back to offering no tickets to their fans. At every step they have pushed us towards these decisions. At every stage we have tried to give them space to back up and talk seriously.

I wrote last night about what a waste of time that was.

So, they can spare us the lachrymose nonsense and the outrage about their supporters being denied the right to follow their team. My advice to them is this; this is the bed your side made. Lie in it and stop making yourselves sound like idiots.

There have been people in that support for years who wanted Celtic’s numbers reduced. They wanted more of their own people in Ibrox. They wanted fewer Celtic supporters there. They cheered the end of the huge Broomloan allocation and regarded it as some sort of victory. Well, congratulations. Look at the victory now.

No Celtic supporters at Ibrox. No Ibrox supporters at Celtic Park. What a triumph. Put it in the trophy room.

This is what happens when people treat working relationships and established understandings not as part of football but as bargaining chips in some endless tribal contest about who has surrendered to whom. Eventually everybody loses.

And the damage did not stay confined to Glasgow. That is another part of this history which people conveniently forget and which they have been whining about from the day the first restrictions from elsewhere came into being.

Once clubs realised they could sell more seats to their own supporters by reducing the numbers given to Celtic and Ibrox, the idea spread. Hearts reduced away allocations at Tynecastle. Other clubs discovered that there was no sacred principle saying Celtic or Ibrox supporters had to receive huge sections of their grounds. The age of enormous travelling supports began to disappear.

The numbers available to both Glasgow clubs around Scotland were squeezed, and the knock-on effect reverberated through the league. The madness shows no signs of abating. Our early away matches were played in front of half empty grounds whilst many thousands of our fans had to sit the game out. Ibrox fans face the same restrictions, and they are pissed about them. The difference is, they had it coming.

That genie was never going neatly back into the bottle.

So, when the FAB now says that supporters should be able to follow their team to every match, I find myself wondering where this grand philosophical commitment to the travelling supporter was when Celtic’s allocation was being hacked from around 7,000 to about 800.

Where was the anguished statement then? Where was the insistence that the fixture would be diminished? Where was the solemn declaration that Scottish football would suffer? Where was all this concern for the principle of away support?

Because I remember the mood rather differently.

I remember a lot of people being absolutely delighted. That is why this statement is so funny. They are complaining about the destination we’ve reached while refusing to acknowledge that they built and paved the road that got us here in the first place.

And they are still making up the narrative as they go along, paving that road ever further into our future. Read the statement carefully.

First, they tell us that the absence of away fans is a dreadful thing. Then they tell us that it was “only right that the club took a stand” against Celtic.

Excuse me? Which is it?

You cannot simultaneously deplore escalation and then applaud escalation. You cannot complain that the house is on fire while cheering the bloke pouring petrol through the letterbox. Their club offered Celtic 300 tickets. Three hundred. Celtic rejected them.

Of course Celtic rejected them. What serious person believed Celtic was going to accept 300 tickets for Ibrox and then continue handing over thousands for Celtic Park?

Nobody. Everyone knew where this was going the minute that offer was made. The FAB knew. The Ibrox board knew. The SPFL knew. Celtic knew.

You did not need a negotiating genius to work it out. Offer 300. Celtic says no. Reciprocity collapses. Or rather, it emerges in its darker form.

That was the obvious chain of events. So now the same people are standing among the rubble asking who demolished the building.

You did. That is the answer. Your club did. Your wider culture around this issue did. And the original decision all those years ago came from your side of the city.

Celtic’s executives did not wake up one morning in 2018 and decide that thousands of Ibrox supporters should no longer come to Celtic Park.

The BBC reported Celtic’s position at the time in language which could scarcely have been clearer: the club said the development was not welcomed and described the original move as unilateral. Celtic then responded in kind, as they had briefed fan groups well in advance they would do if Ibrox took that step … and they had told Ibrox the same thing.

That historical fact matters because this subject is constantly rewritten as though two clubs simultaneously became deranged and decided to destroy one of the best atmospheres in European football. That is not what happened.

One side changed the arrangement. The other responded.

