The Gamers Guide To The Celtic Board And Why The “Risk Averse” Strategy Isn’t.

Today there are a lot of rumours about our team being on the brink of some business as last. Is it true? We’ll find out I suppose. In the meantime, I have tried to understand what motivates those who run our club to do it in the manner that they do.

And maybe I have come to understand it a bit more after having watched a YouTube clip last night which made me think about it in a different way.

People have all sorts of wild theories about why our club’s transfer policy is so scattershot, why it’s so difficult to get us to reach for the next rung of the ladder, why we always seem to want to stay just one step ahead of our rivals. There are some who believe it’s deliberate, that we don’t want to move too far ahead of them, that doing so might endanger them and thus us. I understand why some people might think that way. I don’t personally buy it.

Another of the theories that I do not subscribe to is the one about us being risk-averse. The board does encourage this sort of talk at times when its members remind us of what happened to the club from Ibrox. I personally believe that’s a smokescreen.

The number of our fans who think we should spend every penny we have on the team is vanishingly small. Nobody credible is asking for a huge overspend or anything that would endanger us. Nobody is suggesting that our directors carry debts on the club’s behalf. Only one of them has that kind of wealth in the first place, and he’s made his position on that clear and I for one am glad that he has. Sugar-daddy ownership breeds bad habits.

So, when I hear people on the Celtic board, or other Celtic fans, use Rangers and their fate as an excuse for their own lack of ambition I don’t buy it for one minute. It’s a shaky argument which only stands up if large numbers of our fans are calling for reckless spending, and this is just not the case.

I have said many times that I think this board is way too conservative. And yet in a way maybe they are exactly the opposite of that … because I can’t help but notice that in many ways our team building policy is not risk-averse at all.

Last season that strategy very nearly cost us the title. They gambled, un-necessarily, stupidly, with a Champions League bounty worth some £40 million. The manager bailed them out, by ditching the new signings, changing the system slightly and kicking us up a gear. Had he not done so their policies would have had a dramatic, negative, effect on the club.

Celtic does not have to be run in this fashion. This is not accidental. We are here because of choices. Deliberate choices. Our first team has gotten weaker in the last 18 months from a peak position prior to Peter Lawwell’s elevation to the role of chairman.

Within that timeframe we have sold Giakoumakis, Juranovic, Starfelt, Jota and Abada. With many tens of millions in the bank we are looking at starting next season with Stephen Welsh and Liam Scales as part of our back line, as backups at best and at worst as regular starters. There are people talking about having a midfield where Mikey Johnston is an acceptable option on the left. That’s how crazy things are, and the question that nags away at a lot of us is “why?”

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why does it have to be this way?

So, I want to toss an idea into the thought pool, to see if it floats. It’s no worse than some of the theories which have been proposed for what this is about.

What if I told you that our board is not conservative in the least? What if I told you that far from being risk-averse that these guys are inveterate gamblers, forever seeking the next high? And what if I told you that what inspires me to wonder about this is because when you look at a certain slice of society you can see plenty of people who behave exactly as they do?

And what if I told you that those people are gamers?

As crazy as it sounds, it’s a fact, and I’m going to explain it to you. As a gamer myself I might have spotted this sooner, except I am not a gamer in the way some of these people are. See, I play to relax although the types of games I play are extremely frustrating and many of them are not relaxing at all. And I play strategy games mostly, and the people I’m talking about prefer games with a different sort of challenge … although a handful of strategy games offer this one.

There is a fantastic third person shooter called Hitman: World Of Assassination. It’s not normally my sort of game, but I have bought every part of it, add-on DLC’s and all. And in that game you play a contract killer. You can devise your own strategy, choose your own method of dispatching the targets. But obviously the more creative you are the greater the rewards.

Anyone, with a little practice, can beat the game by simply improvising your method on the fly. More experienced players want to try it by fulfilling bonus objectives, many of which involve killing the target in a specific way. And I’ve had a lot of fun doing limited objectives. Some of them are just too damned difficult. They require perfect timing. Perfect play.

