There is no defensible place for historic child abuse to become football ammunition. The abuse of boys connected to Celtic Boys Club was not a punchline, a social-media retort or a means of winning an argument about trophies, finances or the fate of Rangers in 2012. It was the exploitation of children by adults who were supposed to protect, coach and guide them.
Yet too many Rangers supporters have chosen to treat that suffering as precisely that - a weapon. Every disagreement, every Celtic celebration, every joke about liquidation, every reminder of a league table or a trophy count can be met with the same grotesque response - taunts, chants and accusations built around child abuse and the trauma that survivors endured for years even to this day. The target may be a Celtic fan who has said nothing about historic abuse, a current player, a manager or an entire support. The point remains the same. The abuse of children is being deployed as tribal currency.
That is sickening. It is morally bankrupt. And it says far more about the people using child abuse for point-scoring than it ever could about the people they aim to insult.
The survivors of abuse at Celtic Boys Club deserve compassion, space to speak and the full support of anyone who claims to care about children, justice or Scottish football. They do not deserve to be dragged into an argument by people who want a cheap way to silence Celtic fans on an entirely unrelated subject. No survivor’s story should be summoned because someone has laughed at Rangers’ financial collapse, their prolonged sporting decline or the club’s record in a particular season. That is not showing solidarity with victims or demanding justice for them. It is exploitation of victims and the suffering that they endured.
The starting point must be unambiguous, the crimes committed by figures including James Torbett and Frank Cairney were appalling. Torbett and Cairney have been convicted and imprisoned for sexual abuse offences - along with other Celtic Boys Club coaches and staff. Celtic later settled group legal claims with 24 former Celtic Boys Club players, with payments exceeding £1 million, while further cases are still awaiting being addressed.
Those facts must be faced honestly. They should never be minimised, buried beneath a wall of club loyalty or treated as an inconvenience to be managed. Survivors took enormous personal risks in coming forward. Some spoke in court. Others spoke to journalists. Many carried their experiences for decades before bravely coming out and telling anyone what happened to them.
The correct response to that courage is belief, respect and a determination to make sure institutions learn from failure. It is to listen when survivors say that the damage did not end when the abuse ended. It is to recognise the long tail of trauma, whether it was relationships damaged, confidence destroyed, resulting in addiction, mental health affected, trust in adults and institutions shattered. It is to accept that a criminal conviction, while vital, does not restore what was taken away. It is certainly not to turn their experiences into a football chant.
When Rangers supporters label Celtic fans “paedos” or “nonces”, or aim those words at Celtic players and managers with no connection whatsoever to historic offences, they are not expressing concern for victims. They are not demanding accountability. They are not contributing to a serious discussion about safeguarding in football. They are using the language of child sexual abuse as an insult because they believe it will hurt their rivals. That is a profound betrayal of the people whose experiences they pretend to invoke.
There is a simple test. If the same supporters who chant and tweet about Celtic Boys Club abuse do not show comparable interest in survivor testimony involving other clubs, other football institutions or their own club’s historic youth set-up, then their concern is not child protection. It is tribal hostility. They are not standing with survivors; they are selecting survivors whose pain can be turned into a weapon to be useful in a rivalry. That is not advocacy. It is voyeurism with a scarf on.
The Convenient Silence
The ugliness is made worse by the selective amnesia which so often accompanies these attacks. Scottish football’s historic abuse crisis did not belong to one club, one part of Glasgow or one community. It existed across clubs and youth organisations, and it reflected wider institutional failures seen throughout society in schools, care homes, churches, youth groups and sports bodies. Rangers are not outside that history.
The Scottish FA’s independent review into historic child sexual abuse in Scottish football recorded testimony relating to multiple clubs and alleged perpetrators. Among the figures associated with allegations involving Rangers’ youth set-up was Gordon Neely, a coach whose history had already been examined in reporting by BBC Scotland. Neely worked at several clubs, including Hibernian and Rangers, and allegations were made that he continued abusing boys after moving between football environments.
