I’ll tell you what, I was thinking last night about the darkest days we’ve ever had as Celtic supporters, those days when it seemed like everything was up in the air, when the situation our club faced was at its running worst. Through all of them, there was hope. Faint hope, perhaps, but hope nonetheless. And that hope carried us through.
But it wasn’t only luck, you see. We know that now.
As crazy as this might sound to some folk, the darkest period for me didn’t come during Rangers’ nine in a row. Through much of that time we were run by an incompetent board which didn’t have a clue. There was always a chance that New Celtic would stop them. It was in the wind in the Tommy Burns years; we were so close. Wim didn’t seem like the answer when he came but he put the finishing touches to what Tommy had started.
To me, the real darkness saved itself for the two shambolic, chaotic, years between 1998 and 2000. Those were the hard ones, the tough ones. Our club had been rebuilt but it still lacked something, it still lacked that spark we needed to move forward. It was around that time Murray started to taunt us about life after Fergus; he said that whoever took over next would need to have “very deep pockets” and that for every fiver we spent he would spend ten.
And back then, in those days, before facts were freely available online, back when there were no Internet Bampots and no wide audience to get their findings out to, even if there were, when you had to rely on the press manning up – and this was the succulent lamb era – and giving them to you, you lived in total ignorance.
We had no idea, back then, what Murray International was built on, and even if we had known the basics, there was no way to tell if it was ever going to come crashing down. Banks might have carried on lending that guy money indefinitely. Who knew when it would end?
Who knew if it would end?
Being there at the time – especially in that dire second season when Rangers won the league by 21 points – you didn’t see the light.
You could look into the future and easily imagine another long spell of dominance, but this time without the hope of a saviour.
Those were the years of darkness in which our club was almost hollowed out. We saw one manager leave under a cloud. We saw another arrive in a blaze of negative publicity. He was soon gone. John Barnes was next, and what a disaster that was.
A brief period of Kenny Dalglish followed, the one highlight being a League Cup and seeing Hugh Keevins physically launched out of the Celtic Club when King Kenny took his press conferences on the road, sick of the media twisting every single word he said.
Towards the latter part of that horror spell, I went to Ibrox and saw us utterly destroyed 4-0. Emerging from the ground that day, shell-shocked, in despair, I sat on the roundabout waiting for my mate and had a good cry about how dreadful it looked. He came along and I told him straight; I couldn’t see how things were going to get better. There was no end in sight. If Murray could keep spending the pain looked likely to go on and on and on.
A year later, we were back there, swaggering conquerors.
We had already won the league and the League Cup, and were heading for the treble. Henrik Larsson and Lubo Moravcik were peerless that afternoon.
The 3-0 score line flattered them.
We played them off the park.
The darkness lifted. Oh there were more bad days to come – and the diabolical laxity of our board in allowing three final titles to be won at Ibrox between 2008-11 – but it never got that bad again. You always felt there was something just around the corner. When our club fell into the dark hole it did last season you knew a change of manager was the main thing. A fresh approach to get more out of the good players at Celtic Park. Brendan proved it.
Likewise, for all three of those years you knew that individual errors and acts of self harm had done for us. The decision not to back Gordon Strachan by signing a striker in the “Wilo Flood Window” was a disaster. The appointment of Tony Mowbray the following year was a catastrophe. I still believe that naming Neil Lennon his successor was the wrong move and it cost us a championship and the chance to bury them a year before they collapsed and died.
Those were blunders at the strategic level; they were not indicative of a club that was structurally weak or in crisis.
They were mistakes.
Giant mistakes, but that’s all.
Sevco fans will look at the dire state of Celtic before Fergus and think their club could be saved like ours was then. They can look at the year 1997-98 when we stopped the ten and think on how the right blend can elevate a poor team to greater heights than it should reach.
They might look at what O’Neill did and what he was allowed to spend, and conclude that it’s all their club needs to do. They may look at Strachan, who downsized the O’Neill era and still won three titles in a row, and make the deduction that something similar could happen there.
And I know, for sure, they look at the Brendan Rodgers revolution and tell themselves that all it’s going to take is the right man and a modest investment and it will all turn around.
And none of that is true at all. They are kidding themselves on. If the last 12 months has taught them anything at all it should be that they are labouring under a delusion. The world doesn’t work that way, and you know what? It never really did.
The simple truth is that I didn’t get it back then, in the years 1998-2000. I didn’t see the true genius in what Fergus had done, and I wouldn’t get it for at least five more years, even after watching the O’Neill era and the things it brought us. I didn’t understand that what we’d done in those years, in the background, was consolidated and expanded.
The stadium was first; by the time it was finished it was the second biggest in the UK. The long-term – the permanent – structural advantage that gave us over their club was, and it remains, enormous, equating to somewhere between £4 million and £6 million every single year.
It’s been nearly twenty years now; think about what that means.
Fergus knew that when he designed the thing. It’s why he proceeded with the plans when some of the hacks, like McNee – who on his first tour of the North Stand penned a sarcastic, bitchy article saying the best thing about the seat was that you could see Ibrox in the distance – were sneering at him for over-reaching. Fergus had it sussed.
Next was the scouting side. Jo Venglos, who Fergus appointed manager after Wim, didn’t last long in that job, but he didn’t leave the club’s employ. He was put in charge of re-evaluating and reworking the entire scouting system and he put in place the framework which pays such startling dividends for us today. It was a moment of brilliance, and foresight, which makes even the stadium plan look pale in comparison. It transformed our future.
The one area where they might – just might – have had an edge was with Murray Park, but we solved that one when we constructed our own training complex and youth academy at Lennoxtown and over the years, as they’ve made savage cuts to their youth system to keep up with the pace of downsizing, we’ve ramped up our own and constantly built on it. That’s no small thing, and for years to come it will give us a further advantage over them.
