Peter Lawwell: Celtic, Success And The God Delusion

Yesterday, I said that I could not remember a more disjointed Celtic in over a decade. We’ve had bad spells, we’ve had bad teams and we’ve had bad managers, but it’s rare to see a club where the incoherence and lack of joined up thinking is so profound.

The last time we were so all over the place was back in the fading years of Rangers, when they won the last three titles before the campaign where they spiralled down into administration.

Had they not, I think there’s a fair chance that they’d have won that one as well.

I say that, in part, because Neil Lennon was in his early tenure as manager, and it is worth remembering that we had hired him as a complete novice.

He had never before managed as much as a single football match and there he was in our dugout, leading our team. It was a shocking decision to make him the manager after his brief stint in temporary charge. That is one of the laziest and most backward decisions this club has ever made.

Having failed to win the league in his first full campaign, I was amazed that he was allowed to keep his job and in that second campaign he was within 45 minutes of a certain sacking at Kilmarnock only for the fans to urge the team to a 3-3 draw. He should have gone that night, but instead he stayed at the club and two dangerous myths sprung up in the aftermath of his title win; one, that Lennon had proved himself a good manager and the second was that Lawwell had proved himself the genius whose prudent strategy had outlasted Rangers.

Lennon built his rep in the two years that followed with no serious competition to challenge him. It’s not a coincidence that he flopped the second time around when there was a semi-competent Ibrox team in the league with us. It’s no coincidence that Lawwell looks flat-footed and dumb either, because his own reputation was built in the period between Craig Whyte rocking up at Ibrox and Dave King making him look like an absolute mug.

It is those ten or so years which his fans – and there are many of them, in the mainstream press as well as in the stands of Celtic Park – cite as proof of his genius. They ignore that Dave King’s managerial pick bested his, they ignore that he had to pack up his pencils and basically walk after the Second Coming of Lennon ended in the foreseeable disaster … and it’s no coincidence that he’s back at the club himself now and we’re reeling and rocking again.

Lawwell is not the genius his allies make him out to be. His strategy – for it is his strategy we are madly following again – is fatally flawed. When it has come up against a well-financed team from across the city it has failed as often as it has succeeded. He saw fit to return last year so that he could bask in the glory and take all the credit for Ange’s successful revolution, but it was a success because Ange made sure he was the centre of all the power in the land, something Lawwell had already started the grim task of clawing back. Because in the land of the Sun God there can only be one king and Lawwell has always believed that is him.

What amazes me about this is how completely unappreciative he is of the people who have given him the spotlight to bask in; not the absentee shareholder, but the men in the dugout, who alone had to work with the paltry resources he threw like scraps from the table. Think of the balls to sit there at the last AGM and dismiss so casually those who questioned whether or not he and the other executives deserve their pay rises. It’s a legitimate question in light of this board’s hiring practices and general attitude towards governance.

I slated his performance that day as that of a low-grade comedian, cracking shit jokes and trying to impose order like some two-bob dictator. He’s not in his current role on merit but as a result of cronyism and the patronage of Dermot Desmond, who by rights shouldn’t be able to make those sorts of decisions. The best thing Lawwell ever did for Celtic was realise the gig was up when his Lennon experiment blew up in our face. He saw a chance to redeem his legacy and bask in the reflected glory of Ange even as he was snatching the credit for himself … and now that threatens to rip what’s left of his standing with our fans to shreds.

And I would welcome that in some ways, because this glorified accountant is like the Wizard Of Oz; all very impressive until you rip back the curtain and see a stumbling, bumbling man heading towards old age and still grimly hanging onto his Important Chair. I would welcome it except that it would put Ibrox back on a solid footing and cost us trophies and titles and much misery.

I don’t wish Lawwell well in this role, because that will allow him forever to believe he was The Man after all. But I can’t wish him to fail either. I can only tell it like it is.

There are those who say that Lawwell is semi-retired and only a figurehead. That we are the ones who are making Lawwell into the towering legend who rules over Celtic with the controls firmly in his grip, but of course we’ve never believed any such thing to begin with.

Whenever the media has made out that Lawwell runs the SFA and thus Scottish football, I’ve openly mocked that suggestion … because Lawwell only runs Celtic because the man in Ireland wants it that way. He personally could put a stop to all this nonsense tomorrow.

Lawwell is, and has always been, just the puppet dancing on the strings held by hands across the Irish Sea, and although I do believe he was allowed, and is still allowed, too much autonomy I do believe that if Desmond yanked on his leash he’d get into line pronto.

But the idea that as chairman he wields no power when his former number two is the CEO and his son is running recruitment is so funny as to be hysterical. With the absentee shareholder across the water, with what doesn’t even amount to a passing interest in the day-to-day running of things, who do you think holds the controls and makes the big calls?

Remember what I’ve said about his record of hiring managers; Tony Mowbray, Neil Lennon (2), Brendan Rodgers (2), Ronny Deila and Ange Postecoglou. How many other clubs have hired the same manager twice and then done it again? How many clubs have appointed a guy who was originally supposed to come in as the managers assistant? How many clubs have gone for a proven boss, allowed him to drag out negotiations until virtually the moment pre-season training started, and then took a wild punt on a guy coaching in Japan who was literally the last name in his son’s contact book? Do you see a strategy at play in any of that?

