CELTIC AND RANGERS: THE FALSE EQUIVALENCY PROBLEM
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- Apr 3
- 4 min read
“The ugly sisters”, “the gruesome twosome”, “the old firm”. These are just some of the many derogatory terms fans outside Glasgow use to collectively berate Celtic and Rangers supporters equally.
Personally, I’m sick of this, and I think it’s time we talked about it.
Of all the issues in Scottish football, and indeed wider Scottish society, so many of them stem from this false equivalency.
Politicians love to play into this too. Whenever one side’s fans kick off (and you know who’s fans it usually is), they talk about “a stain on Scottish society” or “an embarrassment to Glasgow”.
Celtic and Rangers are not the same, there is no Old Firm
When Rangers players got themselves sent off at Celtic Park in 2011, and their manager picked a fight with our manager, The government of the time called it “The Shame Game”, publicly berated both teams and demanded a political summit on the issue.
Anyone who watches that game back, a game Celtic won 1-0 by the way, will see quite clearly there was only one team behaving shamefully that night.
One side sing songs of Irish Rebellion, of standing up against the oppression of the British Crown, the other glorifies genocide, and actively venerates murderers. The media will try and tell you these are the same things. They aren’t.
Whether or not any political songs should be sung at a football games at all is a separate discussion, and one which I can understand both sides of. There is definitely a valid debate to be had there.
But before we can even have that debate, we need to recognize that Irish Rebel Songs, and racist anthems like The Famine Song and “Build my Gallows” are not on the same level.
This “both as bad as each other” argument is trotted out every time someone at Rangers disgraces themselves.
Celtic fans are no angels either, and I wouldn’t delude myself otherwise.
However, again, we can’t have an adult debate until we accept each individual incident is its own case.
“Both-sidesing” every incident involving Celtic or Rangers fans does nothing to solve anyone’s problems. It only causes further division and aggravation.
Just today, I’ve seen plenty of fans of other Scottish clubs equate jabs about Rangers’ liquidation in 2012, as being in the same sphere of “banter” as Rangers fans making sick “jokes” about child abuse.
It just isn’t. And I for one am sick and tired of this constant guilt by association.
Every time I hear anyone use the phrase “Old Firm” it actively infuriates me. There is no Old Firm. Any semblance of one died long before the original Rangers went the way of the Dodo in 2012.
Why is it that the media continue to use the phrase “Old Firm” every time Celtic play the current incarnation of Rangers, when they know most Celtic fans (most, not all, I don’t presume to speak for everyone) reject that term, and many actually find it offensive?
The answer is simple, its just another of this “both as bad as each other” falsehood, that the authorities in Scotland love to hide behind.
Spending most of my adult life outside Scotland has made me see all of this from a different perspective. For the longest time I did believe it was a “both sides” argument. I realize now, I was being conditioned to think that way, by Scottish society. Because doing that is the easy way out.
If our governments, our police and our media would just develop a collective backbone and call out the filth that emanates from Ibrox every matchday for the fascist, racial hatred that it is, it would be gone within a few years.
Instead, they cower before it. They continue to push, at all costs, the delusion that Celtic and Rangers are just as bad as each other.
This even bleeds over into foreign media. I was watching the build up to a recent Celtic vs Rangers match on a Japanese cable TV channel. The local commentators referred to “The Old Firm Derby”. And then described Celtic as an historically Catholic club, and Rangers as a Protestant one.
Complete nonsense!
Celtic, from day one allowed anyone who wished to play for us and was good enough, to do so. We don’t care what god you worship, what country you’re from, or what color you are.
Rangers, on the other hand, wouldn’t publicly sign a catholic until 1989.
Even then, Rangers manager at the time, Graeme Souness, whom I still respect to some extent for breaking that taboo, admitted in interviews it was more about the mental damage signing one of their former star players would inflict on Celtic, than about ending bigotry at Ibrox.
So please, let’s end this “both sides” debate once and for all. We are not the same as them. Celtic are better, and always will be.
