Celtic’s Barrowfield Plans Are A Consequence Of Our Tendency To Think Short Term.

The news that Celtic has been given permission to proceed with its plan to redevelop the Barrowfield training ground is welcome, it’s overdue and it will bring great benefits to the club.

But that we are doing it, finally, is another symptom of the short-termism and lack of strategic vision at Celtic Park, and the dire need for real reforms at the top of our house.

The Barrowfield redevelopment is necessary because our club took a short-term approach the last time it upgraded Lennoxtown.

It is ridiculous that our primary training facility does not have an indoor full-size pitch, for example; for the sake of saving money the club decided it needed only install a three quarter size one up there.

Now we’re installing it at Barrowfield instead.

That, of course, has now cost us more than it would have just do it right in the first place and it’s worse because doing it this way now incurs long-term costs.

Because, of course, instead of paying for one major facility we’re now running two.

This Celtic board, run from Dublin by a guy who thinks of us once in a blue moon, can tell itself all it likes that it is forward thinking and progressive, but time and again we end up doing stuff like this, and it has real world consequences.

It comes from the same sort of thinking that dropped us into the chaos of the summer; leaving things undone for so long that the problems mount up and then all have to be dealt with at once.

I am glad that we’ve finally upgraded our facilities, although I cannot think of many clubs out there which now have two dedicated training grounds when it would have made more sense to simply have one world class location for everything.

We really need to do things better than this though, and start to act like an organisation with an over-arching strategy instead of one which makes it up as it goes along.