There is an extraordinary story doing the rounds today about Celtic and the Ibrox club supposedly being ready to leave Scottish football and join the English Championship.

The claim comes from Keith Harris, the former chairman of the Football League, who says that a framework had effectively been agreed which would have seen the two Glasgow clubs enter the English second tier as part of a financial package worth around £40 million.

According to the report, there was a secret meeting hosted by David Murray at which representatives of both clubs were present, alongside officials from the Scottish Premier League, the Scottish football authorities and people connected to the English game.

Harris claims that the framework was effectively agreed before details began to leak out.

It is one of those stories which immediately makes people wonder what might have been. The Record and others have approached it with almost breathless excitement, imagining Celtic and the Ibrox club playing in England, imagining the money involved, the scale of the television deals and the possibilities which might have flowed from it.

But there is another side to this which seems to have been almost completely ignored, and it is the side which interests me far more.

Where were the supporters in all of this?

Because if this story is true, and if it was anything like as advanced as those involved now claim, then we are talking about one of the biggest decisions in the history of Celtic Football Club being discussed behind closed doors without the people who actually make the club what it is being consulted at all.

This would not have been some minor restructuring exercise. This would have fundamentally altered the nature of Celtic Football Club.

We would have been leaving Scottish football.

Our league competition would have changed. Our relationship with the rest of the Scottish game would have changed. Our finances would undoubtedly have changed dramatically. Our entire footballing environment would have changed.

Instead of trips to Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland, supporters would suddenly have been travelling regularly to places like London, Birmingham, Newcastle and all over England.

Some people would have loved that. Others would have hated it.

But that is precisely the point.

Nobody appears to have asked.

Nobody appears to have thought that Celtic supporters might have a view on whether the club should remain part of Scottish football or uproot itself and effectively become an English football club.

There were obvious practical questions as well.

What would have happened with European qualification? What would have happened with the Scottish Cup? Would Celtic still have been eligible to participate in Scottish competitions? What would our relationship have been with the SFA? What exactly were supporters being asked to surrender in exchange for entry into the English system?

Those are not small details.

They go directly to the identity of the football club.

Whatever people think about the financial possibilities, Celtic is a Scottish club. It has grown out of Scottish football. Its history, its rivalries, its traditions and its cultural identity are rooted here.

You cannot simply lift all of that out of one football structure and drop it into another without asking what has been lost in the process.

That is one of the reasons I find the entire thing slightly shady.

Not necessarily because people were discussing it. Football clubs have conversations about all sorts of things, and Celtic exploring opportunities is not in itself something I would object to.

But when discussions get to the stage where financial packages are supposedly being agreed, where league officials are in the room and where the framework of a monumental restructuring appears to have been taking shape, then supporters have a right to know what is happening.

More importantly, supporters should have had a right to say no.

That is one of the central arguments for proper independent regulation of football.

A football club should not be in a position where one chairman, one major shareholder or one small group of executives can decide to fundamentally alter the identity and competitive environment of an institution which has existed for generations.

There have to be protections against that.

There have to be decisions which simply cannot be made without the consent of supporters.

Moving a club into another country’s league system surely has to be one of them.

The report says that officials from the Scottish Premier League and the other Scottish leagues were also in the room, and that the financial package was agreed with them as well as with us.

I wonder at which point those individuals were going to go back and consult their own clubs, their member clubs, about this whole thing, and at which point somebody somewhere would have said, “This isn’t going to happen,” because I can tell you right now that somebody would have said it eventually.

Perhaps it would have been fans and fan organisations.

Perhaps there would have been a vote of the clubs themselves.

Something would have given. Something would have broken.

It is entirely possible that the whole story is a flight of absolute fantasy, but I know that there were a lot of talks going on at that time, and I know that this was not pie in the sky.

I know, for example, that Mr Altruism himself invested in Celtic in the first place because he was convinced that something like this was in the offing, and he has been stuck with his shareholding in Celtic ever since because it didn’t come to pass.

So the article does not say what went wrong or where it all fell apart.

But the fact that we never knew it was happening, the fact that we never knew deals were being struck, the fact that fans were not consulted in any way, shape or form, is pretty terrible. It’s pretty abysmal. It’s pretty disgusting.

There would have had to be people at our club, very recently, who were involved in those talks, and those people would have had a lot to answer for if this had ever come to pass without bringing in the stakeholders and the shareholders who matter most: the supporters.

The Record and all the other outlets running this are almost breathless with excitement about what might have been. Not a single one of them has given so much as a thought to what ordinary fans would have felt about it, or whether it would have been acceptable.

They seem to take our acceptance of it as a fait accompli.

It certainly would not have been.

That is not how fans would have felt about it at all. Fait accompli: your club has been uprooted and is now an English team. You’ve lost your Scottish identity, your cultural roots, in pursuit of money.

You’ll start in the second tier because the English football system doesn’t think you’re big enough to play in the top flight yet.

That is to say nothing about what teams who have been trying to get into the English professional leagues would have thought of it, or what teams in the Championship itself would have thought of it.

It’s not about too many vested interests. It’s about too many people who would not simply have rolled over. Whether the article writers like it or not, that includes supporters themselves. But you would never know that to read these pieces.

That is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

It is why we need a regulator, because a regulator would put a permanent block on any such idea without the consultation and approval of supporters first.

Without the consultation and approval of supporters first.

I repeat it deliberately. I know it’s a radical concept, but my God, this was a radical idea for which we were apparently supposed to go along for the ride. It could not have happened, and it would not have happened, without the approval of supporters themselves.

Choose The CelticBlog as a Preferred Source on Google News…