So the SFA has a new CEO. It is, of course, Ian Maxwell from Partick Thistle, allegedly the guy we wanted.
The guy Peter Lawwell wanted.
Is that accurate?
Who the Hell knows?
It might be and it might not be. The one thing we do know is that he inherits a shambles, an organisation so inept that it makes the SPFL look professional.
Ian Maxwell has inherited one Hell of a mess.
There are issues piled up on his desk that are a mile high. This guy has to provide some leadership; sure as Hell none of his predecessors have. The chances are good – very good – that we’re just going to get more of the same, and why not? The fans have been treated with contempt and some of them are all-too ready to swallow that contempt. I am even talking about some of our own.
Celtic fans have not pushed Celtic enough, and so Celtic has not pushed the SFA enough. The new man at the helm should, in theory, mean a fresh start … so if we’re going to act this is the time for it. There will never be a better one.
These are just some of the issues facing Maxwell, and which our club has some responsibility to its own fans for.
It’s time we all got serious about them.
RESOLUTION 12
Number one in the Inbox is Resolution 12 and the ridiculous length of time it has taken the SFA to look into this issue. There are rumours that their lawyers are looking for loopholes so they can kick this matter into the long grass, but that is simply not going to fly.
Maxwell has to be seen to do the right thing here.
This is his first major decision whilst on the job and he dare not get it wrong. If this looks like a cover-up then he is going to have serious questions to answer and they will haunt him not in the short term but all the way through his tenure at the governing body. This can be the perfect start or the worst one.
The media is going to say he is in a lose-lose situation; that is bollocks and they know it. All this guy has to do is follow the rules as they are written. If he allows himself to be swayed by any other consideration than doing what is right then he’s a coward and we’re back at square one.
All he has to do is establish whether rules were broken, who broke them, and act accordingly.
The issue will arise as to the club which broke those rules; this would be a good time for settling the Survival Lie once and for all too. If he’s standing by that lie and he finds the rules were broken by an Ibrox club then punishment – harsh punishment, serious punishment – has to befall Sevco. Anything else will be a cop-out. One of the principle parts of the Five Way Agreement inexorably bound Sevco to the sins of Rangers anyway … and so it should go.
For lying to the SFA on a UEFA License Application, I would think the sentence is going to be pretty severe.
How severe? A ban from European football for a period of time would have to be considered a certainty, and let them moan as they like. They don’t qualify for a license at the present time anyway, so it would simply restore some measure of order.
FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY
Which brings me to the next sunny point.
If Celtic and this guy aren’t pushing for Scottish teams to be accountable under SFA financial fair play then almost everything else is a waste of their time. This is for the good of the whole game; limit clubs to spending what they earn and you ensure sporting integrity and you stop teams from ever getting into trouble again.
Club chairman who don’t support this … frankly I wonder what planet they are on.
They certainly don’t care about their own financial security or that of their clubs. Many of them already voluntarily follow FFP processes, and keep themselves broadly in line with UEFA regulations. Only the handful who do not would have anything to worry about.
And those clubs have nothing to worry about either, because they will be better run and in greater health. That, surely, is a goal worth striving for and Celtic should be way out in front of it, and not only because we, ourselves, follow FFP guidelines rigorously.
It’s simply the right thing to do … and if Sevco goes on one last gasp spending spree, which by some miracle succeeds and they take a title from us whilst the Celtic board has stood idly by and watched it … who do you reckon our fans are going to blame?
Not the SFA, I can assure you.
FIT AND PROPER PERSON CRITERIA
There are people involved with Scottish clubs who every man and his granny knows should not be.
And I don’t just mean Dodgy Dave King.
It is about time this was treated with the seriousness it deserves instead of being a vague and wishy-washy thing where we let the clubs handle this internally and self-certify.
It is farcical to allow Dave King’s concert party members to pass him as fit and proper, when his career of criminal activity is well known to everyone. It is disgraceful that this guy has been allowed to continue to behave in the most appalling manner whilst at that club, bringing the game into disrepute with inflammatory statements, defying court orders, making it up as he goes along, without the SFA even bothering to stir.
I wrote previously that King has the wherewithal to blackmail certain people at the SFA, via the information he purchased from the person calling his or herself Charlotte Fakeovers. But one of the people most susceptible to that blackmail has gone.
Stewart Regan was a toxic character and not just because King had plenty on him.
Ian Maxwell had no connection with those events.
He has no excuse for not dealing with matters arising from them. King should be up in front of the beaks for his recent behaviour and told to pack up his pencils. It might well be the most important thing Maxwell does short of Resolution 12.