You can argue about whether Celtic should have retaliated. You can argue that we should have taken some ludicrous moral high ground and continued giving them a massive allocation anyway. You can argue anything you like.

But you cannot rewrite who changed the arrangement first, and who has undermined the very idea that our fans should have a substantial presence in their ground numerous times since. The Ibrox club did. That is not Celtic fan media propaganda. That is the documented history of the dispute … and all of it was driven by a fan base that could not stand being beaten and mocked in their own stadium.

Which was exactly the same sentiment that erupted at the Scottish Cup Quarter Final last season, when their fans stormed the pitch to attack our celebrating supporters.

And yet last night we got the astonishing spectacle of the FAB portraying its own supporters almost solely as victims. You could not make that up.

“As a result, our loyal supporters will be denied the opportunity to back their team away from home.” Oh, the humanity.

The statement begins by talking grandly about supporters in general and Scottish football as a whole, but by the time it reaches the supposedly “true cost”, apparently the real tragedy is that Ibrox supporters cannot come to Celtic Park.

There is something almost touching about the speed with which universal principle collapses into self-interest. They also attack the SPFL. “In any other industry, regulators regulate.”

Quite right. It’s the one place where I agree with them.

I wrote much the same yesterday. The SPFL has been gutless throughout.

They should have told Ibrox back in 2018 that there was no reason to change the original understanding. They had another chance to do it when Ibrox ignored our safety concerns. Our decision to refuse tickets for Ibrox and deny them tickets to Celtic Park finally brought the governing body in to do some governing … and they had one last chance when the Ibrox club made the announcement this time, and again choose to hide.

Celtic actually asked the regulator to regulate.

That is in the SPFL’s own statement. Ibrox proposed the reduced allocation. Celtic refused it. Celtic sought a determination from the SPFL.

So, what exactly does the FAB believe the SPFL should have done? Presumably impose the Ibrox position on Celtic, because otherwise their complaint makes no sense. They praise their own club for taking a stand. They condemn Celtic for refusing to accept it. Then they blame the governing body because that stand resulted in nobody getting tickets.

That is not a coherent argument. It is a tantrum.

It amounts to saying the regulator failed because it did not force the other side to give us what we wanted. That is not asking for regulation. That is demanding that the SPFL acts as an accomplice in an act based on petty grievance and spite.

Then comes all the stuff about accountability.

Their club has apparently “accepted accountability where appropriate”.

What a gorgeous phrase that is. What a lot of heavy lifting it does. “Where appropriate.”

Meaning: where we agree that it is appropriate. Meaning: we will decide which bits of responsibility belong to us.

Celtic apparently has to accept the Ibrox interpretation of everything which happened in March before normal relations can resume.

Again, that is not negotiation. That is a demand for surrender.

You admit what we say you did. You accept our version of events. You accept the punishment we have decided should follow. Then perhaps we can talk about restoring what existed before.

Absolutely not, not a chance. That is not how mutually beneficial negotiation works, and that is why the whole thing keeps falling apart.

The FAB claims to want a “safe, workable and permanent solution”.

But we had one of those back in 2018.

It wasn’t perfect. No arrangement between these clubs ever will be or ever is. But it had been the normal for years. There had been incidents, sure, but nothing on the scale of the ugliness our fans, staff and players have had to confront since we’ve been crammed into a tiny corner no longer protected by safety in numbers.

All the way down this road they have sought every little victory they could secure over us, and every little “victory” produced another consequence. Every escalation produced another escalation. Every attempt to deny somebody else something eventually meant losing something yourself.

It’s like starting a fight with someone you know can handle themselves and then acting surprised when you actually get hit.

Now we have reached the logical endpoint: zero.

No Celtic supporters at Ibrox in SPFL competitions for the rest of the season, and no Ibrox supporters at Celtic Park. Nobody has anything.

So, when the FAB wails about the fixture being poorer, about supporters being denied the chance to travel and about Scottish football suffering, my sympathy evaporates and I start to laugh instead.

Are these Peepul for real?

Do they realise how dumb they sound?

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.