The details around Neely should trouble anyone interested in truth and justicec rather than tribal propaganda. Rangers have long said that Neely was dismissed after a complaint from parents and reported to police. But the SFA review was unable to establish whether a formal report to Strathclyde Police had in fact been made at the time. BBC reporting also uncovered a contemporary Rangers News item which said Neely had “resigned” and was wished well for the future, creating a serious discrepancy between the public messaging of the period and the later account of an immediate dismissal for alleged abuse.
That is not a minor semantic issue. It goes to a central question in every historic abuse case - what did an institution know, what did it do, what did it record and what did it report?
Nor did the harm necessarily end when a club relationship ended. It has been established that Neely went on to private coaching after leaving Rangers, and allegations were made that he continued abusing boys into the 1990s. That is exactly why safeguarding failures are not historical curiosities. When concerns are ignored, obscured, poorly documented or not passed to the relevant authorities, the risk is not confined to one club, one dressing room or one season. It follows the abuser.
Rangers themselves issued a public apology following publication of the SFA review. The club acknowledged the gravity of the findings and apologised to those affected by child abuse in Scottish football. An apology matters, but it must be followed by honesty, transparency and an unwillingness to allow supporter culture to erase or trivialise the experiences of those who came forward. That is where too many people have failed.
Survivors connected to Rangers’ youth setup have described feeling ignored, dismissed or left without meaningful redress. In 2018, one ex-Rangers youth player who said he was abused by Neely at Ibrox said he had been told by the club hierarchy to contact the liquidators of the former company rather than Rangers FC. Whatever the legal complexities surrounding corporate identity and liquidation, that response exposes the gulf between legal positioning and moral responsibility. A survivor who says he was abused as a child in a football environment should not be treated as a problem to be redirected through insolvency paperwork.
The wider record also includes allegations involving former Rangers and Liverpool scout Harry Dunn, who died in 2017 while awaiting trial on historic child-sex-abuse charges. There have also been public allegations and claims involving other individuals connected with Rangers-related youth football. These matters require careful, accurate language and should never be used to make sweeping accusations about people who have not been convicted. But they do establish the crucial point that Rangers supporters cannot pretend historic abuse is a uniquely Celtic stain while treating every account connected to Rangers as inconvenient background noise, claiming victims lied, or ignoring it completely.
Rivalry As Deflection
There is a reason this behaviour has intensified during the modern era of Celtic dominance. Since Rangers’ 2012 liquidation, Celtic have won the overwhelming majority of Scottish league titles, reached the Champions League or Europa League group stage football, secured extended periods of domestic supremacy and accumulated trophies at a rate Rangers supporters once used to herald themselves as the World’s Most Successful Football Team.
That sporting imbalance has created resentment. Of course it has. Football is built on rivalry, envy, bragging rights and the desire to see your rival lose. Celtic fans have mocked Rangers’ liquidation, financial collapse, European failures, managerial instability, derby defeats, and title drought. Rangers fans have mocked Celtic’s own defeats, transfer disappointments and setbacks. Much of that is ordinary football antagonism, however unpleasant it can become. But historic child abuse must sit outside that world entirely.
It cannot be an escalation in a row about titles. It cannot be the “ultimate comeback” to a meme. It cannot be a way to puncture the joy of a supporter celebrating a league win. It cannot be an answer to questions about Rangers’ use of Employee Benefit Trusts, side letters or the club’s financial practices in the years before liquidation. It cannot be a way of avoiding discussion of the sporting consequences of Rangers’ collapse.
Yet the pattern is familiar. A Celtic supporter makes a point about football. A Rangers supporter replies with abuse imagery, labels the individual a “nonce”, or posts material invoking Celtic Boys Club. The original topic disappears. The survivor’s experience is reduced to point scoring by one supporter against another. The offender feels they have “won” because the exchange didn’t continue. That is the overall tactic of the usual suspects within the Rangers support - don’t debate, don’t argue, contaminate.
It is designed to make any Celtic fan who speaks about Rangers feel that they should be carrying collective guilt for crimes committed by men they never met, in an organisation they had no role in, before they were even born in some cases. It simultaneously allows the person posting the abuse taunt to avoid a more difficult reality that every major institution, including their own, has an obligation to confront allegations of historic abuse with seriousness and care. The cowardice is not merely in the cruelty of the insult. It is in the refusal to look inward.
