Sabotage mystery over Celtic’s Premiership title call

Someone at Aberdeen has been accused of shifting the goalposts in relation to Celtic’s title success.

On Friday the Dons hosted a Premiership video call ahead of Tuesday’s EGM of the SPFL to gather the thoughts of the 13 clubs, consisting of the current top flight plus Dundee United.

News that the clubs had rejected league reconstruction was the headline story that leaked out on Friday at tea-time.

No club wanted to leak details of the vote to confirm Celtic as champions ahead of the EGM but with no independent investigation going ahead the next issue to address is declaring the title over.

Those involved in the conference viewed a 100% call to announce the season over but someone at Aberdeen decided to record the vote as a consensus rather than unanimous.

The Daily Record reports:

All 12 top-flight clubs including Rangers have confirmed they will not object to the current season being officially ended with Celtic crowned nine in a row champions.

Record Sport can reveal the unanimous agreement was reached last Friday during a meeting of the Premiership clubs to discuss the catastrophic impact on the game of the coronavirus crisis.

But, in a bizarre twist, details of the show of hands were fudged in the minutes which were later circulated around the clubs by Aberdeen, who were in charge of hosting the emergency conference call.

We understand those minutes were not distributed until after the weekend and had to be amended as a matter of urgency on Tuesday morning after a number of clubs complained that, crucially, one of the most important moments of the meeting had not been accurately recorded.

Rather than state categorically that all 12 clubs had actually agreed the time has come to write off any chance of restarting season 2019/10 and declaring that they would not stand in the way of the SPFL awarding the title to Celtic and relegating Hearts, it was noted in the minutes merely that a ‘consensus’ had been reached.

Dundee United, Raith Rovers and Cove Rangers have already been announced as champions of their divisions with prize money paid out and promotions awarded.

UEFA have set a May 25 deadline for nominations to their 2020/21 competitions with special cases submitted from leagues that haven’t been able to complete their fixtures.