Amongst all the anger on social media, there have been a few sensible suggestions.
I like to think I made one of them earlier with my article about how the Home Cup Ticket Scheme – which is one of the ways the club has leverage over the fans – has to be the first brick removed from the wall if we’re going to get anything to change.
But there are other good suggestions out there, including a mighty piece which is doing the rounds over on the Kerrydale Street forum, a re-visiting of a mammoth article from 2011, laying out the major changes that the Celtic Underground team believe are necessary.
Listen, I would recommend that everyone read that piece.
I only wish I were allowed to reproduce it on here, because every word in it is solid gold.
But you don’t have to be a blogger to get your opinion across.
The Celtic Star has been running a series of superb pieces all the way from Tuesday where their readers email in and make their positions clear. Articles like that are excellent for informing debate and discussion and for letting the supporters be heard.
This blog has always had an open policy of allowing people to express their views.
We hold to that, and we have published many a piece over the years, even when the central thesis was one that the editors didn’t agree with.
It goes without saying that this open invite to contribute still stands; if you have something you’d like to say I am easy to find on social media, and so are the guys who administer the Facebook group. Drop us a line and we’ll get your article up.
One member of the group – Sean MacMillan – has allowed us to publish his own piece from yesterday; the ten questions he would personally ask the board and the CEO if he had the chance.
I am pleased to offer them here for you all to read through.
I have added my own comments to each of them, to highlight their importance to the debate.
“Neil Lennon has said he still wants as many four players, so far we have only signed three. Why are leaving over 50% of our transfer business to the last 2 weeks of the window?”
An important question, and one that somehow we find ourselves asking every year.
This is a bizarre Celtic policy, and one that has evolved into a reckless gamble every single season.
I wrote earlier in the week about how we ride our luck time and time again with unprepared squads for the Champions League qualifiers, but of course it’s not just about that.
Every single year we end up in the same mad scramble in the closing days of the window … nobody can tell me that this benefits us, it hurts us time and time again.
“The club knew as early as January that we would likely be losing Benkovic, Boyata, Lustig, and Izzaguire. Why did we not prepare for this much earlier? Lennon was at the club as early as February.”
The thing is, if you believe the club we were prepared; all through the final weeks of the season, we were told that meetings were ongoing, that talks were underway, that lists were being formulated and the club had loads of options.
And then our so-called target list leaked.
Who put that together and over what timeframe? Because not one player on that list has actually signed for the club. It was, it’s now apparent, a total waste of everyone’s time and effort to collate that list and to come together to discuss it.
None of the names of it were particularly inspiring anyway.
Whatever preperation there was, it was wasted.
Time and effort and resources, pissed away.
“Where was the due process in hiring Neil Lennon, and what were the other options?”
That might be the most important question there is.
According to some rumours, the club did conduct interviews and speak to candidates, but that contradicts Lawwell’s own public statements.
It is difficult to believe that any kind of open process would have produced Neil Lennon as the best man for the job.
Equally though, it’s difficult to believe that the board could be so scandalously lax and unprofessional as to have not even bothered.
What we have for posterity is Peter Lawwell’s own statement to that end though.
Which is frankly scandalous, and would be a sacking offence in any other industry.
Celtic is a PLC, run for the shareholders, not Lawwell and Desmond’s personal fiefdom where they can appoint their pals as they see fit.
An appointment of this significance should have been treated with the gravest seriousness and it appears to have been handled in the most slapdash manner possible, with Lennon promised the job from the start. In other words, it was a stitch-up … and that makes it a major problem for the board if shareholders decide to query this on the record.
I cannot think of a more blatant breach of their fidicuiary responsibilities to put us on the strongest possible footing.
This has the potential to be the next Resolution 12.
To be blunt, this is a question that every Celtic shareholder should be asking the club for an urgent answer to.
“What has happened to the 50-60 combined million we got for Armstrong, Dembele, Rodgers, and Tierney? (in addition to the money we are saving in wages).”
There are two answers to this, and the first is that the transfer window is still open … and we should wait and see.
But nobody realistically expects us to spend much more than we have already.
The other answer is to say that it’s where you’d think it would be … in the bank.
The greater question is why is it just sitting there? Is it earmarked for something, and if so what?
And how does that help the football club, and what benefits does it bring us when exiting the Champions League deprives us of a shot at tens of millions more?
