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Celtic’s Board And The Case Against Dominic McKay.

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I think it’s readily apparent that something has gone majorly wrong at Celtic Park when we’re replacing the CEO after 72 days in the job.

I think heads should roll for that, even if the leaks to board-friendly media are broadly in line with the truth.

Their version of events is that Dominic McKay was just not getting the job done.

Now, I personally wonder how the board which left Lawwell in his role for 17 years and which didn’t see that Lennon was leading us to disaster until February could have arrived at that conclusion so soon, and I think that there has to be more to it than that.

But let’s for the sake of this article give the board that which they haven’t earned; the benefit of the doubt.

Let’s imagine that the version that’s been leaked to mainstream titles and a handful of friendly bloggers is broadly accurate and reflects feelings inside the club.

Is there anything in the public domain which supports that point of view?

And you know something?

When you look for it – when you actually start from the premise that these stories are true and look for circumstantial evidence to back that up – there’s actually quite a bit which does.

I had not realised how much until I looked at it.

What I’m going to do in this article is examine the stuff that’s out there and that we can actually measure.

I’m not saying I believe this hypothesis, I’m simply presenting it in full to you, and I might not even go that far because I am sure there are elements to this which I have missed and therefore haven’t included in the article.

This is the case in favour of the Celtic board’s version of events.

You might be surprised how strong it is, albiet in a circumstantial way.

Out With The Old Plan …. But Not In With The New One?

One of things that looms largest when you look for proof that Dominic McKay was overmatched in the Celtic job is that we’re now in September and some of the changes that were supposed to be more or less coming since January still haven’t gone through.

We still have no head of scouting. No club doctor. No director of football.

The latter is the most maddening, and puzzling, because we spent real money on a major consultation process and we actually interviewed three outstanding candidates.

Yet the position remains empty.

The job is unfilled.

We no longer even know if hiring a director of football is part of the club’s long term plan, if such exists.

It is a pretty safe bet that the delays in this area are down to Dominic McKay.

Everything was proceeding apace nicely up until his appointment. Whatever plan existed was obviously chucked in the bin the moment he assumed the full responsibilities of his post. But what’s less clear is that he had a plan to replace the one he junked.

There is probably not a company in the world whose directors would have watched the CEO make such a radical series of handbrake turns on major issues of policy without feeling squeamish.

Almost all would have been willing to accept on one condition; that the key decisions about how to proceed were made quickly and that signs of life were obvious to all.

Three months isn’t a long time to put a new plan together, but you have to then wonder if it was entirely rational and sensible to throw the entirety of the old way aside just days into the job without having at least the outline of a fresh strategy.

There is an element, when you look at it, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that, perhaps, was the first moment when the board began to have doubts.

McKay was obviously going to make these key decisions at some point … but if the board got fed up waiting and began to doubt that he ever would, you could understand why they called time on it.

And this isn’t the only area where they might have had cause for concern.

A “Risky” Level Of Engagement With The Fans

At times like these, it helps to think like the people you are analysing.

I believe that there are members of the Celtic board who would have found the decision to let fan media interview the CEO and the manager in a separate forum from the mainstream press to be quite dangerous.

If they wanted vindication as to how potentially risky that level of engagement is they don’t have to look any further than the club across the city.

Now, it goes without saying that this would be short-sighted and downright stupid. I would personally find such a comparison grossly offensive.

In spite of Sevco social media’s witch-hunt of the past few weeks, much of it directed at us, they found only a handful of tweets which could be considered naughty, and nothing on the level of bile which flowed from their own fan reps.

The Celtic fan media is almost wholly responsible and level headed.

But our directors have a long history of demonising our own fans.

Our chairman disgracefully called a section of the fan-base anti-Semites.

Lawwell was forever decrying Republicanism.

Our largest shareholder was instrumental in the press calling us “entitled.”

Our former manager is on the record as having condemned knee jerk reactions and believing the Parkhead demonstrations to have been the act of thugs.

Our board put up steel fences around the ground.

It is perfectly, and painfully, obvious that there are people at Celtic Park who didn’t need the media to criticise this move before they started to worry that it was a mistake; some of them would have believed it was a reckless, even dangerous, stratagem to start with.

The events involving the fan media across the city would only have enhanced their view that the whole idea was barmy to begin with and proves that McKay was hopelessly out of his depth in the job.

The one thing we found most agreeable about the guy is probably one of the things that led the directors to conclude he wasn’t right for the position.

Not Understanding The “Complex” Transfer System.

In 2003, the famed and feared writer Tom Bower published one of his most searing critiques. Entitled Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football it is a withering, even devastating, indictment of how the game works behind the scenes.

