One of the reasons Scottish football is not like anywhere else is that we have one club here which generates more headlines, and more madness, than just about any other in the game. Even with our own club frequently doing things that leave fans scratching our heads in bafflement there is nothing quite like the one at Ibrox for producing headline-grabbing lunacy.
Someone asked me once how our own board gets away with some of what it does. I told them that it’s simple; our fans have Ibrox to gawp at. If their club was in any way normal ours would have to work harder and do more. No matter how much is going wrong inside our own walls – and I have written and talked about this extensively this month – we can look across the city and see quite clearly just how much crazier things could be.
And the board preys on this of course. It’s not a new strategy either. I’ve seen a lot of it in politics and in history, but I’ve seen it too in great fiction. One of the best fictional characters of all time is in the news at the moment; Hannibal Lector. He’s in the news because Donald Trump keeps bringing him up at his rallies. It’s not clear that Trump knows he isn’t a real person.
But Trump’s fascination with him is part of the wider fascination the public has with him. Thomas Harris did something amazing in creating Lector. Because how do you make a cannibal serial killer into the kind of character people want more of? Well, you make him supremely competent and entirely rational for a start, you make him sophisticated and charismatic. And you make him, in his own way, fair minded and even civilised in his outlook.
But more than that, you create other monsters for the audience to hate more.
See, one of the reasons Lawwell and our board gets away with it is that they will never be, for most Celtic fans, the Big Bad of this story. And Hannibal, in spite of his proclivities, isn’t the Big Bad in any of the books in which he’s a character. In the first book, Red Dragon, the Big Bad is Francis Dolarhyde, The Tooth Fairy, slayer of entire families. In the second, The Silence Of The Lambs, the Big Bad is Jame Gumb, AKA John Grant, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill.
But Harris’ real genius for making Lector sympathetic comes in book three, the eponymous Hannibal, where Lector is on the loose in Florence. There, he’s settled into a relatively peaceful and happy existence. But due to a confluence of circumstances involving Clarice Starling, an Italian cop called Rinaldo Pazzi and one of his former victims, the gruesomely disfigured Mason Verger, all that is interrupted and once more he’s doing what he does best; killing people with savage aplomb.
The genius of Harris is to make Hannibal much less repulsive than virtually every other character in the book with the exception of Clarice herself. She’s been drummed out of her job by a proper piece of shit called Paul Krendler, Pazzi is corrupt and is trying catch Hannibal so he can sell him to bounty hunters who have some rather specific and awful plans for him and that hunt is being financed by Verger, who is a child molester who amuses himself tormenting orphans to the point of tears … and then drinking those tears in his martini. He’s by far, by a considerable distance, the most despicable of all the characters across the four Hannibal books.
(The fourth book is not up to much, but I love the third dearly, it is a masterpiece which is miles better, in my view, than Silence Of The Lambs and which I cannot enough recommend to everyone who likes a good book. It is, in fact, a great one.)
Whenever our board needs to contrast the way they run Celtic with the way it might have been they only have to point across the city at our own Big Bad, the never-ending, ever evolving, disaster of a club at Ibrox and any criticism fades to a whisper.
It’s not just that they are a mess, it’s that like Harris’ counterpoints to Lector the whole club over there is a grotesquerie, a horror-movie creation from the people who run it to large swathes of a fan-base which uses hatred as its fuel. Their dark obsessions and mad fantasies are every bit as severe as some of those existing in the heads of Harris’ real bad guys.
I do sometimes wish they were semi-competent. The club that is. Their fans are a lost cause and as long as the club dances to their tune it will also be a lost cause. But if they were smarter in how they work we’d have to get smarter as a club. The guys running Celtic would no longer be able to coast. The truth is, though, when it comes down to it, I wouldn’t change a bit of this.
Because let’s be honest, they are what make the wait between great TV seasons easier to bear. They make up for the awful stuff on the news. More dodgy characters have trooped through the halls over there than walked through The Bada Bing in The Sopranos. A handful of good books, the best of which is Tangled Up In Blue by Stephen O’Donnell, have gotten right to the heart not only of the first Ibrox club and its weird history but the way it collapsed as well. I have little doubt that there will be other books, charting this mad period.
I always thought I might write one of the definitive texts of this crazy era, but there’s a guy called Tim Shipman who wrote two fabulous books about the Brexit campaign and the Theresa May election disaster which followed it, and had intended to cap it all off, three years ago with a third book to close out what he called his Brexit Trilogy.
But events piled on top of events, and eventually three books became four and the last of them has already been delayed twice as he races to include the recent election … that’s what I would feel like if I sat down to chart this. Just when I thought I was finished, something else would happen and I’d have to start a whole new section.
I don’t know if this is the weirdest summer we’ve seen over there; I guess probably, and it might get weirder still. The Elite case was back in court yesterday; they’re on the end game with that one and all that awaits them is to find out how much money it’s going to cost. Their directors, who a matter of months ago absolutely believed they’d be basking in the warm glow of a treble and spending the summer in a big extended party, are instead caught in a nightmare.
