Old Firm with No Away Fans: Martin O'Neill, Police Scotland, and the Goalkeeper Gamble at Ibrox

I remember it vividly: an evening in March of this year, sitting in a small café in Lyon, rewatching footage of the Old Firm. The Ibrox stands roared like a pressure cooker with no valve. But in the eastern corner there was a strange, gaping void, where thousands of Celtic supporters should have been. They were locked out over a ticket dispute that neither side appeared willing to resolve. Days before the upcoming League Cup quarter-final, a small detail caught my eye in a Glasgow bulletin: Police Scotland had visited Celtic's training ground, spending exactly fifteen minutes reminding the squad about "general behaviour" on the pitch. Martin O'Neill, the seventy-four-year-old with silver hair and the calm of a man who has weathered every storm at Parkhead, called that reminder "timely and good." I think otherwise. When police have to teach footballers how to celebrate, the sport has quietly signed a verdict nobody dares read aloud.

I do not write to be loved. I write to be read. And I sat down to write this not to predict the Celtic-Rangers scoreline, nor to attack Police Scotland, who are doing their job. I write because I see in this small story a mirror of contemporary European football, where emotion is boxed in, where crowd violence is handled with paperwork, and where a goalkeeper decision is obscured by things that have nothing to do with football.

Context: A battle beyond the pitch

The Old Firm surpasses the definition of an ordinary match. It is a ritual. Celtic and Rangers split Glasgow, split the flag, split history, and split the scars between them. These two clubs have given Scottish football almost all of its glory, and almost all of its infamy. For more than a century, the Old Firm has defined organized hostility: two faiths, two classes, two identities, and a history each side recounts to its own advantage.

But this season, something cracked. In March, at Ibrox, chaos erupted. Fans of both sides clashed, flares rained onto the pitch, the referee halted play, police intervened. The verdict from Scottish football authorities: both clubs were fined one hundred thousand pounds, and their next home Scottish Cup tie had to be played behind closed doors. It is a punishment I once called "hitting the rich man's wallet to teach the poor man manners," because both clubs can pay the fine, while those who suffer in silence are ordinary supporters who have never thrown a flare in their lives.

Now comes the League Cup quarter-final. Both clubs still have not resolved the away ticket allocation dispute, so no Celtic supporter will be allowed into Ibrox. This season, that has become the default for both the Scottish Premiership and the League Cup. In other words, the Old Firm has been stripped of half its breath. Anyone who has sat in a derby stand knows: away fans are the twelfth goal. The singing, the jeering, the seats pounded like war drums, all of it creates pressure that no tactical board can replicate.

In that context, Martin O'Neill called the police reminder "timely." He said he was excited for the match but found it strange without away fans. He said he would be "delighted if there were something to celebrate," but referenced "recent fixtures" as a warning. This is a man who has managed at Celtic, Aston Villa, Sunderland, and once visited Vietnam through a football cooperation program few still remember. He is one of the greatest Northern Irish managers, a man who beat Barcelona, who took Leicester to the Premier League, and now, at seventy-four, manages in an environment where every word he says could become evidence in the court of public opinion.

Analysis: The goalkeeper decision as a psychological test

Here is where it gets interesting. Amid all the noise about police, tickets, and violence, there is a purely footballing question O'Neill has not answered: who starts in goal? Sam Johnstone, the thirty-one-year-old Englishman on loan from Wolves, who just made his debut with a clean sheet in a 1-0 win over St Johnstone. Or Viljami Sinisalo, the twenty-three-year-old Finn, who began the season as the number one, chosen by O'Neill himself?

Reading the Scottish football press, most reporters simply relay: O'Neill has not decided, he will tell the goalkeepers first. That is it. But to someone who has watched football for thirty-four years, that is the surface. Beneath it lies a tactical and psychological battle nobody bothers to dissect.

Start with the technical profile. Sam Johnstone stands at one metre ninety-one, came through Manchester United's youth ranks, and has played in the Premier League for West Brom, Crystal Palace, and Wolves. His strengths are distribution and reflexes. He belongs to the generation of English goalkeepers trained as sweepers, meaning he does not only save shots but joins the build-up from deep. At Wolves this season he has had almost no game time because Jose Sa is preferred, making Celtic's loan a financially sound move: no transfer fee, shared wages, and a player hungry to prove himself.

Viljami Sinisalo, meanwhile, is a product of Aston Villa's academy and a Finnish international. He has less experience than Johnstone but has already spent a season as the number one at Celtic Park, accustomed to Old Firm pressure, accustomed to making decisions in three hundredths of a second.

What catches my attention is not the CV. It is the timing. O'Neill is contemplating replacing his number one right before a derby at Ibrox, where every mistake is magnified tenfold, where crowd jeering can bury a young career. If he picks Johnstone and Johnstone errs, people will say: "Why play a newcomer in a big match?" If he picks Sinisalo and Sinisalo errs, people will say: "Why not use Johnstone's Premier League experience?" It is a decision where every option can become the wrong one. And O'Neill knows it.

