Why is the Scottish FA Independent inquiry into Scottish Cup Quarter Final disorder taking as long as Hillsborough's Taylor Inquiry?
The Scottish FA promised they would be transparent in their inquiry, to get to the bottom of how the disorder unfolded at Ibrox, instead, it has delivered delay, confusion and radio silence.
A review into one of Scottish football’s ugliest afternoons in recent years should not still be hanging in the air like a bad smell. Four months on from the Scottish Cup quarter-final disorder, the Scottish FA’s silence is no longer just frustrating, it is becoming part of the story, and a deeply damaging part at that.
There are moments when football’s institutions are tested not by the incident itself, but by what they do afterwards. This is one of them. The disorder at Ibrox in March was serious enough to demand a swift, credible and transparent review. What it does not demand, what it cannot justify, is a process that drifts on for months while the relevant parties offer little more than the occasional sentence of reassurance and a lot of institutional shrugging.
Rangers chief executive Jim Gillespie said on 18 May there had been “no feedback yet” from the review and that there had been an indication of an end-of-May, early-June conclusion. “We know these things are never usually delivered on time,” he added. Nearly two months later, the silence remains. That is the problem in plain English - if this was always going to take longer, say so. If there is a legal reason for delay, explain it. If there is no such reason, then why on earth is a non-judicial review moving at the pace of a committee whose dog ate its homework?
But what we saw instead at the end of May, was not the findings being published, we saw Scottish FA Chief Executive Ian Maxwell grinning like a Cheshire cat as he boarded the plane with the Scotland squad heading to the United States for the nation’s first World Cup in 28 years. A month later, after spending time wining and dining with Five Star opulence thanks to FIFA, while schmoozing with Infantino and the rest of the FIFA cabal - Maxwell returned to Scotland after our World Cup exit.
The Scottish FA set this process in motion to establish the facts surrounding the day of the match, both inside Ibrox and in the surrounding area, and to examine events and decisions made before, during and after the fixture with a view to identifying lessons and avoiding a repeat. That is a perfectly reasonable mandate. It is also a mandate that should have produced visible findings by now. When a body says it is there to learn lessons, but refuses to show any findings or a sign it is actually learning them, suspicion fills the vacuum.
I drew comparison on social media to the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster, this was not to claim similarities between the events. It is about pace, seriousness and public duty. Lord Taylor’s inquiry was a major national undertaking into a football disaster of the gravest kind, and yet it moved quickly in its initial phase, taking evidence from 174 witnesses, reviewing thousands of written statements and viewing hours of video footage, before producing an interim report in four months. The point is not that every inquiry should copy every feature of Taylor. The point is that, when a system is forced to confront failure, urgency and getting to the facts matter.
That urgency is absent here. The Scottish FA’s review is not a judicial inquest and not a criminal trial. It is an operational review, designed to identify failures, what lessons can be learned and what their recommendations are. That should make it easier, not harder, to provide a public timeline. There may be material that cannot be released immediately, and there may be sensitivities around ongoing police proceedings. But none of that explains why the public are still left guessing about basic milestones, basic participation and basic next steps.
This kind of delay does not happen in a vacuum. It creates the impression that the institutions involved are more interested in managing embarrassment and the narrative than publishing the truth. And when that impression takes hold, it becomes difficult to dislodge. Football supporters are not stupid. They can tell the difference between a careful process and a stalled one. They can also tell the difference between genuine caution and the kind of caution that is just another word for avoidance.
The most corrosive thing about the current situation is not simply that the review has taken a long time. It is that the Scottish FA has not done enough to explain why. Silence may be a bureaucratic comfort blanket, but in public life it has a cost. Every day without a proper update invites the same obvious questions. What evidence has been gathered? Who has been spoken to? What remains outstanding? Is there a timetable? Has the process been delayed by the police, by the clubs, by legal advice, or by the governing body itself?
A serious review would not need to answer every operational detail in public, but it would at least offer a framework of transparency. Instead, what we have is a fog. That fog is not helped by the fact that other actors in the story have been much quicker to speak when blame needed to be shifted, and much quieter when accountability needed to be faced.
In the immediate aftermath of disorder, the instinct in football, in politics, and policing is often to point the finger of blame first and explain later. Supporters are blamed quickly. Clubs are urged to issue statements. Officials appear in the media within hours to condemn behaviour, gesture towards action, and insist that matters are being handled. But when the deeper questions begin - the questions about planning, crowd management, ticketing, stewarding, match control and communication - the appetite for public candour mysteriously vanishes. A pattern that is very familiar.
The events of that day clearly raise questions for several bodies. Rangers and Celtic both have obvious interests in the conclusions of the review. The Scottish FA, as governing body, has an interest not just in the conduct of the match but in the integrity of its own competition. Police Scotland and the Security companies have questions to answer about its operational decisions before and during the game. And the public, quite reasonably, wants to know how a fixture with a known risk profile ended in scenes that embarrassed Scottish football yet again.
This is where the transparency becomes especially offensive. When supporters are involved in disorder, the response is often rapid and punitive. People are identified, images are released, arrests are publicised and messages of zero tolerance follow. That is all understandable. But when institutional competence is under the microscope, the response becomes strangely hesitant. The same bodies that speak loudly about crowd behaviour suddenly discover a penchant for process, discretion and the idea that everyone should calm down and wait. That is not accountability. It is a delaying tactic.
And it is hard not to ask whether the same standard would apply if the failure had been somewhere else. If a players’ union, a club board or a private event organiser had overseen a day that collapsed into chaos, would a three-month silence be tolerated? Would the public be told to trust the process and leave it there? Of course not. Football gets away with this sort of thing because it has spent years normalising the idea that serious questions can be answered eventually, which in practice often means not at all.
