The hacks are having a rare old time tonight painting Celtic as a club which took a mammoth financial hit in the last tax year; ignore everything they are about to write.
Profits plummeted but we posted one anyway, of £100,000. In the climate we were dealing with that’s not a result, it’s a minor miracle.
It is an outstanding performance from the club … actually what it reflects is the immense loyalty and commitment of our support.
The club realises this, as Lawwell’s statement makes abundantly clear.
The “best supporters in the world” tag ain’t no joke.
But this is a tribute to the way our club is run, as a business.
I may have major concerns with the strategy, but on the fiscal side of the club there are not and have never been any complaints.
These guys known how to run the shop, and there’s no question about that at all.
The marketing and commercial departments and the way they integrate with the operation as a whole are first-rate and all involved should be proud of them.
Deals like the Adidas deal … they are awesome accomplishments for a club operating in Scotland.
Next year’s figures will be horrendous, of course; nobody disputes that at all.
We will post a loss and probably a substantial one in the eight figures.
The effects of the global health crisis and a summer in which we spent well and didn’t sell a key player will be reflected in the balance sheet, but mark my words, what today’s figure demonstrate quite clearly is that our club is robust enough to sail through the storm and emerge intact.
There is no financial hanky-panky in these figures, no sleight of hand, no massaging or artificial inflating to make them look good. They reflect the Kieran Tierney sale, but also the spending in the transfer market that it paid for.
But there are no director’s loans, no borrowings from payday style lenders keenly disguised as income, no tricks of the light and no shadows on the wall.
It’s all straightforward and all above board. Like them or loathe them, we have professionals in charge here and a financial model which allows us to spend and still live within our means.
We can afford a season like this one, in which we spend more than earnings … because over any financial period (UEFA FFP looks at three years and counts as far back as five for a rolling average) the books will balance out.
We have no need at all to fear for our future either in the immediate or long term.
Whatever might be coming, we’ll weather it.
So please, ignore any outlet – and there are plenty of them already – which tries to label this as some kind of disaster.
Those numbers might not be as sterling as the season before them, where we posted a £17 million profit off an £80 million income – income here was way down on that, to a little over £70 million – but they take in the early spell after the health crisis kicked in and all the way up to the end of June.
They are not stunning, but they are robust.
You wait to see how the same hacks present the figures from another club, which will certainly not show a profit for the same period. You can gauge how disastrous they are likely to be by the fact they didn’t even release half-yearly interims … look out, too, for plenty of massaging and trickery and loans disguised otherwise.
The picture will still be horrendous.
The headline here is “Celtic Post Profit Amidst Financial Slump” but every newspaper and media outlet is talking about the revenue drop. This is the media at its absolute worst, scandalous coverage which the club certainly expects and prepares for.
There are those who mock and slag off the blogs, but it’s days like today we come into our own by offering a corrective to this atrociously biased coverage. Football clubs are being pummelled by this thing; we’ve shown today that we got comfortably through the summer without it having a major impact on the finances.
We should be getting praised to the heavens for that, and in any other media environment but this stinking pro-Ibrox one I assure you we would be.
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