Mike Mulraney has called on the authorities to ban pyro-wielding yobs from all Scottish football grounds and insisted they must be treated like criminals.
The SFA president came out with all guns blazing after Sunday’s League Cup Final clash between Celtic and Rangers became the latest in a line of big-match fixtures to be blighted by smoke bombs and fireworks in the stands. As was the case in both club’s semi-finals, kick-off had to be delayed and the chaos unfolded despite the Old Firm pleading with their own supporters not to break the law.
There were also shocking scenes in Glasgow city centre earlier in the day when groups of rival fans clashed in front of terrified Christmas shoppers. And Mulraney believes it’s now time for a zero-tolerance approach to be adopted. Asked about the latest pyrotechnic breaches he refused to rule out imposing a possible ticket ban on clubs with repeat offenders.
But he said: “There’s one critical thing we have to remember – it’s a crime. Everybody is losing focus on the fact it is a crime and that we have legislation to deal with it being a crime.
“It doesn’t matter how much the chief executive of the SFA or a club says, ‘Please don’t do that!’. It’s self-evident these messages are having no impact.
“What does have an impact is if you use the tools currently afforded to us. We have a piece of legislation which allows for football banning orders.
“We need to ban them out of our game. They are criminals, they are not fans. They might call themselves fans but they are criminals. Last year we had one football banning order. One!
“I’m getting asked, ‘What are you doing about it?’. And I’m saying, ‘We will work with anybody to have a positive impact on society and to make sure people are safe’.
“But we need the football banning orders to be embraced as the tool that’s currently available to actually ban these people and make it a criminal offence for them to come into our grounds. We’ve only had one in the last year.
“The police are the specialists and we cannot second guess them on how to do their job. But what we can question – not the police or the courts or the government but everybody together – is why are we not banning them? There were 43 banning orders two years ago. Then it went down to 20. And then, in this last year, there was one banning order.
“It’s reasonable for us to say, ‘Maybe we should be using that tool that’s at our disposal as a society, if we are all going to work together’. We can say to them, ‘Please can you ban this person? You’ve arrested them, can you ban them? Please!’.
“If we start with that then maybe it’ll be a useful starter for 10 to work out how to deal with people who are committing criminal acts and endangering the person who sits beside them and those sitting 300 yards away as the smoke travels around the stadium. So please remember, this is a crime and they are not getting criminalised. It’s reasonable for me to say that’s got to be what we push everyone to work towards. One banning order seems unusual.”
Speaking at the launch of a fundraising campaign for a £50million investment in grassroots facilities, Ian Maxwell added: “Pyrotechnics are a huge problem. We’ve seen kick-offs delayed and we’re aware of the impact it has from a players’ perspective because it creates a potential injury risk to players. I don’t know how much people even think about that.
“We’re seeing more and more supporters having to leave the stadium before the game has even kicked off because of the impact of smoke inhalation. It’s dangerous first and foremost and we need to do something about it, there is no doubt about that.”