The cowardice in the press box and how the gatekeepers failed Scottish football | OneFootball

A peek behind the curtain: The cowardice of the press box and how the gatekeepers failed Scottish football. It’s Colin Dempster’s latest controversial column…

Celtic Park ahead of the Celtic v AC Milan in a pre-season friendly at Celtic Park on July 25, 2026. (Photo by WM Sport Media/Getty Images)

Let’s clear the tracks right away: I am not a career sports journalist. I don’t sit in the media lounge, I don’t drink from the club’s hospitality well, and I couldn’t care less about protecting a press pass.

I am a railway engineer and a proud RMT trade union member. I spend my working life managing physical assets, identifying operational bottlenecks, standing up to corporate management, and fixing broken machinery.

When you look at Scottish football through an engineering lens, you quickly realise the problem isn’t just that the engine is broken. It’s that the people paid to inspect it—the mainstream football media—have spent decades pretending the smoke pouring out of the chassis is just a minor design feature.

Celtic Park ahead of the Celtic v AC Milan in a pre-season friendly at Celtic Park on July 25, 2026. (Photo by WM Sport Media/Getty Images)

The modern Scottish sports press like to think of themselves as the grand gatekeepers of the game. They aren’t. They are corporate PR shields, paralysed by a collective cowardice that has actively degraded the entire fabric of our national sport. They prioritise media access over accountability, cozying up to boardrooms to protect their interview privileges while the actual infrastructure of the game rots beneath their feet.

The systemic cost of safe scripts

This isn’t about a single bad match report or a recycled manager quote. This is about a historic, systemic failure to monitor the structural integrity of Scottish football.

If the mainstream media box had possessed an ounce of courage twenty years ago, the entire landscape today would look vastly different:

1. The Financial Collapses and the Ghost of 2012

If journalists had applied basic engineering and financial scrutiny to the unsustainable debt structures, side-letters, and aggressive tax manoeuvres of the late 2000s, instead of fawning over wealthy benefactors, Rangers would never have gone into liquidation in 2012.

The Herald headline: “Rangers Football Club Born 1972, died 2012”. Press cutting.

But it wasn’t just Ibrox. A complete lack of media oversight allowed clubs like Hearts, Dunfermline, and Dundee to sleepwalk into administration during that same era. The press stood by and watched the critical infrastructure collapse, completely failing to warn the everyday fan until it was far too late. They treated corporate recklessness like a soap opera rather than a structural disaster.

2. The fallacy of the Celtic balance sheet

We are seeing the exact same complicity play out right now with Celtic. The mainstream press box consistently celebrates record bank balances as if a football club’s sole purpose is to act as a high-interest savings account.

Just look at the latest financial results for the year ending 30 June 2026. The media lounge is falling over itself to downplay a massive financial swing—where group revenue plummeted by 22.7% from £143.6 million to £111.0 million, resulting in a £4.8 million loss after tax.

16.05.2026 Celtic v Hearts, SPFL Premiership Callum Osmand goal against Hearts to give Celtic a 3-1 lead in the title decider. Photo Kenny Ramsay IMAGO/ News Licensing

The board’s defensive script blames a “turbulent season” and the failure to secure Champions League riches. But the real story, the one the media refuses to print, is the structural fragility of the model.

Operating expenses climbed to £122.1 million—an expenditure level that is completely unsustainable without guaranteed Champions League distributions. The board hoards a £66.4 million cash balance like a safety blanket while the squad’s book value dropped by 31% to just £31.4 million at the end of the financial year.

UEFA Champions League 2026/27 Play off round second leg match between LASK and Celtic at on August 25, 2026 in Linz, Austria. (Photo by Christian Bruna/Getty Images)

By refusing to challenge the board on why this massive capital isn’t being converted into elite, modern European sporting infrastructure, the media helps maintain the very “infrastructure of apathy” that limits our potential. They praise the board for dominating a weak domestic market while the club’s European machinery remains completely rusted out.

The collapse of the grassroots production line

The failure of our national team over decades isn’t down to bad luck or individual managers. It is the direct consequence of a broken development pipeline. A real gatekeeper would have spent the last twenty years aggressively exposing the lack of public facilities, the underfunded academies, and the broken grassroots structures in Scotland.

UEFA Champions League branded microphones are seen on a desk prior to the UEFA Champions League 2024/25 League Knockout Play-off second leg match between FC Bayern München and Celtic FC at on February 18, 2025 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Alex Grimm/Getty Images)

Instead, the media lounge chooses the easy route: hyping up short-term, paper-thin results and refusing to call out the SFA and SPFL executives who oversee a production line that is completely unfit for purpose.

They would rather write 1,000 words on a VAR controversy than investigate why Scottish kids have fewer public pitches to play on than almost any other nation in Western Europe.

Why they fear directness

When my recent pieces began making waves from Glasgow to the North American and Australasian diaspora, the reaction from the media establishment was entirely predictable. First came the intellectual nods, then the frantic pushback calling it “the Emperor’s new clothes,” and finally the embarrassed U-turns when they realised the everyday fans were completely bypassing them.

Celtic Park. Photo Vagelis Georgariou

They don’t know what to do with a writer who drops the corporate jargon and explains the machinery in simple, unvarnished English. They are terrified because that directness exposes their own complicity. They could have been analysing these accounts, exposing these bottlenecks, and asking these exact questions for twenty years.

They chose not to because they preferred the comfort of a press box seat and the access to boardroom briefings over the hard, honest work of real investigative journalism.

We don’t need their corporate spin, and we don’t need their permission. The everyday supporter is tired of the selective jargon. It’s time to strip away the PR gloss, look at the literal data, and educate ourselves—because the self-appointed gatekeepers are far too cowardly to do it for us.

Colin Dempster

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