The club appears as divided as it has ever been and in spite of their best efforts, they still have an awful lot of poor-quality players weighing them down. This thing with the stadium is so surreal that even I can hardly believe it’s actually happening. The dysfunctionality is extraordinary and made worse because they don’t actually see an end in sight.
I’ve talked about books and box-sets here for a very good reason. Harris didn’t know he was writing a series of books when he started. Shipman probably didn’t either. Good TV series get picked up for one season at first and it depends on ratings whether they get a second; you’d be amazed how many real good shows never get that second year.
We’re in Season 12 of this bizarre Ibrox soap opera, and I can tell you, nobody would ever have cancelled this one because of the twists and turns in it and the oddballs who have made up the cast. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? It’s had dramatic moments, but it’s had funny moments as well, more of them than we can count. To their fans it’s like a tragedy, but that’s only because they constantly hope for happy endings which never quite come around.
For our board, this is all a blessed relief.
Those who say that our policy is to stay just one step ahead of them is made hard to argue against by the obvious fact that we could, and should, be so far in front of this shambolic outfit that all they can see is the dust as we vanish into the distance forever … and somehow we aren’t yet. Which suggests maybe our club doesn’t want to.
Our board would probably justify that policy by saying we need them to keep our own ratings high, but that shows how little they understand us, it’s revealing of how little they know. I would watch Celtic anyway, and I suspect most of us would. Our own story runs concurrently with theirs but is an entirely separate thing, and the truth is I would tune in to both. Ours for the pleasure of seeing our own successful story continue and theirs … for a giggle.
But see, the thing is, if their club was in that sort of state and so far behind us that no realistic challenge from that quarter could be contemplated for years to come, our Big Bad would be gone, because how could you call them that when they weren’t big, just bad? The Big Bad has to be at least vaguely frightening, as all Harris’ evildoers were. I think if they were gone, every single one of us would be able to judge our board on its own terms, and that would start with honest scrutiny of our European record and bleed into every other area of the club … we’d want us to make Europe our proving ground and the source of the real challenge for Celtic.
But as I said in a previous piece, none of our directors have the imagination for that, and so in some ways it’s them who “need” a team at Ibrox for something other than amusement. For the rest of us, as Season 12 is about to begin, that is the function they fulfil in our lives … not even our Big Bad, but a source of sheer freakish entertainment, something to remind us of how lucky we are.
The latest CelticBlog podcast can be found below.
Just get ahead of The Pathological Survival Lie (For Liebrox) Trophy Count Please Celtic…
Every Celtic supporter (and the fans of the other 41 senior clubs) all know that it’s Celtic 118 v Sevco 3 on that score scenario…
But just to finally shut up The Sevco Huns and The Sevco Huns Crayon Scribblers once and for all…
JUST DO IT CELTIC !!!!!!
excellent james.
If this was the other way about they would be out of sight and bouncing on our heads.
I contacted the daily record yesterday…. online obviously…… about the Todd cantwell breaking “protocol” story…… and informed them phillipe clemOnt told us about cantwell wanted to leave…. So if anyone broke “protocol” it was clemOnt…..that story has disappeared…. online….. surely the daily record…. didn’t just make the story up. Mmmmm…so is breaking “protocol” telling the truth
I love the soap opera season 12 analogy. The most entertaining thing for me this season is the acrobatics of the media trying to dignify this shit show.
“All these many years on, Celtic fans have still never tired of The Ibrox soap opera” –
Aye it’s been goin on for a bit now and long may it continue please…
There’s a well known saying called Comedy Gold –
At Liebrox though, it’s Comedy OLD !!!!
Definitely a soap opera. Parody on how to run a football club for its feral support intentionally badly.
Such a wonderful cast of useless, clueless, chancer characters.
The late seventies American sitcom springs to mind.
Tune in next week for the latest instalment.
That’s absolutely correct. Desmond, lawwell & co regard ibrox as far too important tae their lucrative buisness plan, tae let them slip too far behind. Btw, on the subject of the Hannibal film. The person who played Mason Verger was actually great actor Gary Oldman. Lot of people aren’t aware of that, because at the time, GO himself requested his name be deleted from the title credits at the end. True story. Just a wee interestin bit of info thought I’d fling in.
Great piece James. For me Celtic should always be thinking of Europe.
Will our board be happy with us being pumped every game in the CL or will they just take the pot of gold.
The shambles over there is comedy gold no doubt but we still urgently need 2 strikers and a LB. The chaos across the city and our excellent pre season performances have lightened the mood but the squad is far from ready for the season. What happens if Taylor and/or Kyogo get injured and the right money comes in for O’Riley? We seem to have the right atmosphere in the squad and with a couple of good additions we could maybe improve our terrible recent European record this season.
I’ve said it before, but where we see Espanyolification our board may see ‘Linfieldisation’ – becoming the only big fish in a pond so shallow that interest dries up entirely (sorry about the mixed metaphors). By way of evidence they could point to the closure of half a stand at our own stadium between 2012 and 2016. 2012 was a missed opportunity on many levels but the biggest was not to fill those empty seats by giving younger fans very cheap season ticket deals and incentivised discounts on merchandise, possibly even by reaching out to scotlands latest arrivals and making the club even more inclusive, welcoming and outward-looking. The blame for that lies squarely with the board who, as a collective of old white men, don’t appear to have an original idea between them and therefore give the impression of being welded to the ‘o** f***’ business model whether true or not.
