This Celtic Board Has Never Known Real, Sustained Pressure. They Are About To.

Yesterday, the Celtic fans were singing a new song, and giving a lusty rendition of an old one. And it dawns on me; this is new territory for these people.

There is a perception of the Celtic board as one that is essentially deaf to all criticism, but they’ve never really had any, in a sustained way, except during the COVID campaign and there were no fans in the ground.

That yesterday was ugly. And it’s going to get uglier.

We can all see with our own eyes how bad this situation is and we can all weigh up the evidence and conclude that it’s the fault of certain people.

We are not daft after all, and I said earlier, the evidence is out in the park in a Celtic team starting Mikey Johnston and David Turnbull, a team that is obviously weaker than last season’s although ten new players came in through the door in the summer.

That’s somebody’s fault. That a massive failure.

The signing record since Mark Lawwell was brought in is dreadful and impossible to defend. We have squandered tens of million of pounds on the mad strategy of letting people run a transfer policy which is not constructed around the needs of the manager.

It is lunacy. The manager’s response to it – which is to make it clear that they can sign who they want but he doesn’t have to play them – is not hard to understand. He sees these guys every day. He already knows some of them aren’t going to cut it.

When you examine the Before And After picture of our transfer success rate – when it was being done with the needs of the manager very specifically in mind, as it was under Ange in that first window compared to the signings made after Lawwell got the job – the picture is as obvious as the one painted by the Ibrox penalty stats. Everything changed the minute he and Daddy took that responsibility for themselves.

And not for the better.

Almost every one of Ange’s early signings went right into the team.

It’s an incredible success rate.

Since Mark Lawwell took over we’ve signed 19 players … with a pitiful success rate.

The truth is that the Lawwell Jnr appointment was a disgusting piece of nepotism which no organisation with accountability and standards as its watchwords would ever have sanctioned or allowed, and with his failure rate now the topic of fevered discussion on every fan forum and site, and with the mainstream more than happy to go through it with a fine toothed comb it is as clear as the nose on your face that he should never have been hired and in an open process he never would have been in a hundred years.

One member of our coaching staff was hired from English football’s lower league basement. On what meritorious basis was he brought in? His father used to be the manager here.

Said father was also given a “consultancy” role for reasons passing understanding. Two of his other kids also work at Celtic, one in scouting. The brightest and the best? Not even close to it, hired because their dad pitched it to his pals on the board and they found soft seats for them.

You’ll have noticed that our B team is an utter mess this season.

Who is being held to account for that? We have an ex-Celtic player managing them, and whilst we’re on that subject … how long is it going to take for the penny to drop that not one of our youth players is going to develop to the first team level playing public park football in the Lowland League?

That renders the whole Lennoxtown and Barrowfield projects nothing but a suck on cash to no benefit whatsoever. A decent strategic review at Celtic would leave the people running our club without a name. Our “leadership” is made up of old white men who haven’t shared an original thought between them for over ten years.

Our CEO was an internal appointment. To Hell with a detailed search to bring in the right candidate with the right qualities, they looked after their own. The decision for Lawwell to return as chairman is contemptible and disgusting and he has no shame whatsoever. Any shred of his credibility went by the boards with The Shower Scene From Hampden.

And now, finally, the fans have had enough. They see these guys and they see how our club is being run by them and it’s painfully obvious that we’ve gone backwards.

Two years ago we appointed a manager and backed him lavishly and reaped the rewards. All they had to do was keep it up, was to keep progressing down that road, and instead Lawwell Snr was back, this time as chairman, and his son took a critical position and it upended everything.

This is not difficult for even the dumbest student of football to work out. You look at the time-line and it’s as clear as the nose on your face is. We’ve twice hired the same manager twice, in the space of a decade. In Lennon’s case, the first time, we gave a complete novice the reigns at an organisation with an annual budget in the high eight figures.

We didn’t even attempt to find the best possible candidate when Rodgers left, we gave Lennon the job again. We hired a guy who was initially being brought in to be his assistant.

And with Ange, we took a desperate last-minute punt after being led by the nose by Eddie Howe for months … and got as lucky with that as a guy finding a winning lottery ticket.

But don’t ever let these people kid you that we knew what we were getting there and that this was some kind of stroke of genius cause it wasn’t.

He was just the most palatable name they had in the City Group contact book, and that’s all it was. They got away with that, because they did one thing right; they doubled down and let that guy run the show.

Then Lawwell Jnr came in and everything changed.

The quality of the signings nosedived. Ange barely played some of them, although the club went to great lengths to convince you that he had signed off on that appointment and all the people we bought … the list is available in various places to look at and examine, and it’s horrendous.

I’m putting a video at the bottom of the article which will outline every single one of them. Watch it and let the horror wash over you, and count the cost of those players and then tell me that this is what a well-run, well-oiled machine looks like.

And so when Celtic fans sang the Lawwell Song yesterday it was the first time I’ve heard it at Celtic Park being so loudly sung, and it’s the sign that the tide has turned here against these people big time.

None of us is stupid. We know what we’re seeing … and it’s shocking. For the first time ever, this club’s leadership is under serious pressure from the stands.

And if things continue to unravel, they had better get used to it.

Mark Lawwell’s Celtic Signings – YouTube