Celtic has, in recent years, become extremely adept at picking its moments. Take the announcement over Brendan Rodgers; that was dropped, like an atom bomb, into the news cycle before the Scottish Cup Final. Suddenly the focus was on Celtic Park and not on Ibrox. It was a masterpiece of theatre and timing.
Yesterday we made one of the most significant announcements in our recent history. When I wrote about our “lovely money” and what we should do with it, I didn’t have any inkling we were about to get such a comprehensive and spectacular answer. The project will take years and cost millions, but it will be worth the investment of time and money. It will be a triumph for us, to have acted where other clubs talked.
Because, of course, this has long been one of the grand fantasies at Ibrox, the revitalisation of their ground and the surrounding area, the creation of an Ibrox Village with hotels and bars and casinos. Celtic’s plan is nowhere near as spectacular, and that’s why it will work. It is grounded in realism, in the achievable, in ideas that can actually be executed and things that can actually be done.
For all that, it will be transformative. It’s the kind of project other clubs in Scotland couldn’t even conceive of let alone execute.
Back when Rangers proposed its casinos and hotels plan they were relying on outside investment, in government grants, in a bunch of pie in the sky stuff that was never even remotely likely to come to fruition.
They had meetings with the council, which I was reliably informed consisted of a lot of bluster and hot air; “It wasn’t like they were trying to convince us,” someone at those meetings told me. “It was like they were trying to convince themselves.” Those plans were never viable and all involved knew it.
You can tell looking at Celtic’s concept that it is altogether more modest, and therefore much more likely to come off. It will not make us the tens of millions Rangers fantasy scheme would have but it will, as I said the other day, give us an even greater financial advantage over the rest of the teams here and, as with everything else we build, it can be expanded upon over time.
This is spectacularly ambitious, the sign of a club that does have a clear-cut idea of where it is going and what wants to achieve, in the long term.
And of course these plans were unveiled at a time when the club across the city is in a thoroughly dreadful state, without a clue as to how they are going to get better. They have so many areas in need of improvement that a scheme such as this is so far outside of their capabilities that it would be laughable to contemplate it.
Apart from the cloud this casts over their present, and into the future, this one forces Sevco to confront the failings at Rangers too; that club promised a lot of things to its supporters without coming close to delivering for the most part. The delusions of David Murray, the boasting, the prideful nonsense, are revealed today as the folly we always knew them to be. The club he ran is gone, the new one struggles with its identity and worries about its future as ours forges ahead.
The simple truth is that we are the club he talked about building; one with the financial muscle and the vision to do great things here in Scotland and which can yet find a place on the bigger stage in Europe.
The first league title I remember us winning was in 1986, at Love Street. I was ten. I was in a butchers with my mother and grandmother when I heard we’d won the league. The guy behind the counter was dancing with a bottle of champagne in his hand. When we won the title two years later, in our centenary year, I was there and at the cup final where we won the double. I thought it would always be like that.
I didn’t see us win another league until I was in my 20’s. I went through every one of those dark years, and I thought 1998 represented a new dawn. In the two years that followed we lurched into the kind of crisis I thought we’d left behind, and in which we had to endure more bluster and ego pounding out of Ibrox than ever before.
This is the sweetest moment of my generation of fans, the transformation into the club their fans always thought they were. This is our legacy. This is our revenge.
