The people running our club really do treat us like absolute mugs, don’t they? Today, Celtic has published its interim accounts with a lengthy statement from The Leech, in his role as chairman. It is exactly as you would expect. Loaded down with numbers and with self-justifications and excuses for failure. Some of it is so brazen it makes your jaw drop.
One particularly amusing segment reads thus; “The Board recognises the inherent inefficiencies of holding excess cash, and, in conjunction with other cash commitments, the importance of investing in strengthening the team to deliver football success.”
In short, we’re pretty ashamed to have all this money sitting in the bank. Don’t worry, we don’t intend to hang onto it all. Which makes me wonder why in God’s name they ever accumulated it in the first damned place. This guy … you have to give him credit. Suddenly the cash surplus is a negative, and the club never intended it get so high?
There’s plenty of jam tomorrow in there. Stadium upgrades are touted.
More disco lights would be my response to that, because disco lights are just what we need after all. Forget that unless the product on the park is up to snuff nobody is going to care that the kiosks are no longer serving juice out of plastic bottles or that the wi-fi is marginally better.
There’s no explanation for why the summer transfer window was such a calamitous shit-show; all we get on that front is “look how much money we spent.”
That none of it strengthened the team is glossed over as if that wasn’t important.
That none of it served the needs of the manager apparently doesn’t matter a damn. Just be grateful we spent it, that seems to be the message, along with the usual subliminal hint that he’s offended because we’re not.
His January transfer window segment is priceless.
“The Board shares the frustrations of the supporters regarding the less than anticipated activity in the recent transfer window,” he writes, and for a second, I thought he was mounting some sort of case against the manager. But he had his excuse to hand.
“The Board’s commitment is to strengthen and improve the playing squad in every transfer window and although resources were available, we were unable to further add to the squad due to the unavailability of identified targets. This was disappointing to us all, and never the intention. The January transfer window is notoriously difficult as clubs are very reluctant to let their best players go at such a crucial time of the season just as we are. Indeed, we resisted strong interest in our players from other clubs.”
So yeah, exactly the tiresome rubbish I expected from this joker.
“We didn’t sell anyone and we tried our best.”
There is no indication that he realises failure means what it says on the tin, that there was an obvious problem in that we left so many areas of the team untouched until the “difficult” January window in the first place or that as per usual we left it to the very end of the month, when teams were absolutely not going to sell us players … these people have pulled this same stroke so many times now that I can’t be bothered with it any longer.
I’m not interested in hearing this claptrap that the board shares our ambitions. They absolutely don’t, and this has been demonstrated to us over and over again.
That entire statement is an insult to our collective intelligence, and it comes at a time when the anger against he and the rest of the charlatans who sit in that stand and continually take the piss has never been higher.
And none of it changes a damned thing.
You’ll notice that I haven’t bothered to quote the actual figures, right? Because I couldn’t care less and nobody else I know could care less. The only results that matter are the ones on the park, and they are dire, and we’re second in the league.
As I’ve written extensively, I consider the Leech himself to be a divisive figure who shouldn’t be in the vicinity of Celtic Park in an executive role. He brings nothing to the table whatsoever any longer. There’s not an iota of forward thinking in that statement, for all the talk of spending money on infrastructure.
If the women’s team is underfunded who cares what kind of dressing room they have? If the B team is playing on muddy fields against public park players, you can do what you like to Lennoxtown and Barrowfield and we’ll continue going backwards. So what that the first team squad is getting some shiny new facilities and Lawwell Jnr is getting some shiny new toys to play with?
Scattergun transfer policies and the accumulating of “project players” whilst the starting eleven progressively weakens means that none of it is worth a damn.
His son running recruitment is a grotesquerie which no serious organisation would ever have allowed and the failures of the summer and January belong to them both and if the manager swings at the end of the season their heads must be on spikes next to his, or this club and this fan-base are on a collision course of epic proportions.
Brilliant post, Bob