Celtic Ticket Office this morning look like proper April Fools | OneFootball

Celtic’s Supporters’ Liaison Officer, John Paul Taylor, had to issue an apology to supporters following widespread problems with ticket sales for the upcoming Scottish Cup semi-final against St Mirren…

Hampden Park.  Photo by Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star)

Celtic supporters have been allocated an increased share of seats at Hampden for this month’s semi-final, with tickets released on Tuesday to those who had been successful in the ballot.

However, difficulties quickly emerged as supporters attempting to secure their seats online reported technical faults preventing them from assigning client codes – a necessary step to complete purchases – leaving many unable to buy tickets.

The situation was further aggravated by the digital queuing system, familiar to regular users of the club’s ticketing platform and Ticketmaster, which saw affected fans pushed to the back of the line after encountering the issue.

Given that nobody else from the club communicates, it was JP who unfortunately became the focal point for supporter frustration across X before later addressing the problem and issuing an apology once the technical fault had been resolved.

Taking to X, Celtic’s SLO said: “Apologies for any issues caused earlier with Semi Final Tickets. Seems to have been a problem at service provider side but have been advised that it’s resolved and site is up and running now.”

It could be argued that the ongoing focus by the Collective on Green Brigade-related bans and the marginalisation of fan media has diverted attention from more fundamental operational shortcomings within the club.

Chief among these is a clear deficiency in communication strategy. The reliance on JP to issue apologies – particularly in response to failures by a third-party ticketing provider (which the club sourced last summer) – is amateur hour.

The club’s dedicated ticketing communication account on X is woeful. It hasn’t tweeted directly since last May. It only replies to folk (occasionally) with generic answers such as ‘email the ticket office for your concerns.’

Communication on digital platforms for clubs should be a fairly basic and standard procedure that the club is not good at. It is another major issue the club must address in the summer in line with how they communicate to supporters better.

A pertinent challenge for any of the Celtic board, in particularly the CEO, would be to identify, in concrete terms, what the club can genuinely claim to excel at on a world-class level?

World class at annoying your supporters every single day? Yes, that is something they are world class at. If only they’d kept the ticket release back to today they could have claimed it was just an April Fools joke.

Conor Spence

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