The BBC has weighed in on the matter of the Celtic fan’s title party at the weekend, in a piece which is as filled with ignorant rubbish as anything you could hope to read. It quotes business owners and council officials who seem intent on putting the worst possible spin on the events, and to read it you would think that our supporters had wrecked the whole area.
A bus-stop got damaged. Wow. Some graffiti got sprayed. I don’t want to suggest that this stuff is no big deal, but this is a city centre. I am sure graffiti happens everywhere, and the business owner who complained about it actually admitted that it’s a regular occurrence but expects us to swallow the idea that if it’s “Celtic or (the Ibrox club)” graffiti that this is somehow different.
One business owner, whose café is full of rescue cats, said that the noise scared the animals. I’m not downplaying that, but please … let’s try to keep it real here.
Another owner claimed that their having to close early had “potentially” cost thousands of pounds. Like we live in a world where a Trongate café earns thousands of pounds in takings on a Saturday early evening. Not in this lifetime. She said she lived in Barcelona; perhaps that’s true for that city, but not for the east end of this one.
An owner of a children’s shop, who closed for the day, claimed that children would get scared if they had stayed open. The children whose parents took them to the celebrations – many, many, many of them – would have disagreed.
Her general rant was the worst of the lot. She talked about hypothetical damage (which in the event wasn’t done), and demanded the club itself be made to pay for any that had been caused … why would Celtic have to pay? What role did the club play here?
The council wanted to pass the buck. Of course.
They made the already discredited claim that Celtic should have laid something on. How? Where? Like what? Let’s try to look at this logically. To get permission for something like that takes many months, and requires submitting a mountain of paperwork. To what end? On the off-chance that you do win the title, months later? What if you don’t?
Celtic, by the way, has tried to talk to the council about these sorts of events for years. We’ve been ignored for years. We’ve even released a sweeping statement about it, and asked for Scotland’s political class to do more to support football clubs and their fans … and that too was roundly ignored. But numerous laws have been passed criminalising supporters, in what some have characterised as attacks on the game itself.
Paul Sweeny, the Labour MSP, has condemned some aspects of the weekend whilst also making it clear that the council itself could do a Hell of a lot more to help. The BBC report left Sweeny’s comments out; in fact, they didn’t bother to publish a single thing which contradicted their entirely one-sided narrative. The “national broadcaster” seemed more interested in running an anti-Celtic story than opening up a proper public discussion.
“The answer is for Glasgow City Council to recognise that this is a huge part of the city’s culture and to actually create a proper fan zone and victory parade route for the buses to come around,” Sweeny said. “This should be organised with the fans, groups and with the football club management to try and anticipate this.”
Other cities do manage this stuff; the lady who had lived in Barcelona pointed out that that city has, and does, make arrangements for these sorts of situations.
“A Glasgow football team … has won the Premiership every year for the last 40 years, so it’s going to be in Glasgow anyway, we might as well plan for it and make it more of an occasion,” he said. He then talked about the money the clubs bring to the city economy, and although I think his estimates are hilariously low, his point was right on.
“We should recognise the value of that and try to accommodate it more instead of looking down on football fans and not providing the relevant facilities … We provided huge amounts of public investment for the Cycling Championships and we did so for the Euros in 2021, so I don’t see why we don’t do the same for our biggest brands. We should be looking to maximise its benefits while minimising its disruption.”
Only the BBC will know why they chose not to bother with such a sensible and serious suggestion, and instead published something sensationalist and which sought to demonise our supporters. It is the easiest thing in this whole country to do, and a lot of us are sick of it.