Police Scotland’s role is at the centre of much of the public frustration. That is partly because policing is always visible when football disorder happens, and partly because its own conduct around major fixtures is often defended in institutional language that sounds tidy but sheds little light. The police can legitimately argue that their responsibilities inside the stadium differ from those outside it. They can also argue that not every operational detail can be released while investigations or prosecutions are ongoing.
But none of that removes the need for a clear account of what the match commander knew, when they knew it, what resources were deployed and why the response evolved as it did. If the public can see evidence of disorder, they are entitled to ask whether the policing strategy was adequate. If the police want to defend that strategy, the answer cannot simply be to retreat behind procedure. Procedure is not the same thing as explanation.
The problem is compounded by the way police communication often works in these situations. There is an early, public effort to shape the narrative. Then, once the difficult questions start arriving, there is a noticeable move towards caution. The public is left with selective detail, photos of people sought, arrests announced, and the impression that operational failures can be buried beneath the language of active investigation. That may be enough for a press statement. It is not enough for trust.
And trust is what is really at issue here. Not just confidence in one match, but confidence in the system that is supposed to prevent a repeat of these scenes. If the public comes to believe that police and football authorities are circling the wagons, then any future assurances about safety, planning and crowd management will sound hollow before they are even delivered.
One of the more convenient justifications for delay is the suggestion that publication could interfere with court proceedings. That argument should not be dismissed casually, because contempt issues are real and legal caution matters. But it is also not a magic spell. It does not explain everything, and it should not be used to excuse months of silence.
The review itself has been framed as an operational debrief, not a tribunal. Its purpose is to identify what happened, what should have happened, and what should change in future. That means it is possible and essential to separate general lessons from individual criminal culpability. There are ways to do that responsibly. Reports can avoid prejudicial detail. Sensitive evidence can be withheld or redacted. Interim findings would focus on systems, not on allegations.
If a body with no power to convict, sentence or determine guilt still cannot produce a timely public account, then the issue is not legal impossibility. It is institutional reluctance.
And that reluctance tells its own story. Football’s authorities are expert at invoking process when process suits them. They understand how to use legal complexity as a shield. Yet when it comes to protecting supporters from disorder or preventing the next debacle, the same systems suddenly seem less urgent, less exacting and less capable of speed. That double standard should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
There is another reason this delay matters. Scottish football has a long history of asking people to move on before the questions have been answered. Big incidents are followed by fury, then defensiveness, then a drift into selective forgetting by the stakeholders. Over time, the official version becomes tidy and the public version becomes frustrated. That cannot happen here. Not if the point of the review is genuinely to prevent a repeat of the scenes we saw on the pitch at Ibrox.
Because this is not only about one match. It is about what kind of governance Scottish football wants to have. Does it want a culture in which serious incidents are reviewed openly, quickly and with a willingness to accept fault? Or does it want a culture in which reports are delayed until the news cycle has moved on and the appetite for scrutiny has softened? The answer to that question matters far beyond March’s disorder.
The comparison with Hillsborough also matters for another reason, it reminds us that football disasters are not just sporting stories. They are public safety stories, civic stories, moral stories. They involve power, responsibility and the consequences of institutional failure. That is why the Taylor Report still resonates so strongly. It was not perfect, but it recognised the urgency of telling the truth while the memory was fresh and the evidence could still be properly assembled. The Scottish FA’s current approach has not yet shown the same seriousness.
So what should happen now?
The most obvious immediate step is simple - publish an update. Not spin, not a vague assurance that work continues, not a line about needing to respect the process. A proper update. Scottish football deserves to know whether interviews have been completed, whether any interim conclusions have been reached, whether outstanding material is preventing publication and when the report is expected. If the timetable has slipped, explain by how much and why.
The second step is to stop treating transparency as a threat. A review of this kind should be helping restore confidence, not protecting reputations. If the Scottish FA believes it has acted properly, it should not be afraid of showing its work. If Police Scotland believes its operation was sound, it should be able to outline the logic behind its decisions. If the clubs want to demonstrate they care about supporter safety, then they should press publicly for answers rather than wait passively for the report to land.
The third step is to recognise that delay itself can become evidence of a deeper problem. When an inquiry takes too long without explanation, people stop assuming caution and start assuming concealment. That is not just bad optics. It is bad governance. Once that suspicion has settled in, every subsequent statement is read through it.
There is still time to correct course. But the window is narrowing.
If the governing body wants to avoid the charge that it is stonewalling, it needs to behave like a governing body rather than looking like an organisation with something to hide. The longer it waits, the more it invites the very criticism it is trying to avoid.
The real test here is not whether the Scottish FA can eventually publish a report. It can and it must. The real test is whether it can do so in a way that shows it understands the seriousness of the events it is examining. Right now, there is little evidence that it does.
A review into disorder at a major cup tie should not take on the feel of a closed courtroom. It should be visible, methodical and accountable. If the Taylor Report reminds us of anything, it is that public confidence depends on timely truth. Not perfect truth, not final truth, but timely truth - the sort that allows lessons to be learned before the next disaster, not after it.
That is what is missing here. Not just speed, but intent. Not just publication, but seriousness. And until the Scottish FA proves otherwise, the suspicion will remain that it is treating a public safety issue like a reputational cover-up.
That is not good enough for Scottish football. It is not good enough for supporters. And it is certainly not good enough for anyone who believes that the purpose of an inquiry is to reveal and to learn from, not to hope the focus shifts so it can bury the findings.