Celtic Fans Shocked By Board As Hierarchy Snubs Gerrard – An Exclusive By Keith Jackass.
Tonight this writer can exclusively reveal that Celtic is bracing itself for a long-term, sustained revolt by its season ticket holders as news broke that they have settled on Eddie Howe as manager instead of moving for the best young boss in the whole of the game, Steven Gerrard, who currently works across the city at Ibrox.
A prominent Celtic source, who we’ll just call Kris, told us tonight that he is shocked that the club hasn’t gone for Gerrard, who he rates highly.
“Surely,” Kris said, “the club could have shown the proper level of ambition and made an offer to both Ibrox and Stevie G to release him from his contract. He is just the man they need and I have no doubts that the fans would have been well up for this, but they clearly lack the ambition to go out and do business at that kind of level.”
Celtic’s entire season has a been a disaster, and they now find themselves in disarray.
Such is their current lack of strategic vision that they haven’t even tapped into the hugely successful business model of using director’s loans converted to shares to pay the bills, choosing to run things the old fashioned way, by paying them through the use of actual income.
Our resident football finance expert was scornful of Celtic’s approach to doing business.
“How can you build success over a sustained period by spending only what you earn?”
He was equally dismissive of Celtic’s approach to finding a new man at the helm;
“What do they want a guy with a track record for when they could have gone out and hired someone who would have brought that ‘wow’ factor to the dugout instead? Someone like Keane, or maybe Keanu Reaves, or perhaps even Beyoncé, someone who’s profile would have risen theirs a notch or two? It just seems clear that these people have no real idea how football finance works.”
It is the news, tonight, that they have decided to snub Gerrard that will shock fans most, and send their supporters into the kind of orgy of destruction you usually only see in George Square after “Chelsea fans” hold a title celebration.
We spoke to a panicked Celtic insider this evening, a man who would only allow us to refer to him as Pete, who tried to defend the move before we twisted his words to make it sound like he agreed with us.
“I think this is a terrible decision,” he is alleged to have said. “We will regret it, but not half as much as we regretted the last one.”
When he finally did agree to go on the record he would only say that “Look, you’re interrupting my packing. God, I hope when I no longer work in this building you and the rest of these muppets will delete my number and leave me alone.”
Ibrox sources I tried to speak to were unavailable for comment, except one who asked “When are you writing the piece about how the SFA is run by a fenian cabal from Dublin, with connections to the Illuminati? They’re all Catholics, you know.”