Martin O'Neill's goalkeeper decision before the Old Firm is not a technical calculation but a psychological gamble: in a match stripped of away fans, the goalkeeper becomes the only player facing the full roar of the opposing stand with no home singing to cling to.

Think carefully. In a normal derby, the away goalkeeper has one ear tuned to his own supporters, a mental tonic. But at Ibrox, Johnstone or Sinisalo will stand before fifty thousand Rangers fans with nobody singing for them. That goalmouth becomes an island. And for a goalkeeper, an island is not shelter, it is an execution site.

That is why I believe O'Neill will pick Sinisalo. Not because he is better, but because Sinisalo has already lived through that loneliness. He has stood at Ibrox, been abused, had bottles thrown, heard flares explode behind him. Johnstone's Premier League experience is valuable, but it was accumulated in stadiums where police do not visit the training ground beforehand to remind players about "general behaviour." The Old Firm is another universe. And in that universe, whoever has crossed the black hole holds the advantage over whoever has only read about it.

What is really at stake?

The goalkeeper decision is only one piece. The larger piece is the question: what will the Old Firm become without away fans? The answer, in my view, is far more frightening than what Scottish reporters are writing.

Football is not mathematics. It is an organized system of emotion. When you remove away fans, you do not merely remove a section of the stand, you remove a source of competitive drive. Sports psychologists have long shown that home advantage comes not only from familiar turf or less travel. It comes from the crowd. And when the crowd is one colour only, that advantage becomes absolute. Rangers at Ibrox without Celtic fans is a stronger Rangers than Rangers with Celtic fans. It is a truth nobody in the league office wants to admit, because admitting it forces them to answer: are we staging a sporting contest, or a scripted stage?

I have written before, and I stand by it: an empty stadium is just a parking lot painted green. But here, the stadium has a crowd, just one side's crowd. That is a worse form than emptiness. It is imbalance legalized.

This connects directly to the goalkeeper decision. Without away supporters, the visiting team loses its reserve energy, what big clubs lean on in the final minutes. Without that singing, Celtic's players must self-generate motivation. And in goal, a keeper with no ally in the stands must build confidence from within. That is why, in this specific context, I lean towards Sinisalo. Not because he is better, but because he is used to building everything from zero.

The shift of power: police as a second coach

There is a detail worth dissecting. Police Scotland visited Celtic's training ground and spent fifteen minutes delivering a reminder. O'Neill called it "timely and good." I read that line and ask myself: since when did police become part of the coaching staff?

Do not misunderstand me. Police have legitimate reason to worry. The March match showed the worst could happen. Flares, clashes, injuries, none of it can be justified by "derby culture." But there is a fragile line between "risk management" and "behaviour control," and I believe Scotland is slipping toward the latter.

Consider this through the entertainment-industry lens I always use. A football match is a product. People pay to watch it. People pay to feel emotion. And emotion, by definition, cannot be managed by memorandum. When you tell a player he cannot celebrate excessively, you are not protecting him from violence, you are stripping away part of who he is. Football was built on moments like Marco Tardelli screaming in 2026, like Diego Maradona running toward the stands, like embraces nobody can control. Without those moments, football is just twenty-two men running on grass according to an approved plan.

I wonder how many times O'Neill had to check himself before answering press questions. He is a man who knows the Old Firm better than almost anyone alive. He played there, managed there, lived with its consequences. When he says "I would be delighted if there were something to celebrate," I hear a man weighing every word. A seventy-four-year-old who once beat Barcelona has to carefully phrase how he talks about celebrating a goal. That is a degradation not only of Scottish football, but of an entire sporting culture.

Within Scottish football circles, they say Celtic's players were warned not only about celebrations but about how to react to referees, to opponents, to provocation from the stands. A team enters the biggest derby of the year with a list of things not to do longer than the list of things to do. That is a cultural defeat before the match even kicks off.

The financial dimension nobody bothers to count

In another piece, I would discuss how Celtic are using the Premier League loan market as a cost-saving mechanism. But today, I want to stop at a specific number: one hundred thousand pounds.

That is the fine each club received after the March chaos. For Celtic, a club with revenues over one hundred million pounds per season, a hundred thousand is loose change. Same for Rangers. That punishment does not hurt. It teaches nothing. It is a line in a financial report, a ritual regulators perform to prove their authority.

The real punishment, the match behind closed doors, hits someone else. It hits loyal supporters, season-ticket holders, people who never threw a flare, who only wanted to sit with their families and sing. They pay for the sins of a small group. And when neither club can settle the ticket dispute, who loses most? The supporters again.

Economically, banning away fans also means lost ticket revenue. At Ibrox, roughly seven thousand away tickets per Old Firm, no small sum. Yet seemingly no club executive wants to resolve it, because each side believes it is right. That is the nature of the Old Firm: personal righteousness always placed above collective interest.

I once sat in a press conference in Lyon after a French derby, where a club executive told me, "Away tickets are a political problem, not a financial one." He was right. In Scotland, away tickets are also a political problem. And in that problem, nobody wants to be the one who concedes.

