ACCORDING to football folklore, the late Bill Shankly, who emerged from a Lanarkshire pit village to become the most revered Liverpool FC manager of all time, once insisted that football was more important than life and death. It’s a quote that many football fans wear as a badge of honour. Last week, thousands of Celtic supporters appeared to take the words literally.

As we basked in cataclysmically high temperatures for February; as food and medicine shortages wait just around the corner because of Brexit; as the calamity that is Universal Credit drives people to suicide; and the world sits on the precipice of another arms race with psychopaths in charge of nuclear weapons, the biggest story in Scotland was one man’s decision to switch jobs – with the consent of his former employers.

There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Fully grown men seemed to lose all control over their rational faculties, and overwhelmed by paroxysms of grief and betrayal, declared Brendan Rodgers a traitor. The man who’d brought Celtic seven trophies and two trebles, with another treble on the way – and who’d become so worshipped that some fans even claimed they saw his image floating in smoke from a pyrotechnic during the September 2018 match against Rangers at Celtic Park – was “always a fraud”. Quite what the evidence is for this, I don’t know.

Apparently, walking away from Celtic when they are on the brink of a “treble treble” – which would have elevated Rodgers into the saintly territory of the Jock Steins and Bill Shanklys – makes Rodgers an egotistical narcissist. One who presumably seeks vilification and infamy rather than worship.

To characterise the reaction of the Celtic support, and the pundits, as over the top just doesn’t quite describe how high the top is that it was over.

There was no space for exploration of alternative hypotheses. Maybe Brendan is actually not very egotistical and is quite cool that he’s done his bit to place Celtic in prime position for the treble treble and is content to watch Neil Lennon ride on his coat tails and be lifted high by the Celtic support at the end of the season. The thing is, I don’t know Brendan Rodgers. So, I’ve no idea what he is like as a person – and neither do 99.99% of the people decrying him.

My partner thinks I “just don’t get it”. No, I don’t. Because it’s ridiculous. And it’s about time that men – and it is generally men – grew up and abandoned their irrational hysteria when it comes to football.

Women have long had to put up with being stereotyped as over-emotional in their thinking. For centuries, it’s been a trope that men are more objective and logical. That myth was well and truly blown up over Paradise last week.

I’ve been around left-wing political circles for many years. Most of my friends are progressive in their views. Many are socialists and/or feminists. When we were in the same party, consensus abounded on issues such as public ownership, redistributive taxation, and reducing inequality in wages by having a maximum wage. Except when it came to football.

When it comes to football, it’s a question of how flat can we lie down as the tanks of capitalism roll over us. Football exceptionalism runs rampant. Idealistic, principled goals are muted for the ‘realities’ of the modern game. The domination of big money investors is necessary in the pursuit of a trophy.

Spending millions on players who happen to be skilled at kicking a ball is justified if you want to compete with the best. Paying an 18-year-old £25,000 a week – 50 times more than a nurse – is just the way it is. And without blinking an eye, the average football fan will fork out 50 quid for a team strip emblazoned with an advertising slogan for an exploitative corporation.

While the fans are, in the words of one Celtic supporters’ song, “faithful through and through”, those who run the ‘beautiful game’ are steeped in the ethos of big business.

At the highest levels, the sport has become a ruthless capitalist operation, an investment-fuelled game of Monopoly, played with real money for sky-high stakes. To think anything else is delusional.

And before anyone suggests that my ire is motivated by support for any other team, my views would be the same if it was Rangers supporters turning on Stephen Gerrard when he inevitably moves back down south to where the real, and preposterous, money is. Or any other team for that matter. The influence of big money in football is one big reason why it leaves me cold.

And back to that Bill Shankly quote. Most football fans can recite his words, but few are familiar with the context. Shankly was a man who knew real poverty. As a child, he’d been so hungry he stole food.

Later in life, he appeared on a TV chat show to answer questions about his attitudes to football, life, family, and politics. The host asked him whether he regretted all the time he lost with his family because of football. He told an anecdote about a conversation he once had when he was totally fixated on his work. “Somebody said to me: ‘Football’s a matter of life and death to you.’ I said, ‘Listen it’s more important than that.’ And my family’s suffered. They’ve been neglected.”

With the wisdom of years, Shankly told the story as a retrospective criticism of his own obsessive behaviour as a younger man. So, is it too much to ask all football supporters, pundits and the like to get a wee bit of Shankly’s perspective?