The Appointment Of Mark Lawwell Is A Ghastly Indictment Of Celtic’s Decision Making.

Peter Lawwell’s son has been appointed the Head of First Team Scouting and Recruitment.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Of all the possible candidates out there, the best one we could find just happened to be the son of the non-executive director and former CEO. We have an outstanding man in the dugout.

Everything else at Celtic is third tier.

Where is the process? Where is the system?

When do the shareholders get real and start asking hard questions about how this board does its business?

Is it a coincidence that this news came out today, with the title virtually assured? No, the board relies on us not rocking the boat. They continue to take decisions in this appalling way and we’re meant to play nice.

We now have a head of recruitment and a CEO who are both right out of the old boy’s network.

In case it is not painfully obvious, when things are run like this, with the decision making run by a select few at the top with no outside scrutiny and based on nepotism and a thinning contacts book it is a recipe for disaster.

I will write more on that later.

Is this the best possible candidate?

We’ll never know because we have no idea what the criteria we decided to appoint him on was. But he was no more the choice that a proper, independent search would have turned up than Michael Nicholson was as CEO.

This appointment is a joke, and regardless of the nice words from the manager.

It is something we should all have grave misgivings about.

It is the kind of appointment this board is becoming notorious for.

Serious organisations do not run like this.

Lawwell remains on the periphery and it is hard not to conclude that he still pulls strings. Now his son is in a senior role, in the way that Gordon Strachan, being consulted on God knows what, has two of his sons inside the club.

Our largest shareholder wants to pass his “responsibilities” on the same way.

We have new Kelly’s and Whites in charge here, everything but the names.

Our leadership is a joke.

The people running this club are an abomination.

Their strategies are praised because we didn’t go bankrupt; a minimally talented board could have achieved that simply by not spending more than we earn. Small businesses all over the world manage that as the bare minimum every day.

But there is no vision. There is no long-term over-arching goal.

The past eight months have been characterised by Ange’s nearly perfect selection of players; when there was nobody else involved in the process he got almost every single decision right.

I cannot be alone in worrying that this summer will not be so successful.

Now we know what was behind Desmond’s interview, in which he went out of his way to point out that the club allows the manager total control.

It’s an opening salvo against those who will express concern at this insular appointment, a step back to the nonsense that caused the crisis of the summer.

If the shareholders organisation does not ask hard questions here we have learned nothing.