THE brief statement which Celtic released on Tuesday confirming that a number of legal claims in the group proceedings against the Parkhead club had been resolved made reference to the “historic abuse” which young people in their care had suffered in the past.
Their persistent claims that Celtic Boys Club had been a “separate entity” may have prolonged the suffering of the 30 or so former players who had launched a US-style class action lawsuit against them in more recent years.
However, the actual abuse of the kids who had dreamed of one day representing their boyhood heroes had not, their 167 word missive was at pains to point out, taken place in modern times.
Celtic are far from the first Scottish club of late to emphasise that such abhorrent treatment of minors had occurred decades ago as they have issued public apologies – Hibernian, Motherwell, Partick Thistle and Rangers all did the same following the publication of a long-awaited SFA report back in 2021.
To a large degree, they have been correct to stress these offences were “non-recent”. The crimes which were perpetrated by beasts like Frank Cairney, Gerald King, Jim McAfferty, Jim Torbett, Harry Dunn, Gordon Neely and many others were all committed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, not on the watch of the current regimes. Mercifully, Scottish football is a different place now compared to those dark days.
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The Independent Review of Scottish Football made a total of 97 recommendations when it was finally published four years ago. Ian Maxwell, the SFA chief executive, confirmed at the time that 80 per cent of those had either already been implemented or were in the process of being brought in.
The interim report had warned that protocols were not fit for purpose and that kids were still at risk when it was released in 2018. But since then a comprehensive child wellbeing and protection programme, minimum standards for clubs, increased resources and a clear procedure to respond to concerns have all been introduced.
It is to be hoped the horrifying sex abuse scandals or yesteryear have been consigned to the past forever and no boy or girl at a Scottish club ever has to endure what their predecessors did before them.
Yet, the welcome changes which have been made at all levels of the game have by no means brought an end to concerns about how children are treated within Scottish football. Far, far from it. There remain serious misgivings in many quarters about the commodification and exploitation of youngsters within the pro-youth system.
The Public Petitions Committee at Holyrood recommended “very strongly” that multi-year registrations for players under the age of 16 in the Club Academy Scotland system should be abolished back in 2020. They have been tweaked slightly since. But they remain in place to this day.
Bruce Adamson, the then Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, argued they breached the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which MSPs had voted unanimously to incorporate into domestic law, in a letter to Maree Todd, the Minister for Public Health, Women's Health and Sport, in 2021.
Unhappiness with the registration’s retention and other SFA and SPFL rules – not least the need for “development contributions” to be paid before a child can move clubs - prompted the commissioner and youth football campaigners Real Grassroots to lodge complaints with the Competition and Markets Authority back in December.
They are hopeful the body will decide they breach competition law and compel the governing bodies to finally yield to external pressure and scrap rules which, while there in black and white in the small print in their regulations, are to all intents and purposes Scottish football’s grubby little secrets.
It is certainly important that our leading clubs are reimbursed adequately for the money they invest ever year, which can run into the millions, in developing potential stars of tomorrow. There are very real fears that academies could be shut down in the years ahead due to loss of outstanding prospects to England for paltry sums at a young age. That would be a very bad thing indeed for our national game.
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But at what price must that come? Talk of significant power imbalances, free labour, human rights violations, fear of speaking out, deliberately opaque regulations, registrations being withheld until exorbitantly high sums of cash are paid, kids being frozen out of football altogether just so they are unable to succeed elsewhere is deeply unsettling and suggests that important lessons have still not been learned.
Many of the kids who come through Club Academy Scotland clubs, even those who fail to make it, will have a positive experience. They will certainly not have to go through what those poor souls at Celtic Boys Club did during a bygone era. But the SFA and SPFL must guard against complacency.
Clubs may not take kindly to being told what to do by politicians or bureaucrats, but when it comes to the welfare of children it is, given the heinous misdeeds of the past, only right that others scrutinise their practices and that they in turn listen.
