This board continues to push fans towards ever more direct action.

Back when Celtic was battling its own supporters over Resolution 12, while supporters themselves were waging that battle without the club’s help, one slogan became particularly memorable: persistence beats resistance.

It has been the watchword of opposition groups in every kind of struggle because institutions nearly always have the advantages.

Football clubs are massive organisations with deep pockets, lawyers, communications departments and access to power. But none of that guarantees victory when a small group of determined people refuses to go away and keeps forcing an organisation to confront its own mistakes and contradictions.

The Celtic Fans Collective may not be to everyone’s taste. People can argue about its methods, and they can argue about whether it was directly responsible for what happened at St Andrews. But one thing is beyond dispute now: they are on the map.

Everyone knows who they are. Everyone knows what the issues are. And Celtic’s extraordinary statement has multiplied the attention around both.

That is the Streisand effect in its purest form.

The best thing Celtic and Dermot Desmond could probably have done was ignore what happened. Let the tennis-ball protest become a story for a day and disappear. Instead, they exploded it into gigantic proportions, and now everyone is talking about it.

That matters because whatever supporter groups were thinking about organised opposition to this board before, more and more of them are now going to be thinking about direct action.

And that is what makes the threat of indefinite bans so supremely stupid.

Right now, the majority of the Collective and the overwhelming majority of the Celtic support are still inside the tent. They are angry, but they still regard themselves as part of the same community. They still feel an obligation to Celtic because they still believe Celtic belongs to them too.

That feeling has been getting weaker for a long time. But the moment you start excluding people, the moment you start talking about bans and telling supporters that they are no longer welcome, you change the relationship completely.

You make them outsiders.

And outsiders have a strange sort of superpower. They no longer feel the same obligation to respect the rules imposed by people who have already rejected them. The emotional restraint that comes from believing you are all still part of the same institution vanishes.

That should concern everybody at Celtic.

It should never have come to this, where supporters feel so excluded and ignored that direct action starts to look like the only route left.

Direct action is divisive. It is chaotic. Everyone who embarks on it knows there are consequences and knows some of those consequences are unpredictable. Nobody chooses that road lightly.

It usually arrives when people believe every other avenue has been exhausted.

This Board has spent years exploiting the Celtic support’s love for the club, but it has always underestimated what that love actually means. They seem to believe that loving Celtic means accepting whatever the people running Celtic decide to do.

If they had understood the depth and strength of that attachment, they would not have allowed things to deteriorate to this point.

They would have shown proper respect for supporter anger. They would have treated attempts at dialogue seriously. They would have made changes before resentment hardened into something much more confrontational.

Direct action only ends up on the table when people believe every other attempt has failed. The fact that we are now here is a disgrace, and the people running Celtic bear almost all of the responsibility for it.

After that statement, they still have one final opportunity to step back. They have made the threat. They had better think very carefully before carrying it out.

Because if they begin banning people indefinitely, they risk removing the last restraint that exists: the feeling among angry supporters that, however bitter this dispute becomes, they are still part of the Celtic community.

And we all know what that statement was really about yesterday. It was about the bruised ego of one man.

It is dangerous enough that Celtic is run so heavily on the personal whim of Dermot Desmond. But if his ego now starts amplifying the crisis, then other people inside Celtic have a responsibility to speak up.

Not merely on their own behalf, although they may eventually have to bear the consequences of this mess, but on behalf of the club they claim to serve.

I wrote recently about the idea of the higher duty.

It is why people in high office take oaths to institutions rather than individuals. Those beneath them may take slightly different oaths, but the principle is the same: the institution comes first, not the man.

Celtic comes first. Not some billionaire whose most grievous mistake may be believing that he is the walking embodiment of Celtic. He certainly is not, and our Board of Directors has a responsibility to stop behaving as though he is.

This situation could have been prevented in a hundred different ways.

You can blame supporters for what happened at St Andrews if you want. You can say the behaviour was out of order. You can say another sporting event should never have been disrupted. But I have a question, and it is one more people inside Celtic should be asking: what other option did these supporters believe was still available to them?

Constructive talks had been tried. Supporter anger had been expressed. Meetings and engagement had produced little. Desmond himself has barely engaged at all.

He remains the roadblock to every serious possible reform of this club while operating from afar. His representatives speak. His son has attended an AGM and confronted supporters. Other people around him engage selectively.

But Desmond himself remains largely absent while exercising enormous influence over how Celtic is run.

So, I ask again: what path to constructive dialogue did supporters believe remained?

And now Celtic talks about expelling people, removing season tickets and delegitimising a huge supporter organisation representing more than 400 groups.

When you rule out discussion, debate, negotiation and compromise, you should not be surprised when the other side starts looking for another road.

I always believed the only way this could escalate into sustained direct action was if the people in the boardroom were prepared to scorch the earth.

I never really thought we would get there.

Now we have.

They talk about shame. Imagine the shame if this ends with large numbers of Celtic supporters being excluded from Celtic Park because the people running the club were too stubborn to find a way back from the edge.

Imagine the shame if the relationship between the club and a huge section of its own support becomes permanently poisonous because nobody in a position of authority was prepared to tell Dermot Desmond that enough was enough.

They have instead escalated to threats. They have closed the last doors to genuine dialogue. They are pretending that organised supporter opposition can simply be delegitimised out of existence.

And yet they can still stop this thing.

As bad as it has been allowed to get, we are on the brink but not quite over the edge.

There is one last chance to avert disaster.

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