This Celtic Board Does Not Know How To Move Us Forward. We Need Radical New Leaders.

This article is available as an Emergency Podcast episode below. So if you prefer to listen, feel free. 

When he was a kid, someone asked Boris Johnson what he wanted to be when he grew up. He answered “world king.” It was a moronic answer, one he never grew out of. Johnson rose to supreme power. He won an election in a landslide. But what power revealed about Johnson is that he wanted it for its own sake. He had no idea what to do with it.

The same criticism was levelled at Gordon Brown, who plotted and schemed against Blair for years and finally took control, and then over the course of a few short years saw it all slip away. But for a brief time when he rallied the world against the banking crisis, he looked very much like a man who had lusted after the prize without really having a strategy for what would he would do if he won it. Unlike Johnson, he was supposedly a man of ideas … who didn’t have any.

I have written at length here about the state our club is in, and it feels remarkable to write that in the aftermath of another double. Yet, I write it still.

People who criticise me for this and think I should enjoy the good times without wallowing in gloom need to realise something; success on the pitch is not, and it never has been, a measure of how strong a football club is. Sounds ridiculous?

Consider this; Rangers were champions the year before they went out of business completely. They matched us title for title for a decade in which they were one hard push from catastrophe, and when the 2011-12 season kicked off they were not just the holders, they had won three in a row. A year later, the NewCo was clawing its way up from Division 3.

Money in the bank is not the measure of how strong a club is either. Manchester Utd have been in the top five richest clubs for decades. It’s been more than ten years since they won a domestic title, and last season they finished eighth in the EPL. On the day Alex Ferguson left, they were champions. They were rich. To the outside world they looked in good condition, and they looked like they could continue to dominate English football for years to come … but behind the scenes, the rot had already set in and the club was in sharp decline, and Ferguson knew it.

Decline is always visible. There are always signs. Rangers was in dire trouble even as their fans were rioting their way across Manchester in a European final. On the day Ferguson left United, David Gill left too. They had seen the direction of travel inside the club and knew it was not aligned with their own ideas. The signs of decline are clearly visible at Celtic.

But you need to be willing to see them. Many fans are not. That’s part of the problem. They equate winning with strength. They equate financial stability with all being well. The truth is, our club is going backwards in key areas, and it has been for years.

On 25 September 2003, Peter Lawwell was appointed at Celtic in the role of “Executive Director, Head of Operations.” Celtic actually went out of their way to make it clear that he would not have the job title “Chief Executive” and the statement which accompanied that announcement spelled out the reason why those at the club at the time did not give it to him.

“Basically, this is a recognition that football comes first and that everything else is there to support the football side of the business,” a ‘club spokesperson’ said.

Lawwell was at the club, in the same position, for the next 18 years, and over that time he made damned sure that he acquired the title “chief executive”. The idea that everything supports the football department is one that he’s used as a deflection on several occasions since, but you only have to look at the rising profits and the times when the balance sheet definitely took more prominence than the team-sheet to see how seriously he took it.

It’s been 14 years since we spent what was, at the time, our record sum of money on a player, when we bought Chris Sutton for £6 million. We spent another £6 million on Lennon in the same timeframe, and then we completed it with the signing of Hartson for another £6 million. When we spent those same sums of money two years ago to secure Jota and Carter Vickers, we were told that this “big spending” necessitated sacrifices elsewhere.

And this at a time when our earnings were much higher than they were when we brought in those three players for Martin O’Neill’s team.

We have never spent an eight-figure sum on a player. We supposedly came close. There was Odsonne Edouard, but I remain as suspicious of that reported transfer fee as I did at the time and very much doubt that we paid £9 million for him.

We did, reportedly, pay £7 million for Christopher Jullien.

The global transfer market, and player values, have multiplied massively in the time since we spent £18 million on those three players. And with this incredible escalation in player values, we rarely come up to the level of those signings, even now, even without taking into account inflation. In fact, Celtic has gone backwards in terms of what it’s prepared to pay; our average transfer fee over the course of the last dozen years is between £2 and £3 million.

