As we discussed last week, Hibernian cut Celtic’s allocation for yesterday’s game at Easter Road, and the obvious question was what would happen if their own supporters did not buy all of the additional tickets they had decided to keep back.

Well, now we know. But then, we always did. Thousands of empty seats, on television, for one of the most high-profile fixtures Scottish football had to offer over the weekend. What an absolutely ridiculous situation.

Celtic were given 1,699 tickets for Easter Road. In years gone by, we could take somewhere in the region of 4,000 supporters to that ground. Yesterday, thousands of Celtic fans who would happily have bought tickets were sitting at home watching enormous sections of empty seating on television.

My old man was one of them. He wanted to go. He could not get a ticket. Yet anyone watching the match could see row after row of empty seats.

How does that make any sense?

And before somebody says that Hibs are perfectly entitled to prioritise their own supporters, of course they are. Nobody is arguing that Celtic fans should receive tickets which Hibernian supporters actually want.

If Hibs can sell those seats to their own fans, fantastic. Fill Easter Road with Hibs supporters. That is exactly what a football club should want.

But that is not what happened and we knew it wouldn’t.

And once you reach that point, the argument changes completely. You are no longer protecting opportunities for your own supporters. You are simply preventing somebody else from buying a seat which nobody on your side wants.

That is madness.

There are three separate problems here, and every one of them matters.

The first is the most obvious. Supporters are being denied the opportunity to attend football matches while seats sit empty.

Football is supposed to be for supporters. We spend endless amounts of time in this country talking about atmospheres, matchday experience and the supposedly special culture around Scottish football.

Then when thousands of people actually want to attend a game, we find ways of preventing them from doing so.

Brilliant. You could not make it up.

The second issue is financial.

Hibernian themselves have previously acknowledged that restricting allocations for Celtic and the Ibrox club could cost them somewhere between £150,000 and £200,000 annually if their own support does not fill those seats.

Think about how absurd that is.

Scottish clubs constantly talk about budgets. They talk about the financial gulf. They talk about needing every possible revenue stream.

Then supporters turn up practically waving money in the air and clubs decide they would rather leave seats empty.

What business behaves like that?

If there is some overriding safety or segregation requirement which makes additional sales impossible, explain it.

But if there is not, then deliberately refusing thousands of pounds of ticket income because you would rather stare at empty plastic seats is economic self-harm.

And then we come to the third point, which I think Scottish football itself should be far more concerned about.

It looks absolutely terrible.

Yesterday’s game was being broadcast live on Sky Sports.

That means the picture of Scottish football being transmitted beyond this country was a Premiership ground with huge empty sections while supporters of one of the participating clubs could not get tickets.

What message does that send?

We constantly hear about the struggle to sell Scottish football. We hear about television deals. We hear about sponsorship. We hear executives boasting about revenues and talking about growing the product.

Then we put one of our major televised fixtures on the screen looking half-empty.

This league already has enough problems convincing people outside Scotland that it is something worth paying attention to. Why would we deliberately make it look smaller?

Why would we voluntarily strip atmosphere out of games? Why would we make stadiums look emptier than they need to be? And why is the SPFL apparently relaxed about clubs doing it?

This is supposed to be a collective product. Every club obviously has the right to make decisions about its own stadium, but those decisions also affect how the entire league looks when the cameras are there.

Yesterday was so ridiculous that even the Sky commentary team drew attention to it.

That should embarrass the people running the game.

When the broadcaster showing your product is effectively asking why there are empty seats while supporters have been locked out, perhaps somebody somewhere should recognise that there is a problem.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments about away allocations. Home supporters should come first. Clubs should be encouraged to grow their own crowds rather than simply filling grounds with travelling Celtic supporters.

I have absolutely no problem with any of that.

But there has to be flexibility and there has to be common sense.

If you know demand from your own support is not going to fill a stand, sell the tickets. If circumstances change, release additional seats.

If you can accommodate more travelling supporters safely, let them attend the football match they are desperate to watch.

This really should not require a task force.

Yesterday gave us the worst of every possible world. Celtic supporters were locked out, Hibs left money on the table, the atmosphere was diminished, and Scottish football looked dreadful on television.

Nobody benefited.

That is the part I cannot understand. Usually when somebody makes a controversial decision, you can at least identify who gains from it.

Who gained yesterday?

Not Celtic supporters. Not Hibernian financially. Not Sky. Not the atmosphere. Certainly not the image of the Scottish Premiership.

Everybody lost.

And until the people running our clubs and our league start recognising that packed stadiums are an asset to be encouraged rather than a problem to be managed, we will continue doing stupid things like this.

Scottish football spends far too much time complaining about what it does not have. More money. Better television deals. Greater international interest. More attractive games.

Yesterday it had thousands of supporters who wanted to pay money to attend a live televised fixture.

And it chose empty seats instead.

If that does not sum up some of the madness of this league, I do not know what does.

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