Glasgow World Hits Bottom With Its Desperate Article On “Celtic’s Owner.”

The clickbait website Glasgow World, the site which runs “simulations” of matches on video games, which has devoted entire articles to EA Sports Football valuations, which published an article recently on Celtic’s player wages based on what they are in Football Manager 2024, has managed to go lower still tonight with a dire piece on billionaires in sport.

The piece is rubbish in every way, but when it runs with a headline calling Dermot Desmond “Celtic’s owner” then you know it’s fit for nothing but the bin. Although he runs the club like some third-rate banana republic, Dermot Desmond does not “own” Celtic. He has 34% of the shares. He is nowhere near a position where he can be called our “owner.”

Usually halfwits like Ben Banks – the writer of this absurd piece – are satisfied calling Desmond our “majority shareholder”, which of course isn’t the case either. The largest shareholder, yes, but he most certainly does not command a majority. It’s one of the issues our sites raise again and again and again; how can this man effectively run the club without majority control?

Regardless of the answer, he does it. He manages it. He runs Celtic without the benefit of a majority shareholding and that’s a fact.

Aside from that, the blurb read thus; “Hoops fans have been desperate to see the club spend more in the transfer market, with Brendan Rodgers confirming this month that work is already underway for the summer ahead. So, looking at some recent figures, how has the Parkhead powerbroker approximately compared in relation to some of the game’s wealthiest?”

The first name on the list is Steve Ballmer, who owns the LA Clippers.

Anyone familiar with American sports want to be first to point out the flaw here?

Yes, the LA Clippers are a frigging basketball team, not a football team, so really, the article ceases to have any value even as a curiosity.

And this is just page one of what is a ridiculous 23 page “gallery article” which is basically nothing but a bunch of pictures with a number and a handful of words.

This is seriously desperate stuff, even by the standards of that Hell-house publication where people go to lose their souls bit by bit and day by day.

But there’s an even bigger problem with Banks’ absurd piece, and it is this; even if this was a serious study as to where he fits in amongst the elite of football owners, and even if Desmond was an actual owner, his wealth doesn’t factor into our thinking about Celtic at all.

Celtic fans have never judged Dermot Desmond on how much of his own money he puts into Celtic, which would be nothing since the last major share issue. Desmond himself is quite open about how he will never bankroll the club, comparing that to take his money to his back garden to set it on fire. Celtic fans don’t have a sugar-daddy. We don’t want a sugar-daddy.

Celtic is sufficiently wealthy to dominate Scotland and make an impact on Europe simply based on what we have and what we earn. Sugar-daddy doped clubs tend to be the ones that come to the stickiest ends, as we’ve seen across the city and elsewhere.

This team is in a calamitous state right now, with £60 million plus in the bank, something for which there is no excuse. We’re not asking Desmond to spend his money, there’s enough of our money – for that cash in the bank does in fact belong to us – to put us far in front of anything this league is likely to produce to challenge us.

Honestly, there is lazy journalism – and this is amongst the laziest I’ve seen – and there is dredging the swamp, and this is definitely more a case of the latter than the former. Banks and his colleagues at that godawful site must be so proud at the end of a working day.

They can call themselves whatever they want, but they’re not journalists. Christ, these guys are barely writers. Being able to join words together on the page doesn’t make you one of those any more than being able to play keepie-up in the park makes someone a footballer.

That outlet they work for is a repository for clickbait junk, one step above a shop which uses ChatGPT to turn out its articles. These are the kind of people who bring that day inching closer all the time.