If Rangers supporters genuinely want historic abuse to be discussed, then discuss it properly. Discuss why alleged abusers could move through youth football. Discuss failures of reporting and record-keeping. Discuss the culture of deference towards coaches and authority figures. Discuss the need for survivor-centred redress. Discuss the distinction between legal liability and moral accountability. Discuss how modern safeguarding standards can be strengthened. But do not pretend that shouting “paedo” at a Celtic supporter is part of that discussion. It is not. It is the opposite.
A Double Standard On Justice
There is a bitter hypocrisy at work in the comparison between how survivors are invoked in rivalry and how they are treated when they seek justice.
Celtic Boys Club survivors who came forward helped bring abusers into the criminal justice system. The likes of Torbett and Cairney faced their victims in courts of law and were convicted for it. Civil litigation followed, and Celtic eventually reached a settlement with 24 former players in 2025, with tailored compensation awards based on individual assessments. That does not make the suffering disappear. It does not make every question about institutional responsibility vanish. It does not mean the work is finished, particularly when further claims or survivors emerge.
But it does mean that survivors forced the issue into the open, that their accounts were heard, and that real consequences followed. That fact should inspire solidarity with survivors elsewhere in the game, not resentment or comparative scorekeeping. Every survivor deserves a credible path to truth, recognition, safeguarding reform and, where appropriate, redress - whether their abusers are still alive or died years before.
The disparity becomes especially cruel when some Rangers-linked survivors say they have not received the recognition or support they deserve. If a supporter can spend hours online posting abuse-related taunts about Celtic, they can spend five minutes reading the testimony of people who say they were harmed within Rangers-related football. If they can make banners, songs or memes out of Celtic Boys Club, they can campaign for their own club to listen to those who have alleged abuse in its youth environment. That would be what solidarity looks like.
It would involve supporting independent investigations rather than treating them as an attack on the club. It would mean accepting that acknowledging an institution’s failures is not the same as accusing every supporter, player or employee of wrongdoing. It would mean abandoning the childish idea that a rival club’s failures somehow cancel out your own.
The legal questions around Rangers’ 2012 liquidation are complex. But a moral question does not become complicated simply because a company structure changed. When an adult says they were abused as a child in a football setting, the instinctive response should be compassion and a commitment to finding answers - not a rush to identify which corporate entity might avoid responsibility. That includes Celtic’s own handling of the abuse scandal and their years long defence of using the separate entity defence when it came to Celtic Boys Club.
A club’s history is more than its honours list, strip colours and stadium. It is also the people who passed through its doors, including the children entrusted to adults under its banner. Institutions cannot demand the romance of continuity when celebrating title wins and old heroes, then rely on discontinuity when survivors ask to be heard.
Draw The Line
Scottish football has spent decades allowing the Glasgow rivalry to swallow almost every other moral consideration. It has turned religion, identity, history, politics and community into material for tribal antagonism. There are times when rivalry is entertaining, creative and part of the game’s cultural energy. There are other times when it is poisonous. This is one of those times.
No Celtic fan should deny or minimise the horror inflicted on Celtic Boys Club survivors. No Rangers fan should deny or minimise allegations and survivor accounts connected to Rangers’ historic youth environment. No supporter should use a survivor’s experience as a means of winning a row. No player, manager or ordinary fan should be branded a sex offender because of the club they support or work for. And no terrace chant that revels in abuse should be shrugged off as “banter”. Banter is mutual. Banter has limits. Banter ends where the abuse of children begins.
The people who abuse survivors’ stories to attack Celtic fans are not defending victims. They are using the victims. They are taking the most painful experiences imaginable and making them part of a football identity contest. They are turning suffering into content, trauma into a slogan and abuse into a form of entertainment. That should disgust every decent supporter - no matter the club they support.
The more difficult task is to replace that culture with something better, a football culture in which all survivors are believed, all football clubs confront their past, safeguarding is treated as a permanent responsibility and rivalry is kept firmly away from the pain of abused children.
That is not asking football supporters to stop being rivals. It is asking them to remain human and not use childrens suffering so that they can get a kick out of it whether on social media, on the streets, or on the terracing.