Football has gone one way, and we have gone another. That’s the reality and that is a choice, a choice we’ve made; there is nothing inevitable about this. It’s a consequence of decisions taken in our boardroom over a long period of time, decisions which we remain locked into in spite of there being clear and obvious alternatives.

We, are, by virtue of those choices, in a continued spiral of downsizing, and that all starts in one key area; with our level of ambition.

People around keep reminding me this week about a Peter Lawwell comment in the accounts at the end of last year about how we always need to have a surplus for years in which we don’t qualify for the Champions League.

This is, as keen observers will know well, utter rubbish. For one thing, even in the many, many years where we’ve not been a Champions League team we have managed to post a profit. Yet even if it were true, think about what the implications of that statement actually are. We are not building to succeed; we’re preparing for the consequences of failure.

And that is a strategy utterly devoid of hope.

At some point, the people in charge of Celtic looked at the changing landscape of European football and made the decision that we could not keep up. Think about that. Let it sink it. They decided. They didn’t try. They didn’t make any attempt to keep pace with even moderately strong clubs, many of them with much less money.

Outside of the Big Five, most of those teams are beatable, regularly, if we operate right. A smaller squad, of more quality, on higher salaries, would certainly be capable of making that challenge. Instead, they went the other way. As prices increased and wage costs spiralled, they capped our wages and reduced the fees we were willing to pay.

This was not necessary. But this is what we chose to do.

That does not mean that these are bad people.

I have never believed that. I believe they have a certain arrogance and a certain selfishness. They must have, as it is that which prevents them from doing an honest-to-God evaluation of where we are as a club and where we should be. They have egos. That is not an evil thing. But it’s a problem, especially when they do not know as much as they think they do, especially when they look at only certain areas in which we’re doing well without recognising that we are actually simply running along in front of the train and laying tracks as we go.

One slip, and it’s going to run right over us.

I can sum it up for you in two statements, both made by Peter Lawwell, both following shocking January transfer windows where we utterly failed.

“We had targets and moved for them but for a variety of reasons it didn’t happen. As can be the case in January, we found it to be a dead market but we will work hard again to strengthen in the summer. We spent £7m on players in the summer and that’s not a significant amount of money compared to clubs in the big European leagues. But we spend every penny that comes into the club. That’s the way we will continue to operate … it isn’t getting any easier for us to compete with the main European clubs. We have now re-focused on ways of getting players to the club and need to create our own Champions League stars.”

That was from January 2012. Rangers were on the brink of collapsing, but the bigger issue for us was that we had wanted an inspirational window where we didn’t feel like we were risking watching them making it four in a row, and that was Lawwell’s statement.

This statement was from earlier this year.

“The board shares the frustrations of the supporters regarding the less-than-anticipated activity in the recent transfer window. The board’s commitment is to strengthen and improve the playing squad in every transfer window and although resources were available, we were unable to further add to the squad due to the unavailability of identified targets. The January transfer window is notoriously difficult as clubs are very reluctant to let their best players go at such a crucial time of the season. It is notable that transfer activity in England was the lowest it has been for over 10 years, excluding the impact of Covid-19.”

That man has been making the same excuses, and talking the same rubbish, and fooling those who want to be fooled, for more than ten years now. In the one January window where someone called Lawwell was not running things we signed three players who went right into the first team squad and they are still in the first team squad as I write this.

Even if he’s just a symptom of the bigger problem, I’ll take that as long as people accept that we do have a bigger problem here, and it’s the people at the top of our house.

Not only are these non-football people, but most of them are not from entrepreneurial backgrounds. This is what I mean when I talk about those who thirst after power without an idea of what to do with it and those who find themselves in a situation they were never prepared for.

This is one of the risks of having people on the board too long, something I talked about in the “Biden piece” the other day, when I pointed out that most companies change the composition of their boardrooms every three or four years.

It is even rarer for a director to be on one longer than five.

They have boxed themselves, and the club, into a place we can’t escape from whilst they are in charge, because they don’t have the strategic outlook which would enable us to escape from it. They see nothing but limitations, and don’t see the potential in growing in the direction of Europe instead of downsizing to the level of our surroundings.

