SFSA BLUE PLAQUES LAUNCH FIND OUT MORE
Date: 11th December 2025
Dear SFA Board,
I am writing to express my concern at your recent announcement that the SFA has entered into an agreement with Barclays PLC, part of which involves re-naming our national stadium, Hampden Park, as ‘Barclays Hampden’. The partnership will also extend to Barclays Next Gen, the girls’ performance programme, and both the Men’s and Women’s Scottish Gas Scottish Cup competitions.
I urge you to reconsider this short-sighted decision, which places Scottish football firmly on the wrong side of history. Barclays is providing investment and financial services to the companies arming and equipping the Israeli military, and is therefore facilitating both the ongoing killing in Gaza and the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Barclays holds shares worth over £2bn in nine companies supplying Israel with weapons and military technology, much of which has been used in Gaza. It provides loans and underwriting worth a further £6.1bn to these companies. This bank’s support for Israel has actually increased by 55% since 2021, despite growing international outrage and condemnation of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Barclays, your new naming partner, appears to have no qualms about continuing to invest in these companies. Groups calling for a commercial and cultural boycott of Israel, similar to the one that brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa, have called Barclays one of the banks that is ‘most complicit’ in financing the Israeli war on Palestinians. A May 2024 report, ‘Barclays: Arming Israel’s Apartheid and Genocide’, produced by War on Want, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, shows the extent of Barclays involvement and states that ‘Barclays is facilitating Israel’s war crimes and grave violations of Palestinian rights’. Significantly, the report also provides a time-line of many other government bodies and companies that have divested from, for example, Elbit Systems, Israel’s main arms company, citing their continued involvement in the illegal production of cluster munitions. These bodies include Norway’s Ministry of Finance, Foerstra AP-Fonden, Sweden’s largest pension fund, Australia’s Future Fund and many others. Among the most striking is the decision in December 2018 by HSBC to divest from Elbit. Barclays, Scottish football’s new partner, appears to be a particularly egregious example of a company continuing to invest in and profit from the most heinous human rights abuses.
Israel is waging what the International Court of Justice (as well as leading UK charities such as War on Want, Oxfam, Save the Children, and international organisations such as Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres) has called a ‘plausible genocide’ against the population of Gaza. This genocide has, according to a BBC report on the 29th of November this year, killed over 70,000 Palestinians, at least 20,000 of them children. On the SFA website, Alan Stewart, your Head of Wellbeing and Protection, said: “Scottish football will continue to prioritise the rights, safety and wellbeing of children and young people’. Barclays is of course well aware of the ongoing killing of children and young people, but continues to invest in companies such as Elbit which make the weapons and technology responsible for these deaths.
As of August 2025, more than 421 Palestinian football players have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank, killed by weapons at least partly bought with funds raised by Barclays PLC. In an interview in November this year, Jibril Rajoub, the President of the Palestinian Football Association, says that Palestinian sports are experiencing an ‘unprecedented catastrophe’ and that Israel has ‘from Day 1 targeted sports’ and ‘destroyed all sports facilities in Gaza’. 1,100 athletes, coaches and referees have been killed, including the captain of the Palestinian national football team, with thousands more injured and missing. We cannot pretend this is not happening, or allow Barclays to pretend that it is not happening.
In Scotland, in Palestine, and all around the world, football is the people’s game, and Hampden Park holds a very special place in the hearts of all Scottish football fans. It is unacceptable that its name is now to be yoked together with the name of a company that chooses to ignore the killing of children, and to continue to make a profit from it. As a lifelong fan of the Scotland international teams, who was in the Netherlands for the Women’s Euros in 2017 and Germany at the Men’s Euro in 2024, I am asking that the SFA withdraws from this commercial deal. As well as being morally wrong, it also has the potential to be a public relations disaster.
Barclays has millions of pounds to offer Scottish football. But at what price? Please, do not drag our national game into complicity in blatant sports-washing. Please stand up for the Scottish values of justice and solidarity, and say no thank you to Barclays PLC.
Yours sincerely,
John McIntosh
Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News
Tags: Barclays, Hampden Park, SFA