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Celtic fans won’t miss the KMI Panel – Scottish Football is better off without it
Celtic supporters will hardly be mourning the death of the SFA’s Key Match Incident panel.
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4th April 2026; Ibrox Stadium, Glasgow, Scotland; Scottish Premiership Football, Rangers versus Dundee United; VAR decision goal no offside offence on the big screen
If anything, its abolition should come as a relief.
For two years, Scottish football persisted with a system supposedly designed to provide greater clarity around refereeing and VAR. Instead, the KMI panel routinely managed to achieve the exact opposite.
Introduced in 2024, the anonymous group was made up of coaches, former players, media figures and club and association representatives.
The SFA claimed its purpose was to provide “independent assessments of major VAR and refereeing decisions”.
The obvious question was always, who actually asked for this?
Scottish football already spends an unhealthy amount of time obsessing over refereeing decisions. The last thing it needed was another committee revisiting contentious incidents days later and providing another verdict for supporters, managers and pundits to fight over.
Yet that became the weekly routine.
Every “major incident” referred to the panel was put to a vote. Members decided whether the referee had made the correct call and whether VAR had been right to intervene.
Decisions were then graded by complexity, with “red or green” assessments published on the SFA website to effectively tell the public which major calls officials had got right and wrong.
It was supposed to increase accountability.
Instead, it became another stick with which to beat referees.
Celtic supporters became particularly familiar with the absurdity of the process.
VAR decisions would be made during matches, the KMI panel would subsequently rule against them and then, on occasion, Willie Collum would appear to explain why the original decision was perfectly defensible.
Rather than one clear interpretation from the governing body, supporters were sometimes left with competing versions of events.
The Motherwell-Celtic handball controversy towards the end of last season was perhaps the clearest example of why the entire exercise had become so counterproductive.
The incident triggered months – and still does – of hysteria before Collum offered a reasonable explanation for why the handball decision had been reached.
There was only one problem.
The KMI panel had already voted unanimously against the decision a week earlier.
The SFA’s head of refereeing was explaining why a decision was correct while a panel operating under the SFA umbrella had already told everyone it was wrong.
The outrage surrounding the incident spiralled far beyond reasonable debate, with referee John Beaton’s home address eventually being leaked.
Nobody can reasonably pin that disgraceful episode on one panel, but it should have forced serious questions about whether Scottish football’s obsession with endlessly relitigating refereeing decisions was actually achieving anything positive.
Whatever anyone thinks of Collum, he spent years refereeing at the highest level and was appointed to lead refereeing in Scotland. His credentials and identity are there for everyone to scrutinise.
Who were the KMI panel members?
Supporters were never afforded the same transparency.
Their identities remained hidden, but their verdicts were published and used to declare whether professional referees had correctly interpreted the Laws of the Game.
Celtic fans – and every other supporter in Scotland – were effectively being asked to trust the judgement of people they weren’t allowed to identify.
For something supposedly established in the name of openness, that was always a bizarre contradiction.
By the end, even clubs appeared to have had enough, with some – Dundee United being the first 18 months ago – refusing to nominate representatives to participate.
There is absolutely a need for refereeing accountability in Scottish football. Celtic should never be afraid to challenge decisions when there are legitimate grounds to do so, and officials shouldn’t be protected from scrutiny simply because their job is difficult.
But accountability and endless controversy are not the same thing.
Football’s laws are inherently subjective. Two qualified referees can watch the same replay and reach different conclusions. VAR hasn’t changed that, and assembling another group to vote on those decisions several days later was never going to change it either.
When a major decision causes controversy, the SFA’s refereeing department should explain the interpretation, provide the relevant law and stand behind its reasoning. If an official has made a mistake, say so.
That is far more valuable than publishing the verdict of an anonymous committee which might subsequently be contradicted by the country’s head of refereeing anyway.
The KMI panel was created to bring clarity to Scottish football’s refereeing debate. Its abolition isn’t something Celtic supporters should be concerned about.
The bigger question is why Scottish football persevered with it for so long.
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