Everyone online today has seen the astonishing pictures of Celtic fans queuing around the block on the first day season tickets go on general sale.
The club has already sold somewhere in the region of 40,000 renewals. This takes our overall season ticket numbers into the stratosphere; we may hit the 50,000 high watermark of previous eras.
Some have estimated the total take from season tickets to be around £25 million.
This will be astonishing if true, and added to other income it could see us top £60 million in earnings again, even if we fail to reach the Champions League.
Add the cash on offer for that, and we’ll be over £70 million and heading for our best turnover figures since Seville.
That will be staggering, but even as it is right now the way sales have gone has exceeded expectations by miles … here and elsewhere.
It leaves a certain David Cunningham King – also known as the “glib and shameless liar” – struggling to plug an absolutely mind-bending gap in resources.
Now, every club in Scotland will have to endure the consequences as Celtic’s machine growls into life for the first time in a while, but every other club will do that with good grace and without promising to its supporters that they can compete.
Derek McInnes promised the Aberdeen fans that his club would do what had to be done to make next season an even tighter title race; he now knows the ground has shifted under him. He’s tempering his expectations, but only in as much as he’s getting ready to tie down the second spot.
He knows we’ll improve immeasurably and unless he can lift his own club far beyond its current form that this is as good as it’s going to get.
Sevco, on the other hand, is a club that simply assumes it will be challenging us.
They don’t see the likes of Aberdeen and Hearts as being in their way at all.
They just surmise that those clubs will be taken care of as a matter of course; the arrogance is astounding.
But King has told his fans that the only way they get past us is by having them “outspend us” like they did before.
His words, by the way.
He claims that Rangers, the OldCo, had been “built” by its fans outspending Celtic supporters.
To call this sheer fantasy is to do it more credit than it deserves.
Let’s call it what it really is; a flat-out lie.
The OldCo was built on three things; Murray’s initial spending, the indulgence of the bank and finally a gigantic and unsustainable tax scam.
I’ve looked into this thoroughly over on Fields; even if you account for those things, in the ten years between 2001 and 2010 their turnover was higher than ours just twice. Both years were ones in which they had European football and we didn’t. When the two clubs were on an equal footing our fans outspent theirs by a distance.
In that ten year period their total income was £516 million.
Those were their years of riding high.
They were operating at maximum capacity, on turnover that average out at £50 million.
During the same period, our own turnover was £630 million, averaging out at over £10 million higher than theirs for every single year.
Last year’s published figures for Celtic, for 2014-15, are generally accepted to have been fairly poor, with revenues falling by a fifth.
We still brought £51 million in – higher than Rangers’ ten year average when they were selling out Ibrox and playing in Europe.
There never was a period where their fans consistently outspent ours and those who follow the NewCo have virtually no chance of doing it now.
Celtic’s figures for 2015-16 will be awaited with no enthusiasm at all, although we’re still expected to secure turnover in the £45 – 50 million bracket. To put it into some kind of perspective, Sevco’s turnover for 2014-15 was £16.5 million.
That’s the size of the gap when we’re having a bad year.
Imagine the size of it if we have a truly exceptional one this time around.
They just can’t compete with that, especially when their earnings are expected to top out at no more than £30 million as they go forward.
As we grow stronger, we’re heading back to a period where our income regularly topped £70 million.
Let’s say King is able to unravel the Sports Direct deal, quickly and without an expensive trial.
Let’s err on the side of caution and say they’ll make an additional £10 million a year from merchandising and shirt sales. Add that to last year’s earnings of £16.5 million and they still brought in half what we expect to.
Let’s go further; give them the £30 million in earnings and add it to that.
They still fall short of last year’s figure.
If we can crack the £60 – 70 million mark – and those queues around the block suggest we can – then it’s over.
There is simply no prospect of King bridging a gap that size.
The turnaround in the fortunes of our club has been extraordinary in the last few weeks since Brendan Rodgers was announced as boss. The response from the fans has been exactly what I predicted if the club showed the appropriate level of ambition with the appointment. The Celtic supporters have never let the club down in that regard; those £70 million seasons earnings were secured at a time when we reached for the stars.
These numbers must terrify King and his board.
They are the raw materials of power, and as long as they hold their board is going to be under more and more pressure to self-finance any shortfall.
There’s little appetite for that amongst George Latham and others, and I mention him very specifically because it’s been widely suggested that he’s personally sick and tired of putting his hands in his pockets when Chairman Dave doesn’t bother.
In the next five or so years, Celtic will continue to move away from Sevco.
These numbers give us an advantage that is almost unbelievable.
I’m not one of those guys who goes in for the whole generation of dominance thing, but to me this is a gap that simply can’t be closed and as a result 10 in a row is very much ours to lose and their club will come apart, and Chairman Dave swept away, long before that is allowed to happen, but the fundamentals will remain the same regardless.
On and off the field, we’re going to leave them behind.