When a client is struggling with a tricky issue in our media training or presentation skills courses, we’ll often use the phrase ‘the truth will set you free’.
By that we mean that if the audience you’re speaking to simply understood what was going on behind the scenes, they’d likely form a better impression of you. This is based on the principle that most of us, most of the time, are doing good things. And that many of the difficulties we face come some simply missteps around communication rather than deliberate bad intentions.
Problems arise when organisations fail to recognise what’s really going on and can’t be bothered or don’t think there’s any need to share their ‘truth’.
It’s taken a few days but credit to the Scottish Football Association for providing much needed clarity around the final moments of the 2026 league title decider between Celtic and Hearts. The final moments involved Hearts hitting the Celtic wall with a free kick, Celtic racing up the pitch and scoring into an open goal, a pitch invasion from celebrating Celtic fans and both managers and coaches trying to make sure their players stayed safe. It was, for a couple of minutes, pandemonium.
Conspiracy theories raged that the game had been abandoned, that there was time remaining on the clock and that this set a dangerous precedent that a pitch invasion by fans could bring an entire game to a halt. Clearly, the SFA realised they couldn’t allow this to fester and they’ve released audio and video footage and a strongly worded statement which includes important clarification of the rules.
Of course, this won’t convince everyone and the football governing body won’t want to end up in a situation where they have to explain every single decision in every game, but I certainly agree that in this case, it was important to set out the facts and establish the facts, as they see them.
Without that strong response there was a vacuum and in that vacuum opinion and misinformation will spread. This can eventually undermine everything you do.
The lesson here is to first of all, make sure you have ‘the truth’. Are you capturing data? Do you have evidence you can fall back on? And secondly, are you interested enough in your own reputation to know when to use it?