A Vietnamese-French perspective: standing between two worlds

I was born in Vietnam and work in France. It is a strange position, one I often compare to sitting at the corner of a match, where you see both teams, both stands, and everything inside the tunnel. I view European football through the eyes of someone from a place where football is not yet controlled down to the calorie, and I view Asian football through the eyes of someone who has lived in a system where everything is calculated.

When I look at the Old Firm and see police teaching players how to behave, I remember a derby in Vietnam I once watched on screen. The stadium was packed, nobody was controlling, nobody was reminding, and emotion simply surged. I am not saying Vietnam's approach is better. It has its own issues, issues anyone watching Southeast Asian football knows. But one thing always surprised me: there, away fans are always allowed in. They may number only a hundred, sitting in a small corner, but they are there. In Scotland, they are barred entirely.

I learned from the 2026 World Cup in Russia that emotion needs no visa. Argentines may not understand a word of Russian, yet they still sang with Russians. Croatians may not know the road to Zagreb, yet they still wept together in Moscow. A stadium has its own language, and that language does not recognize borders. When you block a group of fans from entering, you are not protecting a match, you are severing a nerve.

I stand between two worlds: one dying, one refusing to be born. European football is slowly dying inside safety regulations, administrative verdicts, stands controlled like airports. Asian football refuses to be born, still too chaotic, too unprofessional, yet still retaining the raw quality that made people fall in love with this sport in the first place. And I, a contrarian, stand between the two, belonging to neither.

The signals from Ibrox I will track

So here is what I will watch in the upcoming quarter-final.

The first thing I am watching is O'Neill's selection. If he picks Sinisalo, I read a message: Old Firm experience over Premier League pedigree. If he picks Johnstone, I read another message: he is building for the future, accepting short-term risk. I bet on Sinisalo, not because he is better, but because O'Neill is a man of caution. But if he picks Johnstone, I will publicly admit I misread him.

The second thing is the stands. If the match passes without incident, it will be a victory not only for Police Scotland but for the theory of control. And if there is an incident, I will be one of the few unsurprised. Because I have seen too many times that when you ban a group from a stadium, you do not eliminate emotion, you only compress it. And compressed emotion always finds a way to explode somewhere.

The third thing is how players celebrate. If a Celtic player scores at Ibrox and runs toward the stands, will it be an act of courage or a foolish one? I do not know. And precisely because I do not know, I will watch. In football, the unpredictable moments are the most valuable. And if safety regulations are killing those moments, we need to say so.

The fourth thing is revenue. If the entire season continues without away fans, I will monitor the financial impact on both clubs. Because ultimately, football is a business, and every decision has a price. If the price of safety is revenue, who pays?

A contrarian turn: maybe I am wrong, and that is fine

I have written far too long about what I believe is true. Now, following my obligatory habit, I must steer against myself.

There is a possibility I have not considered seriously enough: that banning away fans is not the collapse of the Old Firm but a reboot. Look at the history of security measures in football. In the 1980s, English football was seen as a cultural disaster. Hooligans in the stands, crumbling stadiums, the Hillsborough tragedy claiming ninety-seven lives. People thought English football was dead. But it was reborn as a global product worth billions, cleaner, safer, and in some sense, less emotional.

Maybe Scotland is walking that exact path. Banning away fans is the first step to removing the ultras, to building a new stand culture, to turning the Old Firm into an exportable product rather than a stage for destroyers. If that is true, then I am a nostalgist, crying for a past perhaps nobody needs to remember.

They call me a contrarian. I call them the crowd. But there are times when even a contrarian must ask: is what I defend worth defending? I publicly admitted I was wrong in 2026, when the Bundesliga returned with empty stadiums I believed would be cold and soulless. I was wrong, and I wrote a piece to say so. And I am willing to be wrong again if it means Scottish football becomes better.

But I still do not believe in how they are doing it. There is a difference between teaching a child not to fight and tying his hands so he cannot fight. The first is education. The second is detention. And football, at its deepest level, is a game of freedom. When you strip that freedom away, you are no longer organizing football, you are organizing a censored performance. And that performance, however safe, will never make anyone cry.

What I will verify

The crowd believes in the table of numbers. I believe in the pain on the grass. And in the coming Old Firm, there will be plenty of pain: on the pitch, in the stands, and in the rooms where police sit waiting. When the whole world chants in unison that "safety comes first," my ears start ringing with the echo of what has been lost.

Here is a falsifiable prediction: within the next twelve months, at least one more Old Firm match will be affected by the away-fan ban, or a public debate will erupt about restoring the ticket allocation. If that does not happen, I will publicly admit I overestimated the discontent of Scottish supporters. And if it does, I hope someone remembers this piece.

I do not write to be loved. I write to be read. And if someone in Glasgow reads these lines and asks whether the Old Firm is still the Old Firm, then my work is done. Because that question is not only mine. It belongs to anyone who once believed football was something more than a sport.