This time last year we were approaching the summer months with an enormous amount of confidence in the future of our club, at least out on the field. We had just appointed one of the most forward thinking managers in Europe; I believed that then and now. Brendan was a top drawer boss, of the very highest calibre. Yet we had no idea what was about to happen. The turnaround was just incredible, and the results are clear to see.
In addition to that, and I was absolutely not expecting it, was the way we forged ahead off the field too.
Top sponsorship deals, a growing commercial side and the finalisation of plans for the Celtic Village, a long awaited announcement and a huge step towards securing our long-term future as the biggest club in this country bar none.
To stand and look at Celtic right now is to admire an evolving work of art. We are the perfect model for how a professional football operation should be run. I don’t remember us ever being in such rude health, or with such optimism surrounding us.
All of it stands in contrast to the dire state of affairs across the city, and perhaps that’s why we do nothing to reign in the excesses of their directors and the suicidal behaviour for which those who “govern” Ibrox have become known. Perhaps we don’t push for financial fair play or for licensing changes because we enjoy what’s happening across there too damned much. Maybe the never-ending soap opera suits our purposes.
Even if that were true – and it isn’t – it’s just not good enough.
Tighten the regulations, strengthen Scottish football governance, and Sevco will never catch us no matter how many dodgy geezers they troop through the doors. The structural advantages we have are just too great. If we literally stood still it would take them ten years to catch up, and we absolutely will not do that.
Fail to tighten the regulations and Sevco will die trying to catch us, because their recklessness knows no limits whatsoever. And that might seem like a positive outcome for some people, but in the event it happens even we will be going backwards before long and it will have nothing to do with lack of competition; it’ll be because the game up here is seen across Europe as an ungovernable joke, and nobody will pay a blind bit of notice to anything happening in it.
Can you imagine how badly it would reflect on our “leaders” to have two Ibrox clubs go out of business in the same way in the space of half a dozen years? Can you imagine the consequences of making them start at the bottom again? It would be farcical. The credibility of our national sport would be shot. And that’s the best case scenario because it would not survive the alternative, which is giving Rangers III the place Sevco was never allowed; a straight bye into the top flight or the Championship, and that’s what the SFA and SPFL heads would be clamouring for and I believe the clubs would opt for it without any hesitation at all.
It is not in our long-term interests to carry on like this.
It is not in our long-term interests to let chaos reign all around us, and hope we are shielded by the “feel-good factor” and the quest for ten in a row. It is not in our long-term interests to pretend indifference or practice isolationism when we are stuck in this football environment with nowhere else to go.
Celtic does need a challenge to emerge if we’re to continue thriving.
But what we cannot allow, what we must not tolerate, is the emergence of a temporary, artificial one based on a skewed playing field and the bending of the rules. It doesn’t simply disenfranchise every other club in the league but it makes all our hard work to get here a joke.
Because really, what was the point? What was the point, all these years, of playing by the rules, of building the brand, of constructing something that works, when others are chasing glory, ignoring regulations, flaunting the rulebook, dumping debts and emerging clean at the end of it all to start the cycle all over again?
Why did we even bother?
Yes, I know why. I’m not stupid. None of us are. We did it right, and I am proud of that. We played it straight, we lived by the rules, we respected ourselves and others. We suffered setbacks and lean years and endured some pretty dark times.
But we did all this in the expectation, I think, that when the crash at Ibrox came that it would shake things up so even the governing bodies here learned the lessons of it.
Rangers was a basket case long before the roof fell in, but our club didn’t interfere. In fact, we’re not asking that it interfere now. We’re asking that it protect itself and the rest of Scottish football by leading a reform effort before it’s too late.
Celtic owes us this.
It’s not enough to say we’re looking after ourselves and getting it right inside our own walls; we don’t operate in a vacuum here. Scottish football is our home, and we’ve nowhere else to go. It is our responsibility to make it as good as it can be, to make sure it’s run right. We have people on the boards of the SFA and the SPFL … what in God’s name are they doing? Why are we giving legitimacy to mean like Doncaster and Regan?
The club has a duty to its shareholders, even more than it does to its supporters.
I cannot repeat this enough; we’re stuck here.
We’re not headed for England and a European league is a decade away if it comes at all.
Scotland is where we’re at, and if this game continues to be run in the corrupt manner it is right now we will not thrive in it.
Our club cannot continue its policy of silence on these matters, not for much longer. It’s time to get off the fence. It’s time to start representing the interests of the fans in the only way that matters. The game here is bent. It is corrupt. It is heading, at high speed, for another disaster and we cannot be ignorant of how that impacts on us. We cannot pretend that we can roll on without any negative effects. The moment for speaking up and acting resolutely has come.
Nothing else will suffice, or it’s all been for nothing.
Our superiority on the pitch really will be meaningless if the game around us collapses into ruins.
Our hard work off the field will have been for nothing if the Celtic brand is torched along with everything else.