Celtic Are More Than A Club…Some Have Forgotten That
I contacted him. Told him: “Son, I’m going to make you a star” in that 80’s kitkat advert style. This is part one, part two will be posted at the beginning of the week.
Before you start reading make reference to Video Celts blog regarding football’s rich list.
Enjoy.
Celtic are more than a club …………… a phrase we hear an awful lot about our club and yet there is something lacking. From the top to the bottom there is an indefinable ingredient missing at our club.
From the Boardroom there has been a shift in policy in the last four years which involves buying low and attempting to sell high. Now as a policy this is fine as long as players are being brought into a team that is winning and the pressure is not so great.
However if you are coming into a struggling team playing catch up to their greatest rivals then that’s a different thing altogether. Also if I was another club looking to buy players would I prefer to buy from a club with a winning mentality, hence a player with a winning mentality, or a club with a defined selling policy?
This policy culminated in the selling of Kenny Miller who scored a few goals for us and had great movement. More importantly he came back to haunt us scoring the goals that gave Rangers two league titles twenty odd million pounds in Champions League money just at the right time. All because we were offered a quick buck on a player we signed for nothing.
On to the make up of the board; we are probably the only club with two billionaires on the board and yet we are being run on a budget where the books must balance. This is fine if you are fighting on a level playing field but our greatest rivals across the city are almost bankrupt and yet outspending us year in year out with money they do not have, winning trophies with the players they can’t afford, and now I suspect making plans to go into administration to avoid paying these debts where the biggest hit will be a ten point deduction leaving them with a far superior squad than us.
While I do not expect Celtic as a club to go any where near the possible illegal activities that have gone on across the city surely there must be some form of ‘speculate to accumulate’ plan as the current plan is clearly not working.
At this time bonuses are being paid to the Chief Executive not based on success on the park but on off field activities while the team on the park is not as strong as most of us believe it is!
Moving on now to our Training Facility at Lennoxtown: this on the face of it is a tremendous leap forward for our club developing our next generation of players. However the ‘buying low attempting to sell high’ policy means that the first team squad is cluttered with dead wood that must be played in an attempt to move it on.
The next generation is often overlooked, caught in a bottle neck created by the failed policy above. Remember these are the very players that have won the last nine reserve league titles and also won the last under 19 league and yet only one player, James Forrest, has managed to make his way into the first team.
We seem to have been scouring Europe for young talent for the last few years and signing players for the future. It is surely time that at least one of guys for the future is actually played. In other words the future is now. Finally regarding our Training Facility; how many pulled muscles and hamstring injuries have we had this year? Can money not be found to bring in a yoga teacher to teach the players stretching exercises?
It has worked in far bigger and more successful clubs than us. In fact as I was talking about this today a friend told me that our neighbours have adopted this policy for the last few months and guess what……….. the guy hasn’t been paid. But how many muscle and hamstring injuries have they had?
The cost cutting above has also left us with a rookie manager who, under tremendous pressure, is trying to turn round the club from the last disastrous regime. I have the utmost respect for Neil Lennon in the way he has dealt with the intimidation and media orchestrated witch hunt of last year, while at the same time putting together an entertaining side on the park.
The simple fact remains that he was the cheap option that, from the board’s point of view, turned into a God send. At this point maybe a straight question should be asked; if there was a coach at our academy that had no managerial experience and not yet even passed his coaching badges would you be happy to see him appointed as manager of our club?
I write this after our defeat to Hearts and I don’t yet have the clarity to start on our playing staff.
Celtic are more than a club…… perhaps those at the top should remember that first and foremost we are a football club.