Don’t underestimate the fact that we currently operate nine Celtic Stores, as well as having a strong presence in the high-street retailers and a very decent online shop. When Rangers sold off their stores, remember we were told how good that idea was? Their partnership with JJB? How’d that one turn out? JJB was in the toilet before Rangers was and Sevco was no longer bound by the contract. But with no retail outlet willing to bulk-stock their goods, and with them needing that expanded presence, they were forced into going with Sports Direct. Remind me again, how did that particular decision pan out?
See, people always pan Green for that as if it was a cheat. But what other option was there? What choice did he really have? If that deal was one sided that’s because nobody else was interested in signing one. Better a little money from shirt sales than none.
When the Sports Direct deal finally closes out, Sevco fans seem to think that’ll give them back the kind of earnings Rangers made in retailing. They couldn’t be more wrong. They have no sales infrastructure to speak of, which means a contractual agreement with another retail partner is a certainty, and what kind of terms will they get? What kind of terms would you give to them, knowing they were desperate and couldn’t sell their stuff otherwise?
Celtic was able to spend money during the O’Neill era, but that was because we had acquired a good reputation for fiscal probity and had a good relationship with a bank. We went heavily into debt during that time; Gordon Strachan had to made radical cuts to make up for that. But the fundamentals were right, so even as he was cutting back we were able to go out and sign players like Nakamura, and assured more titles.
Everything changed, as we all know, in 2007 and in 2008.
Clubs can’t do that anymore, and especially not in Scotland. The transfer market in England has gone insane. Banks and lending companies will only grant over-draft facilities if clubs are able to meet their responsibilities as they come due. A club borrowing money from its directors to keep the lights on isn’t going to get bank funding; it’s as simple as that. They will not entertain an application from Sevco on that basis … or on any other.
We now know that during those dark years of the 1998-2000 that Murray was spending the bank’s money, not his own. We know that he had already embarked on the suicidal policy of tax avoidance. We know now that the ship was holed below the waterline, that he was fudging it, that the club was artificially supported. We know too that they were a liquidation certainty the moment the banks stopped playing ball. Back then it just looked like they were uncatchable.
The difference is that our success, and the gap between the two clubs, can be maintained. There are no secrets anymore. No great scandal or revelation lies out there waiting to sweep over the horizon and wash our club away. There are no secret loans, no hidden debt. We’ve never had a sugar-daddy owner nor will we ever. Frivolous, hopeful nonsense which sparked European Commission investigations and years of fevered fantasises proved to be worth nothing.
They have no money for the kind of infrastructure spending that would even start to bridge the gap. Rangers sold it all in the last years of Murray, flogging off everything that wasn’t nailed down. When they went under much of the rest was swept away. Green bought a shell. He never rebuilt any of it. Even if increasing the capactiy at Ibrox was possible, and affordable, the structural problems with the roof and elsewhere would make it a non-starter.
So if you conclude that we’re on safe ground and that nothing will eradicate our structural and financial advantage over them what does it leave?
It leaves a saviour. Someone willing to come in and spend.
That’s what they are pinning their hopes on, all their hopes.
Red Bull, someone, anyone, and in their desperation they no longer care what their “saviours” look like or from where they come.
Which leaves them in a dangerous place, exposed to exactly the sort of chancers who’ve been at Ibrox before and who got their claws into clubs like Coventry.
The myth of Real Rangers Money with pots of money has been proven to be just that. There’s no chance of someone buying the club as “investment” because Ibrox is a black hole. You could pour ten, twenty, thirty million down there and never seen a fraction of.
The £4 million profit they made in 2009-10 was solely from Champions League participation, a season before Scottish clubs saw their Champions League quota cut to one team and had their automatic place in the Groups rescinded. We’d had it the year before, and they had posted losses of over £12 million.
When qualification became required, they were dicing with death.
Had Celtic won any of Rangers’ last three titles the party would have been over before Craig Whyte got his hands on the keys to Ibrox in the first place.
Do not listen to a word their fans say; their club was never financially viable.
Sevco could be financially viable. What you are seeingat the moment – that wreckage of a team – is actually what overinvestment looks like.
They are running at losses at the moment year in year out and that can’t go on indefinitely.
But if they make cuts, and adapt, and accept a long period without being competitive, yes it can be done.
They pin their hopes on a new boss, perhaps, but the current level of their squad is so abysmal that nothing will drag it up to the required standard. Brendan Rodgers himself couldn’t go into that dressing room and make good players out of what’s there.
So replace the manager and that’s just the start.
Then you have to replace the squad.
With what? Where’s the money to do it coming from? Nobody on the current board has it, and any “investor” who was being asked to come in – and there’s nobody out there; do not let people kid you on about that – would know he was being asked to pour money down the drain.
There is no infrastructure work taking place at Ibrox. No investment in key areas. No turnaround plan. No business plan, in fact, to speak of short of “Europe will make everything alright.”
If they get there.
If UEFA grants them a license, in spite of their failure to qualify for one.
If other clubs don’t raise a stink.
If they can negotiate qualifiers.
Things are still not being done which should be; the stadium faces a closure at some point in the not too distant future and that’s a problem their board can’t even begin to deal with.
This is their dark period, and there are no aces up anyone’s sleeves. There is literally no end in sight here and short of a collapse of the English league system and Sky giving every penny to Scotland – as likely as Donald Trump winning a Nobel Peace Prize – there’s not even a speculative scenario, a cosmic “what if?” for them to cling to for hope. Because without that, no outside investor is going to touch the game here with a twenty foot pole.
This is what their future looks like; last night at Tynecastle.
They can adapt to that or they can die fighting that reality, but those are their choices and there are no others.