Celtic’s Leaders Need To Articulate A Plan And Stop Treating The Fans With Such Contempt.

Celtic, like every other football club in the country, will go through spells when things don’t go particularly well. But for the last few years Celtic has had an issue which is pretty much unique to our club, and it’s not one we will be boasting about to the rest of football. Because it’s one of the worst offences any organisation can commit against its customers.

Celtic does not communicate with us. It does not communicate with us at all. Yes, fan media get invites to press events (some of them anyway) and we are kept in touch with when certain issues develop, but the supporter base as a whole never hears from this club directly, except through the occasional announcement. But that’s not a good comms strategy.

One of the reasons for fan dismay right now is that there doesn’t appear to be a clear-heading and thorough strategy at the club. Now, we are constantly assured that this misunderstands the situation and that in fact we are following a coherent plan which fans would understand better if we just saw it clearly. But I believe that insults our intelligence.

Because if we’re simply not understanding it part of the reason for that might lie in the fact that it is never adequately explained to us.

Nobody actually gives us the run-down on what the directors are thinking or what the plan for the club is in the medium to long term. The club has been dreadful at this stuff for years – the last time Celtic clearly articulated such a strategy was under Fergus – but it’s worse now that we have a CEO who prefers not to be public facing.

As I’ve said previously, I don’t necessarily have a problem with a low-key CEO because it’s in many ways a better option than having someone like Lawwell who enjoyed nothing more than having his face in the papers, even if there were few examples of his actually talking to the fans. He did enjoy doing the rounds of the editors and journalists though, and this was widely reported. There are no such reports about Nicholson, which is both good and bad.

I get the impression that he’s a mediocre communicator at best, and that’s a problem in and of itself because a modern CEO should be good at that particular job, he should have that particular skill-set down cold, and this guy just doesn’t seem to have that at all.

Still, at some point someone from the club – someone credible, someone the fans know represents the thinking at the top of the house – needs to get in front of the supporters and start talking because the club looks a complete mess from the outside at the moment, with Rodgers and the players the only people in the front line of it all.

We need to understand several things about the future of this club.

We need to know whether there are plans to shake up the board; what the medium term strategy is as far as the football department – not the manager, those above him – goes; we need to know where the club stands on the state of Scottish football governance; we need to know what’s happening in Europe which might affect us in years to come; the situation with policing; away match tickets and what the hell we’re doing there; what the plans are for the stadium; what the plans are for proper engagement with fans … the list goes on.

All of this, and more, could be the subject of a lengthy interview, and it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, be offered first to the mainstream media. There are fan media outlets to offer it to and the club’s own official channels to broadcast it on if fan media proves unfeasible or they want the maximum possible reach. The media will pick it up in due course.

But the fans need, the fans deserve, answers. In almost every other field in business and sport the communication level is vastly better than that which is offered from Celtic, and if these people want to prevent the spread of rumours, disinformation and a lot more besides they should get in front of it all and stop treating us with a contempt that ends up reflected back at them.