It was an expose of crooked agents, backroom dealing, corruption in the sport, its tolerance for malfeasance and the way a sordid cast of characters are lent credibility and even acclaimed within the game even in light of well publicised scandals.

Bower’s book remains powerful today because since it was published it’s been made clear just how little things have actually changed.

Ten years after it was published, with much of the book lamenting Terry Venables ascent to the England job in the face of numerous allegations of impropriety, the FA came within an ace of offering the same job to Harry Redknapp shortly after he’d been cleared in a high court corruption case.

Although many of the practices which were then just “frowned upon” and which were discussed in the book are now against football regulations, there remains a lot of grey area out there which some people simply don’t understand.

Coming from rugby into football, Dominic McKay would have been largely clueless about them. Many of them are to do with the way players are transferred between clubs.

There is one piece of evidence which suggests that at least one deal for a player collapsed because McKay was unable to reconcile himself to football’s way of working; it involved Celtic’s efforts to sign the Rennes right-back Sacho Boey.

That deal appeared to be done until the player walked away from the negotiations blaming what he called “foreign intermediaries” for collapsing the deal.

But what does that actually mean?

Well, it could mean a lot of things, and some of them might, on the surface of it, seem outrageous to the layperson. But if you’ve read Bower’s book you might recognise the scenario. There are a lot of ways in which unscrupulous individuals can get involved in a transfer deal and demand a cut of the money. This happens more often than you might be aware, and the reason most people don’t know it is that it’s not uncustomary for one or both of the clubs involved in the deal to pay these people a stipend or percentage just to move the process along.

Think about it like this; a deal is just about done and then someone appears on the scene to claim that they own certain image rights or once represented the player or that they had a signed contract which claims that they do; how do you handle that?

Challenge it in court? That could take forever, and in the meantime you don’t get the player, the player doesn’t get to move, the selling clubs gets no transfer fee … who has time to wade through a legal minefield when it’s much easier to add or subtract £60,000 from the transfer fee and get that person and their claims out of the road.

Understand, there’s nothing illegal about this and if it’s done in the “right” way it’s not even against football regulations. It’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s an unpleasant, but accepted, part of the game and we’re kidding ourselves if we think it doesn’t happen.

But imagine you’re Dominic McKay with no idea how this stuff works. Imagine this guy or this agency pops up in the closing stages of a deal and makes a cash demand. Would you know to pay it? Would you understand the lay of the land? Or would you hold off?

Sacho Boey thought the deal was done, and then all of a sudden he was aware of the existence of these “foreign intermediaries” and their demands. Under normal circumstances the player would neither know nor care about these people, because the clubs, between them, would work on that side of it and get it all taken care of.

But perhaps – and this of course is purely speculation – McKay either didn’t want to do that or didn’t know how that part of the system works.

That’s how deals run into delays and eventually don’t get done, and in this case the player wasn’t willing to wait for these issues to be resolved.

Which Leads To Frustration … Especially If He Won’t Ask For Help.

When Ange publicly expressed his frustration at the glacial pace of transfer negotiations, we may have been guilty of confirmation bias.

We have seen this stuff play out so many times in the past that it seemed to be an example of Celtic doing what Celtic does; dragging its feet and making things harder than they had to be. But maybe this time we were completely wrong.

Maybe, because McKay was a babe in the woods about this stuff, Ange’s grievance was not against the club but against the CEO in particular for not moving fast enough for him and more importantly, for not asking anyone with the requisite experience for help.

It is a danger common to men in high office that they try to micromanage and that they don’t want to lean either on those around them or, especially, those who came before them.

We all wanted a guy independent of Lawwell and that era … but maybe things are more complicated than that, and maybe when Lawwell offered to be on the other end of the phone McKay would have been wise to pick it up every once in a while.

Alyson Connell of The Evening Times claims that this was another area where the board had doubts about McKay and his ability to do the job; he didn’t know when to ask for guidance.

Things are hard enough for anyone in a new job, but Celtic had put itself under immense pressure to do a difficult job quickly, and it may be that the board were frustrated that McKay wasn’t doing himself, or the club, any favours in being obstinate and wanting to go it alone.

They may have been prepared, at that point, to let him stand or fall by his own decisions … but when the manager sat in front of the media and took his frustrations public that would certainly have changed their level of tolerance.

Dermot Desmond Stepped In … And Made That Fact Public.

We can kid ourselves as we like that there weren’t visible signs that people in the club were becoming frustrated with whatever was going on behind the scenes, but in point of fact there were two instances where their dissatisfaction was made clear, and was conveyed to people in a public manner, albiet in a way that wasn’t automatically obvious at the time.