And let me repeat; I cannot hold this against them. The fact of it. I can be angry with them for their megalomania, but simply being unable to chart a course for us is not their fault. I merely wish they would have the sense to realise it and move on.

You have to understand that when a lot of these guys joined the board, you could still buy an English international striker for £6 million. Those days are gone. Instead of adapting to the changes they freaked out. The collapse of Rangers gave them an excuse to downsize and they locked themselves into that cycle too. We took a decision to bunker. It’s not a crime. We make money, we win trophies … what’s not to like? But do not look to these people to solve our larger problems.

They barely recognise them. And they terrify those of us who do.

We misfire in so many areas. We have a signing policy that depends on finding assets, not strengthening the team. What happens when we have windows like last summer where none of the signings work out? That costs us trophies and titles and money. It costs us in Europe which shatters our co-efficient, which drags down the national one, which will remove from next season the automatic Champions League place, and will soon see Scotland’s second team losing even the chance to qualify. Before long, the parachute into the Europa League Groups will be gone as well.

We need a complete separation between the football department and the rest of the club, with that department run by a broad-thinker from a continental background instead of Scotland’s piss-poor and shallow talent pool. Not a Friend Of The Man either but someone with no link to Celtic, brought in with a wide-ranging remit to make huge changes in every department, and who controls a budget which nobody outside the football department can touch and which he and the manager can allocate to strengthening at their own discretion.

We have a dysfunctional scouting system which is tailored to aim low, instead of finding the best players we can get. A good Director of Football would direct it where it belongs, and if necessary rebuild it from the ground up.

We are ruled by a stinking defeatism on that front which his summed up by “we can’t attract the kind of players the fans want” which is made worse by their failure to articulate a vision, or to offer the kind of financial incentives which would make it easier, and which basically comes down to them no longer being willing to ask the question in the first place.

We have a completely deadening youth system which does not work, which does not produce and which therefore provides no assistance to the manager at all in terms of augmenting his team with academy players. The quality of our “leadership” there is abysmal. We aim low there too in terms of our coaching staff and the whole way we go about things.

Like a lot of failing regimes, our directors think you can solve this stuff by “investing” in The Big Project, but the keys to a better future are not in fancy buildings but in a better quality of coaching staff, a more coherent system run by innovative people and whose first task would be to upend everything we’re teaching our kids right now.

And even then, we risk that it would all fail the minute we threw those players into the blood and thunder of the Lowland League where they won’t learn a damn thing. The failure to fight for a proper reserve league in Scottish football is another massive failure.

A proper strategic review at Celtic would throw up even more problems, and expose limited thinking in areas we can’t even conceive of in a piece like this.

And I repeat, this is not their fault. The world changed, and it did so in ways that were so rapid that they were left scratching their heads. At a time like that what you need are people who can think outside of the box, and we don’t have that … and so we are stuck in the mud and they don’t know how to chart a way forward or to pull us out of this mess.

We need to help this club to be better, and sometimes that’s going to require that we put it under pressure. People have been asking me all day, based on the piece earlier, how we are supposed to do that; all of them have asked me this through a variety of social media platforms where they are just as connected to the people who run this club as they are to me.

So if you’re reading this and you want an answer to that question, don’t ask me; ask them. You can get in touch with them as easily as dropping me a message. Ask them what they intend to do. Ask them why this window has been such a non-event so far. Ask them about the areas of the club where you have the biggest concerns. And then ask them what the plan is.

And I can tell you the answer to that right now; they don’t have one. They’ve been in the job too long, they’re too old, too set in their ways, too conservative in their thinking. I once called Peter Lawwell the Wizard of Oz; all superficial bluff and bullshit, and underneath it a tired old man scrambling to look big and to seem in control.

But in fact, that’s our whole club. Successful on the surface, until you scan the surface and you’ll spot the wormhole. And then when you cut it open … enough to stop your appetite dead. We aren’t going to fix this stuff until we get start facing up to it.

But ultimately, we’re not going to fix it until there are big changes around here.