GENUINE TRANSPARENCY
The way the SFA makes decisions is already the subject of a lot of scrutiny, but the decisions themselves never are. We cannot, for example, find information on what is on an SFA council agenda. We do not know how individual board members voted.
It is in the interests of some of these people to run a closed shop; what about the interests of the game?
In case it hasn’t dawned on people at Celtic Park, we’re not getting away with anything here.
Any time we’ve voted out of self-interest that has made the papers; there’s also someone happy to leak stuff like that. In the meantime, people can play little games and hide facts from scrutiny without having to worry about their own backsides, which are well covered.
Celtic should be pushing for every vote to be recorded and those records made public so that the fans can see what’s being done in their name. Chairmen who act out of selfish motives should be spotlighted so that we can all see what’s really going on.
This is not revolutionary; every single organisation of note keeps records of this stuff and they are available for stakeholders to view. Westminster keeps a record of how every MP votes on every single matter; you can check all that online.
We’ll be told Scottish football cannot do that because of fear of intimidation; it’s bullshit.
When MP’s can vote on sending soldiers to war on an illegal basis or triggering Article 50 in the face of opposition from their constituents, then nobody is going to convince me that the SFA is engaged in anything dramatic enough to necessitate total secrecy.
That is a ridiculous suggestion and this is a reform whose time has come.
OPEN ELECTIONS INSTEAD OF THE CLOSED SHOP
The closed shop doesn’t just run to votes, of course.
It runs to the biggest issues of them all; elections. We were told the closed shop period had ended with the reign of Alan McRae, a guy who I still couldn’t pick out in the street. But at the same time we’re told that Rob Petrie is virtually assured a coronation. If that’s true, we’re no further forward.
The President should be elected every year in an open process where all someone needs is the right number of nominations and a set of ideas. This nonsense that there should be a “time served” requirement protects the old pals act, the old SFA blazer brigade.
Let’s face it, we know the sum total of the ideas those people have … zero.
So why are we still running this antiquated, ridiculous, system wherein the same old faces get recycled every single time there’s an election? Where the Presidency itself is simply passed on from one corrupt so-and-so to his mates, as if that was normal?
The English FA even allows for elections from outside of football, for God’s sake. Our association is ludicrously backward, and Celtic must have been content with that for a long time. But surely we’ve seen what happens when you let the same people hold all the power?
It certainly hasn’t benefited us in any way.
CELTIC’S CALL FOR AN INQUIRY
Celtic called for an inquiry last year into historic issues arising from Rangers’ use of EBT’s and how that was handled by the SFA.
Stewart Regan flatly refused this although the clubs, in the form of the SPFL, had specifically requested it.
Some will say there is no point in going over this ground again, but Regan was part of the problem and he is no longer there.
Is our club really going to say nothing about all this now?
Was it that easy to get us to drop it and back away?
Are we giving up without a fight, or is there still some fight left in us?
If the Resolution 12 case comes back and there’s something to answer to, then that leaves a rash of issues hanging.
If the SFA is trying to palm all the blame off on the club then we know there’s some backside covering going on at the association.
If they say there’s no case at all to answer then we know that case went somewhere they weren’t comfortable with.
Look the simple fact is that we know Rangers should never have had that license in 2011. We know it. This is not speculation. We can state this with certainty. It fits in to a wider set of issues and those issues have not gone away just because Regan has.
His going away, in fact, opens them up in new ways.
We stand a chance of getting solutions.
So I understand Celtic holding fire … at the moment. But when the Resolution 12 guys get their SFA verdict our club has to renew its call for an inquiry and this time fight tooth and nail until it gets it. No more playing nice. It’s time to show we mean business.
TIME TO ACT CELTIC. TIME TO SHOW US WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT.
The SFA might just get a fresh start here, but that means that real changes are to be expected. Doncaster is on the board. Maxwell is the CEO. These are allegedly our people, Celtic’s people, which puts us in pole position to drive real change through that place.
If no real change comes, what does that tell us? That we never wanted it in the first place?
It has always been my sincere belief that Celtic was a club that tried to do right by the game, but even if that were not so the last ten years have shown us that reforming the SFA is about self-preservation as much as the well-being of the sport.
We cannot allow the kind of people to hold office up there as those who held it these past few decades, when rampant cheating elsewhere was allowed to go unanswered and who’s consequences are still with us today.
If we have even the slightest sense of what’s in our own best interests then surely SFA reform is top of the agenda.
Maxwell will be watched carefully, but so too will the behaviour of Celtic. If we allow our enemies to maintain their hold on the game here we’re asking for trouble. And trouble has a habit of finding us when we do that.
No more of it, Celtic. No more.
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