Sometimes you do need context to understand something, and as most of us thought McKay was working hard in the background and getting stuff done we didn’t immediately recognise the Dermot Desmond transfer intervention for what it now seems to have been.

I know that I personally saw it as both unwelcome and egotistical; in hindsight, it looks a lot different.

It looks like it could have been born of necessity, and making it public was a warning shot fired at the CEO as a kind of last warning to get his act together.

At the time these reports came out I think all of us were pretty appalled that Desmond was getting involved in an area of the club where he should not have been.

But if the guy was supposed to be there doing that job wasn’t getting it done, then what choice did Desmond have?

To let the manager and the team go short in critical areas with the clock ticking?

Again, I’m not saying this is what happened but it’s another thing, it’s another piece of circumstantial evidence – and quite a big one – that all wasn’t well behind the scenes and that certain people, and important people at that, were starting to get concerned.

Could it be that Desmond was actually doing the right thing here, and taking over in a crucial area where Dominic McKay was asleep at the wheel?

The Gordon Strachan Intervention

Why did we hire Gordon Strachan?

This one haunts this debate, because on the one hand you could say that it might have been the final straw for a CEO who had his own ideas and his own plans well in hand, and who saw this appointment as undermining.

On the other hand, it’s not difficult to envision a scenario where Dominic McKay’s failure to articulate a proper plan for key areas of the club made it necessary for Celtic to bring someone in who the board knew and trusted and to ask him to undertake an initial review.

This was the second public indication of dissatisfaction with Dominic’s overall performance.

I cannot believe that there is any real support for the idea of Gordon Strachan as a long-term answer to our issues on this board.

They cannot be so chained to outdated modes of thinking that there is a majority view that he is the solution to these problems.

But then, the appointment was weird in part because it was temporary.

Whatever Strachan is doing or has been doing is seen as a starting point, not the finish line, and this really was something that Dominic McKay should have been undertaking on his own.

If McKay wasn’t making progress, then Celtic couldn’t afford to wait.

Bringing in Strachan to make a preliminary assessment suddenly makes more sense when you look at in the broader context of what we’ve heard and everything else in this article.

I still don’t believe Strachan should be anywhere near Celtic Park and it’s not unreasonable to worry that in order to move things along someone might decide that the “temporary” nature of this arrangement might not end up so temporary after all … but if you were looking to give it the benefit of the doubt there’s certainly a case you could make that we did what we had to do.

The Manager’s Parting Shot

Perhaps the most interesting, and insightful, piece of circumstantial evidence that Dominic McKay wasn’t as impressive inside Celtic as he looked to those of us on the outside of the club is the parting shot the manager took at him at the weekend.

Ange is a decent man, a man of the utmost probity and good character. We all know that.

There is no way that he would go along with a public hatchet job.

When he corrected the on-the-record assertion McKay had made about being the guy who brought him to the club I was genuinely surprised.

That’s when I knew I would do this article, although I was already mentally working away on the outline of it.

Ange is basically saying that Dominic McKay wilfully misled us as to the extent of his involvement there.

I said at the time it was brave of McKay to take that stand, and to publicly put his name to the decision because it was a risky decision and could have blown up in his face.

But there’s a reason I harboured at least some doubt over his version of events.

As I pointed out on the Endless Celts podcast after the fan press event, McKay’s assertion that he knew Ange well from time spent in Japan never properly aligned with the time-frame in question.

McKay had spent some of his career over there, but not at the point where Ange was working in Japanese football.

You don’t have to dig too deep to see that.

So whilst I’m sure he would have been dimly aware of the guy, I had some difficulty believing that he was the first name who came to McKay’s mind.

And if we’re suddenly questioning McKay’s involvement in bringing Ange to Celtic, then should we be wondering what role he played in the Howe fiasco?

Because although he wasn’t officially in the role, he would have wanted some input into that process.

Most importantly, if you believe that the transfer window was salvaged by other people and that Strachan is being brought in to tidy up another area where things weren’t getting done, what exactly is Dominic McKay’s big achievement at the club?

The appointment of Ange himself, of course …

Which the manager has flatly contradicted and not for malicious reasons but just because he wants to alleviate any concerns we might have that this decision has damaged his relationship with people at the club and that he might be ready to follow his padrone out the door.

A Case For The Celtic Board Having Made The Right Call? 

I believe that in order to do this job right that I have to continually challenge my own perceptions and my own prejudices.

It is easy for me to paint a picture of utter dysfunction at Celtic Park because when I look at the club sometimes that’s what I see.

But this job forces me, constantly, to check myself.

I re-evaluated my positon on the manager in light of his start in the job and his obvious talents.

Is it time that we gave the board the benefit of the doubt, and asked if they’ve maybe done the right thing here and for the right reasons this time?