Lawwell’s legend was made when the competition was so weak that we swatted them aside with ease. In a straight battle with a fully funded Ibrox, with this guy at the helm of “the strategy” we will lose as many major honours as we put on the mantlepiece.

That’s how it was before when he was in charge. The gap between their club and ours is bigger than it’s ever been, but they choose to spend every penny whilst we chose to put the money in the bank rather than out on the pitch. That’s why we’re catchable. That’s why we’re not out of sight. The policy of this club is not just wrong, it is manifestly insane.

We brought in £25 million for Jota in the summer. We got £500,000 for Ajeti and another £4.3 million for Starfelt. A total equalling nearly £30 million. That’s a bonanza. We spent, by the most detailed estimate I can find, £18.73 million.

We sold out our season tickets. We had Champions League cash guaranteed. None of that money was even touched far less spent. We closed out the summer transfer window with an £11 million transfer trading surplus without signing the key footballers everyone knew we needed; a backup striker, an iron man midfielder, a goalkeeper or a left back.

Yet we signed ten players for that money. If you want to understand the scale of the failure, that’s an average spend, per player, of £1.8 million, so of course it ended up an incoherent mess.

We said we had anticipated the Asian Cup but amongst those signings were three players who were eligible to take part in it, along with the half dozen already in the squad.

This is not backing the manager. This is not showing your strength. This is not putting your wealth out on the pitch. It is the opposite of those things.

I wrote last year about how it was Fergus who built modern Celtic, how he got the stadium up, built the season ticket base and laid the foundations for Lennoxtown.

None of that was done under the current board, who until this summer had not, in all the years they have been here, constructed anything lasting. Except disco lights. We should never forget the disco lights. That was the same year we lost out on John McGinn and signed Yousef Mulumbu on a free. And Rodgers, recognising fully how far down the list his own priorities were, was never going to last long beyond that. We all know what happened.

But I was not surprised that they decided, finally, to spend money on infrastructure with part of the surplus. Nothing satisfies the craving for recognition like the Big Project You Can Put Your Name On.

Above all else, these people are really only interested in leaving a permanent mark and it must have galled them that Fergus did that whilst they did not. When they lost the chance to make ten in a row their legacy, they were always going to turn to vanity projects like this. Lawwell has forever dreamed of a statue at the stadium; I guess he’ll settle for a nameplate at Barrowfield.

And that’s why I call it a vanity project.

Because it won’t move us forward in any meaningful way whilst the B squad plays its games in the Lowland League. The women’s team had one hand on the league trophy last season, only for Fran Alonso to be told that instead of building on that he’d need to do more with less, and now Ibrox outspends us in that area just as their wage bill for the first team squad has overtaken ours.

Remind me again; which of the two clubs is the one with the financial muscle here?

So as the B team and the women’s team continue to deteriorate through lack of funding on the one hand and lack of imagination on the other, an upgrade to Barrowfield seems like a grim joke, something done just to satisfy the craving of a bunch of old white men to leave something standing with their mark on it. It’s an indulgence more than an investment.

And people wonder why we’re in a state right now. We can’t even get the pitch looking good at the moment. Even our coaching setup reeks of small-minded thinking. How many years now have we been unable to capitalise on all the set-pieces we get, whilst we continue to look vulnerable to them? Do we have a set-piece coach? If there was one out there called Strachan, I think we’d have signed him up years ago. We’ll just have to wait until there’s one called Lawwell or Desmond. Top class clubs hire top class coaching teams. We retain the services of the ex-managers son and a bunch of former players and it all screams mediocrity at you.

But this is leadership Lawwell style and I still hear people tell me what a success he’s been, what a towering figure in the history of this club. It’s a myth. It’s life in the Matrix, it’s “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

And you know what that truth is? Our “leaders” are leading us to disaster, to a scenario where your money and my money rots in the bank whilst we’re overtaken on and off the field. People keep telling me this is deliberate, that Lawwell, who I know from personal experience hates the club across the city, is wilfully sabotaging us, and I can’t convince people they are wrong because it looks that way to them and they can’t wrap their brains around it any other way.

Unfortunately, I can. He has never been a genius. He has never been a master strategist, far less the Machiavellian figure the Scottish media seems to think. He’s nothing but a jumped-up bean-counter who should have stuck to working on the commercial side of the club and trying – in vain as it turns out – to significantly increase revenues, which I can make a compelling argument he has never actually done. I refer again to the article I wrote on Fergus McCann and the “four phases of Celtic” which you can read at the link at the bottom of this one.

But before that I’m going to leave you with a quote, because one of the worst traits of narcissism is profound selfishness, and his desire to be at the centre of things running this club as he has before, convinced of his own genius, marks him down as one of the most selfish people ever to hold a position of authority at Celtic Park.

“This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism,” the quote goes. “(He) is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

That was Mary Trump, talking about her brother.

If I hadn’t told you that, you might have spent all day trying to guess who had said it, but you’d have spent no time whatsoever wondering who the quote was about, because it’s on the nose, isn’t it?

This is the author of the strategy. This is why we’re heading for trouble.

From The Archives: Four Phases Of Celtic: The Real Story Behind Lawwell’s Record Of “Success.”