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Celtic Release Stunning Financial Results As Sevconuts Mourns We’ve Become “The Establishment Club”

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Celtic today released stunning financial figures for the first half of the season which demonstrate the gulf between ourselves and the rest of the league. I’ll go over what their implications are in more detail tomorrow – there’s a lot of stat-crunching to do on that one – but the top line figures are pretty extraordinary. Our income has doubled since this time last year, to £61 million. We’ve posted a top line profit (as it stands) of £18 million.

Total income for the season is projected to top £80 million.

That’s unbelievable for a club playing in the SPL and it was accomplished without selling any significant playing assets.

We’re leaving everyone miles and miles behind.

I find that amusing tonight, especially as the wailing from Ibrox and elsewhere has reached foghorn levels.

It’s become a joke now.

Hey, I remember the succulent lamb era. The idea that one club might leave the rest of this game in the dust was once guaranteed to get blood pumping to organs they don’t write about in family newspapers.

Just not our particular club.

Today I’ve read the most hysterical nonsense about how we’ve become “the establishment club.”

Yes, one penalty kick decision in a game where we scored four goals apart from the penalty, makes us the establishment club. As if some malign influence is responsible for those financial figures. What did we do? Bribe our accountants? As if we used votes and reach to accumulate that league lead. What, is every single point we gained the result of cowing other managers and the SFA and nothing to do with what happens on the park?

Are we the ones “holding back” Sevco?

Stopping them from being all they can be?

Because I thought that was just a collision with reality after years of sucking on sugar-daddy tit and depending on the largesse of banks.

The establishment club. Jesus wept.

Because the masonic halls and exclusive golf clubs and the members only drinking dens of Scotland are just full of guys called Francis and Declan, aren’t they?

This is the same old cobblers about the Unseen Hand, right?

You know what? Yes, over decades of painstaking work and building and forming associations and what-not, the Irish Catholic community of Scotland carved itself out a wee slice of the pie. We had no choice, really, since for years we couldn’t get certain jobs or into certain organisations and were pretty much treated as social lepers. The same thing happened in the United States and all throughout the world where Irish Catholics put down roots.

I get it, okay? The Ulstermen didn’t do nearly so well.

Because everywhere they went there was already a fraternity of “brothers” who made sure everyone was alright. Blue collar jobs for every good God-fearing Protestant one of them. But see, that right there was the problem. They got it easy when the going was good for that kind of thing. They also got complacent. Whilst they were getting gigs as engineers and providing the muscle for shipyards and steelworks and car plants and all the rest of it, the Irish had to get educated, and organised.

What was it Jack Nicholson said in The Departed?

“Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job we had the Presidency … No-one gives it to you. You have to take it.”

The establishment? Hell, if you can’t beat them, join them.

Then become them.

The line from JFK to Joe Biden is an easy one to trace, with John Kerry and a bunch of others in between.

And the same thing happened here in Scotland, of course, as we got involved in politics and ran for office and got elected in spite of our names. Now we’re at the forefront of the independence movement and other social and political causes, not to mention still having a toehold in the Labour Party and the unions.

Cause we had no other option.

Celtic was formed by that community, way back when.

We were never exclusive to it, and we never will be.

We’re not the “establishment club” because that’s a title that marries us to a small, exclusive preserve and we’ve never been that and never wanted to be, and it’s why the hard-core sect of the Rangers support always saw themselves as fitting perfectly into that slot.

And how they lorded over the rest of us whilst they did.

You know what cheeses them off most?

You know where this paranoia originates?

Where all this hatred for their current situation spews up from?

It’s because when the chips were down, the establishment didn’t save them.

They can’t understand that at all.

It’s beyond their comprehension, after all their protestations of loyalty and commitment and fealty.

When the moment came for the establishment to “look after its own” it abandoned them to liquidation and death and now won’t raise a finger to help the NewCo as it struggles to survive in the real world.

In fact, it was the establishment itself, in the form of HRMC, who nailed the coffin lid shut.

So, naturally, that had to be a conspiracy.

Somewhere along the lines, the reins of power must have changed hands.

Even old Lizzie herself must have secretly been going hither, thither and yon in Buck House shouting “Come on you bhoys in green!”

So it was that HMRC and the banks were being run by a secret – or maybe an open – cabal of Celtic minded individuals who wished them harm and twisted the situation to get exactly what they wanted. Then, with their friends in the SFA and the media and in the political structure and at UEFA, they beat on that club without mercy and caused it to collapse. Now we’re determined to keep Sevco in perpetual disharmony.

That is some story. It really is.

And every single word of it is hilarious nonsense!

Here’s the truth, Sevconuts.

(And I am directing this at that sub-section of the club’s support that really does believe all of the above.)

You ready for this?

Brace yourselves!

The establishment to which you pledged your undying affections never gave a damn about you in the first place.

 Oh Hell, it was happy to have you on board; there’s no denying that.

Ignorant rabble, easily manipulated, wound up and sent to march whether that was against minorities or foreigners or Catholics or even off to war. People who would keep alive the “traditions” whilst their communities were being leeched of every worthwhile resource and service.

Patriots, a few times a year, to show the flag and put the Great in Britain.

Without all that, much of the working class in Scotland would have had its eyes wide open twenty years ago.

So yes, they wanted your support and in a very narrow sense they even needed it. But they rather took it for granted; they sure as Hell never cared one way or another, either about it or about you yourselves. And they sure as heck didn’t muster as much as a fart for your football club, which they viewed the way they view all football clubs; as being supported by halfwits and eejits and bevvy merchants and weekend warriors on the lager.

And don’t mistake the baubles they conferred on Murray as some kind of statement about you lot; he didn’t get called Sir because he put us in our place. A knighthood is still the favoured way that the establishment honours its own. It’s still the way it pats itself on the back. It’s still the standard “reward” annually handed down to the British white collar criminal class, so they can perpetuate their own power and hand influence down to the next generation.

He didn’t care about you either, by the way, except in that during the glory days the club was good for his ego and got him in the papers.

It also probably served as quite a nice tax write off on the rest of his floundering business.

Hey, if he’d have really been a Real Rangers Man he would have done some due diligence on the guy who bought the club instead of lending him the quid and the pen to sign the contract with.

I lost count of the number of Celtic fans I had to explain this to back in 2012, when they were convinced that the state would ride to the rescue and make the tax-payers eat the bullet for the continuation of the charade. It was never going to happen. The people you’re talking about play on a much bigger stage, where a West of Scotland football club just doesn’t factor into the Grand Scheme of Things at all. They didn’t give a monkeys, either then or now.

The establishment has many clubs, none of them to do with football.

All talk of them suddenly favouring Celtic, of some titanic shift in the power behind the scenes … all of this is comforting, in its own way, I’m sure.

All of it helps to soothe the pain of realising, at last, what some of us said for years; Rangers was an artificial construct, and the version so many of this generation of fans supported was never sustainable in the first place.

If this is a conspiracy, that too provides its own comfort. Because if we took over the establishment then one day they can take it back, and set everything right, instead of waiting for Dodgy Dave King to dip into his “unlimited resources.”

Are these the stupidest people in the world, or is that still a competition with some juice?

Because you’d hate to think they had the field all to themselves, wouldn’t you?

Tonight, aside from fevered threads over whether the rest of Scottish football should seek to ban us – for what? I do not know nor care – they are having far more important, far weightier, discussions on their forums, about the future of their club, and how to make it better.

Yes, it really does all start with banning their players from wearing green boots.

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