Partick Thistle managing director Ian Maxwell has cited safety as the main reason behind the club’s supporters being moved from the Jackie Husband stand in the upcoming Betfred Cup quarter final.

Rangers supporters will be housed in what is normally a stand reserved for home supporters, as they and Celtic fans are for league meetings between the clubs.

Many Thistle supporters were disappointed to see that set-up remain for the cup tie, with some perceiving it to be the submission of home advantage. But Maxwell says the club were lift with no choice.

And while he admits that the financial advantages were a factor, he insists the board’s number one priority was safety.

“It will make a financial difference,” Maxwell said.

“Paying for Adam Barton, buying Miles Storey, these things don’t just happen by magic.

“But in saying that, there is a big safety element to it. If it was fundamentally about just making as much money as possible, we would be giving them the stand behind the goal as well.

“We’ve got 2500 seats in the main stand, and that is more than we’ve ever had at any Old Firm game since I’ve been here.

"There is a financial element to it, but it is not the be all and end all.

“There are two reasons for the way we set up the stadium. There are safety issues with supporters who frequently use pyrotechnics coming into the Main Stand.

“As a board of directors, we would end up in jail if we put fans in there knowing they had a history of doing that, and then something goes wrong.

“Added to that, when we first came up, Celtic used to get the North Stand and a third of the Jackie Husband stand, so about 3500 tickets. Because of the demand they have, Celtic fans were getting tickets for home areas of the stadium.

“That caused a lot of problems. I remember the game they won the league here, and there was a lot of opposition supporters in with the home support, which antagonises people and upsets people.

“I get all that, but the reality of it is that we are very, very limited in ways to stop that happening.

“That became a safety issue, because there were groups of opposition supporters in fairly chunky numbers sitting together in the home end.

“The number of complaints we got off the back of that Celtic game told us we had a problem. The demand was outweighing what we could provide.

“So, we had to reconfigure things, and if we gave Rangers and Celtic the full Jackie Husband stand, that’s 5500 tickets. That should satisfy the majority of the demand.

“The number of ejections we’ve had since for opposition fans celebrating a goal is very, very minimal, and we’ve never had any complaints from our supporters about it, so it seems to have solved that problem."

Maxwell hopes that by explaining the motives behind the club’s decision, Thistle fans will put any grievances aside and turn up to support their team.

The Jags fanbase has historically turned their back on fixtures against the Old Firm at Firhill, but he hopes that a healthy home crowd can dispel any notion of handing over the advantage to their opponents.

“I see the comments that say we are giving away the stadium, they have bigger numbers and they are a lot noisier,” he said.

“The reality is though that if we sell out our allocation, then there’s 1000 less Thistle fans in the stadium than visiting fans, and I’m not convinced that’s a massive difference.

“4500 Thistle fans against 5500 Rangers fans would make it a tremendous atmosphere, and the place would be bouncing.

“History tells us that we are going to struggle to sell those tickets. For whatever reason, our fans don’t come to Rangers and Celtic games.

“We’ll drop from 1500 to 1600 season tickets at our home games to under 1000 at those matches, regardless of how we set the stadium up.”