Maybe they’ve learned something from Lawwell’s decade or so too many in the job, and from the decision to retain Lennon when it was obviously going wrong.

That’s not impossible.

Indeed, it’s what you would hope for and even expect.

If McKay was clearly failing and it was obviously not going to work the board really didn’t have much choice and in moving fast they’ve limited the damage to the club.

I don’t believe that to be a completely outrageous scenario, and in looking for “proof” of it I found more than I expected to find.

It’s incumbent upon me to give an honest account, which is what I’ve tried to do here.

But if we’re going to take the club’s version of events literally, it still doesn’t leave them looking great.

I still think three months is way too soon to make a proper judgement on a guy who had such a complex and demanding job in front of him; there must have been ways to work this stuff out without resorting to the drastic measure of bringing his role to an end.

The club has not hidden the fact that whatever plan was presented to them wasn’t to their tastes, and that McKay’s planned modernisations might have been too radical, or rich, for their blood.

There was clearly some undermining that went on and clearly some major disagreements about the direction he was headed in or was planning to take the club.

And that shouldn’t happen.

All these people should have been willing to do what was in the best interests of Celtic and not allow personality clashes and other issues to get in the way of that.

I remain unconvinced that losing a CEO after 72 days is anything short of a colossal screw up for which somebody else should be held to account, and not just one person but a few.

Yet if you’re looking at this as a whole, and you see the lines that connect it all together, it’s pretty plain that it wasn’t just one thing that went wrong here.

McKay clearly didn’t fit into Celtic’s odd and incestuous culture, risk averse and short-term in its outlook.

The question then becomes about how he ever got the gig in the first place, with so many obvious variances between his vision and that of the directors, and that’s a question that does need to be answered by someone at Celtic Park before we can have confidence in the next steps.

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  • John says:

    James, as I have said in a previous article on this subject it is dangerous to assume that the problem is all on one side.These situations are rarely black and white. Sure the board made some catastrophic decisions last season. Dubai and not removing Lennon after Champions League fiasco but we have now moved on with an absolute first class manager in Ange.I would urge all the malcontents who have Peter Lawell and the board living in their heads to get behind Ange and the team. I am old enough to have lived through the pre Lisbon Lions days of the early sixties and Lou Macari days of the ninetiesBeleive me this is nothing in comparison.10 in a row is gone now so we need to get over it and move. HH

  • Jim says:

    The Board cannot be allowed to get away with this.
    Why are they appointing a man who has ” no idea about all this football stuff ” ??
    What kind of Due Diligence and discussion took place, for goodness sake ? The same due diligence as when Lennon was appointed, and all other C.V’s from around the world weren’t even looked at ???
    For such a vitally important Appointment to fail after 72 days, the blame lies squarely with those who chose him and the process they undertook to do so.

  • John says:

    Wonder if the people who lambasted the board for leaving Lennon in his post way too long are the same people lambasting the board for removing McKay quickly if, indeed it is true that he wasn’t up to the job? Just a thought. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. HH

  • The Great God Pan says:

    I don’t believe this at all.
    I believe that Dominic McKay was trying to involve the fans more and this would be a frightening prospect for the board members and for Dermot Desmond.
    McKay was a Celtic fan and would NOT have been clueless about matters football.
    He is certainly well respected in Rugby circles and turned Scottish Rugby around.
    Could it be that the board may have realised what a talent they had and perhaps.some began to feel threatened?
    It is just another possibility in the context of an alarmingly lack of information from the club.

  • Hamoflage says:

    So best case scenario for the board is that after the shit show of last season they managed to appoint a CEO who was so catastrophically bad that he had to go after 2 months. Lawwell was crap and got 17 years, Lennon was disastrous and got appointed twice, doesn’t stack up for me unless McKay shat in Dermot’s pocket and then tried to burn the stadium down.

  • Thomas M. Daley says:

    I used to sign in with my name Thai Tommy, now when I post, message displayed “You are signed out”

  • Marcus says:

    A great article James. I had never seen the Desmond and Strachan interventions for what they were, or at least seem to be now in hindsight. Lots of interesting points made, thanks.

  • Iljas Baker says:

    Thanks for the analysis James and for challenging yourself and us – that’s the reason why this is the best blog around. Your points were well put and have made me more open to reconsidering my previous position. It all sounds reasonable and plausible and doesn’t entirely let the board off the hook. Time will tell no doubt.

  • Peter cassidy says:

    This celtic board and Desmond i would not belive a word they say as for mckay not up to the job give us a break new manager in new players in surplus money in the kitty after selling and buying progressing total bull$hit from the board football business not the hardest business to run when you have massive fan support like celtic maybe mackay to clever for some.

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