Netflix!! Where are they?
It’s like watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on an endless loop.
Off the wall performative insanity.
Alas I think we could be in the ‘End Game’ for the Tribute Act and a new name will be needed for
The 3rd Club in the series.
The Elite Compensation Case, circa £10 million & Legal Costs pending,
the Over budget costs of the refurb at the DebtDome,
the unanticipated Costs of relocation to Hampdump, Security and Policing,
the lost Hospitality Income & Matchday Revenue ( an integral part of their Revenue Estimates),
the likelihood of having to fund another ‘revolution’ for the next Stooge on the annual Managerial roundabout,
then the costs of paying off the last Chump and his backroom team,
all the stored liabilities for the future instalments of Player Purchases fees (for absolute overpriced dross),
and not forgetting the £6 million owed to the Scottish Government for the Covid19 Support Payments,
any Director Loans that haven’t yet been converted to ‘Share Confetti’,
add in the usual run of the mill debts to Suppliers, Facepainters, Newsagents etc,
and Gawd knows how up to date they are with NI and tax due to HMRC.
If they are lucky they can go for a pre planned Administration Event, dump the Debt and take the points hit for next Season.
I’m sure that the SFA, true to form, will extend them a brotherly helping hand on that.
If they aren’t so lucky and Creditors don’t play ball, well ‘ tick tock, tick tock…Kaboom…
I wonder how much appetite there will be for a 3rd Club from investors.
Last season we were told by the smsm this “the rangers” team are the best in years. And clemOnt just needs to add to it to move on up. Some in the press even said who they should “build” the team around. Now the same smsm are telling anyone who will listen how clemOnt isn’t finished with his “rebuild”. Yes another rebuild….. you could not mark the smsm necks of with a blowtorch
that’s the problem when you only try to stay a step ahead of someone, the poorer they get on the park then the poorer on the park you get.
We could end up with team of absolute dross and win the league because their dross is worse, we would have record breaking amounts of cash in the bank but as a football club and football fans we go to watch games, not to oooh and aaah over the accounts flashed up on the big screens.
The other thing is ( and they did during the Murray ETB’s etc period) if the roles were reversed they wouldn’t take their boot off our throat till we were dead and buried. Our directors are playing a dangerous game here and have been for years, last season it was the brilliance of our manager that got us over the line and if not for BR they would have won the treble.
I know Clara, That Wilson on the Celtic board is a Butchers Apron lover as he is a very Open Labour supporter and former Butchers Apron Labour Loving MP…
The others are just the same probably being Tories…
Could it be within the realms of possibilities then that being associated politically with The Butchers Apron that they don’t wanna end the ‘Pathological Survival Lie’ !
Clach you need to get over it mate , SNP had their chances a few years ago,this years election showed that people were fed up with the SNP and their one policy,ie independence,their records on health education etc was worse than the Westminster govts records,so yes butchers apron or not we’re better off under a labour government because the alternative is a Tory government, SNP have blown it , sorry mate.
Definitely agree that Labour are the lesser of the two evils than The evil Tories Jim for sure but as a Republican I couldn’t ever bring maself to vote for any of the two of them ever…
(Well Perhaps Labour If it meant keeping The Tories out in my constituency I’d do it) but only then…
I think personally we need a ‘Scottish Sinn Fein’ as Sinn Fein have been a truly MAGNIFICENT political party for The Nationalist Community in The Six Occupied Counties in The Island of Ireland…
On the other hand The SNP did indeed (tragically from my own point of view) implode in The 32 Occupied Counties of Scotland !
Scottish Sinn Fein – The way forward forward Freedom For Bonnie Scotland !!!
Sad.but true !!!!!
The Celtic Bores have no idea how to take this club to the next level. Going out of sight of Rangers terrifies them as the last time it happened, the stadium was half empty and they became so lazy and bereft of ideas Celtic were begining to fail themselves.
Never forget that this is a Board that did nothing absolutely nothing about years and years of cheating at Ibrox and Hampden.
I often wonder about the anomaly of Sevco wining that title.
I believe that they don’t think the rewards of European success balances with the risk, basically they have no balls and go with the option of keeping them relevant.
It’s easier, keeps the domestic scene a little competitive and has little risk. The problem they have now is that the money is piling up and with that so does the expectations of the support.
They just haven’t got the ideas or the balls for it !!!
There,s the real sevconians,want clemont sacked ,this is the same guy they were praising as their saving Messiah, tavernier legend hahaha ,3 winners medals over long period and biggest collection of losers medals in Scottish football aye just what leg ends are made of cantplaywell demanding transfer took his handbags away from him so now it wants out. Comedy classics ,better at comedy than football
Is administration coming for the rangers? Have they even wound up the affairs of the last rangers? Many sites carrying the story. Is this why Celtic’s investments in players this term has been soo poor??
The Sevco sitcom requires a new genre to define itself – I give you the Mock-u-Dementery!