“Why did it take so long to appoint a new director of recruitment (Nick Hammond) given how important this season is? And given how much work we had to do?
Great question this one.
We knew that Rodgers would take Congerton with him, and so it was almost certain that we would need to make this appointment from a very early stage.
Rodgers resigned in February.
Hammond was announced on 20 June … and he didn’t start until 1 July.
In the interim, we continued to act as if Lee Congerton was going to be at the club for the coming campaign and beyond, when everyone involved knew for a fact that this wasn’t going to happen. It is hard not to conclude that we saw the chance to squeeze an extra few quid out of Leicester and that this took precedent over doing right by the club itself.
It is another scandalous waste of time and resources, in the pursuit of a short term profit.
“What exactly has our new director of recruitment contributed since starting? And what can we expect of him in only few months?”
Another excellent question, and the answer is unknowable.
He certainly hasn’t been terribly active in the transfer market as far as we can see; three of the four signings were made before he started and the fourth was already in motion.
If he’s laying foundations behind the scenes then doesn’t that suggest either that he’s got the job on a permanent basis – and why not just announce that? – or that the club is, again, simply letting someone do a bunch of stuff which will have no long term benefits at all and which his successor will simply rip up prior to starting again?
What in God’s name is going on at Celtic Park right now?
“Who exactly is signing players? We know Rodgers did not approve Marion Shved, and Lennon does not seem to be the biggest fan of Julien and Boli.”
This one always comes up and it will continue to come up as long as Lawwell is at Celtic Park.
Some will call it unfair; I ask them to cast their minds back just 12 months to the signing of Daniel Arzani and the dismissal of that player by Rodgers.
As Sean points out, Rodgers later went on to disavow Shved’s signing as well.
Lennon’s reluctance to play Boli and Jullien can be explained in a lot of ways … the trouble is, this is a possible explanation for that, and it shouldn’t be.
An idea such as this should be dismissed in the first two seconds after the question is asked … but our club has a lot of previous for exactly this sort of thing, and so it’s a valid, and horrible, question to ask.
“What is the club doing to improve our scouting networks given how poor our last few transfer windows have been?”
I always believed that John Park was a yes-man for Lawwell, and so I wouldn’t have been quite as over the moon as others may have been had we brought him back to the club.
But for all that, that was a man who knew his business and did one Hell of a job.
There was a time when we did have a top cadre of European scouts … the shambles we’ve become in the area of scouting is another damning indictment of this board.
They are forever telling us that we can no longer compete with the big boys when it comes to signing the finished article … and so it incumbent upon us to find the talents of the future. And without scouting we’re reduced to the same strategy as the Ibrox club … throwing darts at a board.
Our scouting has been abysmal, and that’s if we’re being generous.
If there’s one area in which the cash we have sitting in the bank would come in handy it’s here … but that will necessitate a year-in-year commitment and a major overhaul of the way our club does things. It is long overdue and the best money we could ever spend.
But is the will there to do it? Is the vision there to do it?
“In June we tried to sign Turnbull for £3.5 million, who was a midfielder. Since that deal collapsed, we have made no real effort to get anyone else in that position and do not seem about to do so. Why is this? Are we no longer weak in this area?”
Brilliant question.
I guess it’s possible that we’ve decided to “make do” until January, until we see how Turnbull’s recovery is coming along, prior to making our move again.
But that’s highly risky, as I’m sure doesn’t need pointing out … what if he’s back in their team and doing well and there are clubs from England sniffing around him?
I can’t shake the feeling that his purchase was going to pave the way for somebody else’s departure … and that this is the reason we’re not actively looking for a guy in the same mould.
Tom Rogic is the name that comes automatically to mind.
I guess we’ll know the answer – or at least we’ll be able to surmise it – if this window closes with that hole unfilled.
“Where is the long-term planning for replacing Scott Brown?”
Another excellent question, and one that we were on the brink of answering when we targeted John McGinn.
We all know what happened there … although what happened there is often misunderstood.
It is incredible, though, that a year on we still seem no closer to answering this question, and it’s a beauty of a question.
Lennon said he wants to “build his team” around Brown … that is worrying on so many levels, and it makes you wonder whether this question will be answered whilst he’s in the manager’s office. I guess the board will be happy … it will stop them having to make a decision on it.
The questions are by Sean MacMillan, with comments by James Forrest
Sean is a Celtic fan and member of the CelticBlog Facebook group.