Yet even that is not enough for some players. They seek ever greater challenges. And one of the strategies which the real obsessives gravitate towards involves placing increasing limits on what they can do, what they can use, what disguises they can wear, what weapons they can bring. They tweak the rules so they can only kill the targets; no bodyguards, no civilians, not even if they are cornered and there is no way out. Some of them turn off the ability to save the game at any point, meaning that each assassination is a straight-up one time attempt.

The true sophisticates of the game chase the trophies for completing the most difficult challenges, and the apex of them is the Silent Assassin award.

To achieve that you cannot be recorded on security cameras. You cannot alert the bodyguards or security, which means silenced weapons only. If they switch on to you at all you can’t fulfil the conditions. If you sneak up on one you are allowed to incapacitate or kill him … but you can’t have them see or hear you in the second before the act, even if you succeed, and if you do it you cannot leave the body where others can find it.

The same applies to the target. If you’re spotted it’s over, even if the target sees you just long enough to take the bullet between the eyes. When you commit the murder, you must do it in a location where you can dump the corpse so it’s never discovered.

Every game offers its own set of challenges, but those where the player can tweak the challenge until it’s almost mind-bendingly difficult are those which attract a certain type of player. There is even a notorious football management sim which is difficult enough on its own but which can be made even harder if you want the ultimate test.

In Football Manager that’s called “the lower league challenge”. Or as we players call it, “the career game.” In the ultimate version of the career game the player has to start as an unemployed coach without a single badge and steadily work through the divisions to become an elite level boss. The player is forbidden to use the editor. Forbidden from using the save function creatively to re-play certain crucial matches over and over until you win. Amazingly, the player is not allowed to bring any “real world” knowledge into the game or to sign players based on previous experiences in the game itself. You cannot sign a single footballer in this sort of playthrough until he’s discovered by the in-game scouts and recommended to you.

And why would anyone do this? Any of it? For exactly the reason it says; it’s a challenge. You do it to find out if you can. Once you’ve cracked the game straight up, what else is there left to do but find a way to tweak the difficulty for the next time you play, so that it’s not so easy, so that you test yourself over and over again? Which I’m sure is where you start to see the point.

I think somewhere along the line, this is the sort of egotism that started to flourish in our boardroom. Is it possible that in some ways these people are engaged in a giant experiment to see how much they can get away with not spending, or not doing, and still have us win things?

It offers one explanation for why every manager we’ve had under the various Lawwell led-regimes and who achieves a certain level of success is made to work with fewer and fewer resources and under more restrictive conditions until he hits his limit and either quits or it all falls down, and this is not as crazy as it might sound to people.

Because you remember when I said the other day that the board has to decide if we’re a football club running a business or a business running a football club? If we were a business running a football club there is a certain management type who would run it exactly like this; cut to the bone, slash costs, hoard cash and try to find the line where the company could continue to function at a high level whilst running with the lowest possible cost base.

The phrase “doing more with less” was invented by those people. They are the sort of folk who come in to a company with a remit to make it as profitable as possible and the first thing they do is find out how deep they can cut without it having a negative impact on performance. This happens all the time. It’s not crazy to suggest that’s where we might be.

And there’s something else too, of course; the egotism of the gamer who is going for every achievement. To know that they can do or have done what others can’t. Lawwell and others swan through UEFA thinking of themselves as real geniuses; they run the biggest club in Scotland, and they win everything, and they do it turning a profit every year.

In a world full of chairman who have to spend their own money to bail their teams out and who struggle to put silverware on the table, these guys must feel like they have done something pretty remarkable. The Ibrox board takes itself seriously as big players because their “European record” is impressive … but they are so thoroughly dominated here in Scotland by Celtic, who do you reckon looks like the smartest kid in the class?

In a sense it is worthy of bragging about. In a sport dominated by clubs who spend what they can’t afford, Celtic wins everything here at home and posts a profit at the same time. And I wonder if those on our board haven’t made a simple decision to roll the dice and see how much of a reduction in quality is possible whilst we continue to win, like a gamer for whom every fresh challenge comes after they’ve hamstrung themselves a little more at the start … for no other reason than just to see if they can. It’s the ultimate challenge. It’s the ultimate game.

And perhaps that explains why we’re here.

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