Ex-Celtic Boss Reveals That The Dreadful Transfer “Strategy” Impacts On Every Department.

It will probably not come as a great surprise to most Celtic fans that Fran Alonso has expressed his frustration at the transfer strategy within the club in relation to the women’s team. His comments, which appeared tonight on one of the other Celtic sites, are emblematic of the way our club does things, and echo into the first team squad as we know.

“The problem for me,” he said, “was how ineffective we were about retaining the quality players we produced. I was there four years, and we lost our top goal scorer every year while (the Ibrox side) or Glasgow City would not lose theirs.”

A week or so ago, I did a piece in which I mentioned the women’s team and the redevelopment of the Barrowfield complex. I said that it was a vanity project at a time when the B team is characterised by its mediocre results and the Sunday League environment in which it plays its games, but I was especially critical of what has happened to our ladies side.

They were one of the highlights of last season, and it was obvious from the start of this one that some of the spark had gone out of both the team and the man at the helm. This is precisely what happens when a boss is told, consistently, that he has to do more with less. It is what happens when the team he’s managing is weakened in every consecutive campaign.

Celtic is a club with a short-term, small side mentality. Even having one hand on the league trophy last season was not enough for the people who run us to reward Fran Alonso with the funding he needed to take that next step. Women don’t early nearly the salaries men do in this game; we could build a showpiece women’s side if we got serious about their team. We’re content, it seems to me, to be also-rans in our own back yard instead.

And this is the self-defeating ethos which permeates this whole club and that starts from the top down. It’s as if the people running Celtic have lost sight of what the purpose of a football team is; to win things. Football clubs are dream factories. Our board puts numbers on a piece of paper in front of giving fans something to dream about, and as everyone knows this isn’t about spending more than you earn, it’s about showing the requisite level of ambition to demonstrate your seriousness to the world … and if you do that the financial rewards will come.

If we thought about this correctly, if we had taken the women’s team seriously, we’d have our first title by now. We’d have sent out a signal to the big clubs in England that we’re looking to Europe and the possibility of marching on there. We have no interest in that. The idea of going for the big fish and trying to attract that additional sponsorship is an alien concept.

Fran Alonso wanted to try his hand at being a men’s coach. He would have left at some point. But when I heard, over the summer, that we were cutting back on his budget I knew he wasn’t long for staying. We may not have forced him out, but we gave him no reason to stay.