Celtic’s Perception Problem Is Easy To Tackle But Harder To Fix.

Celtic has a perception problem. Not a great shock to anyone who reads this blog, as it’s a subject we’ve covered here before and before and before. But the more I talk about the subject the more I feel the need to emphasise that although a perception problem is hard to fix it’s relatively easy to tackle, and if you do it right, and get lucky, you might shift the perception completely, or at least make it a redundant issue.

Our perception problem stems from an executive structure, from the boardroom down, which looks too much like a result of cronyism and nepotism than something that developed on merit.

Some of our decision making has paid no heed to the problem of perception, which in itself reveals a staggering lack of concern for it, or worse, a complete blindness to it, neither of which are convincing arguments for our being a particularly far-sighted club.

The internal appointment of Michael Nicholson as CEO was a travesty when shortly before it Celtic had seemingly been about to embrace change. To many people that sent a signal that our brave new dawn had been a false one and we were going back to stagnation and failed policies.

The decision to hire Mark Lawwell was a second, calamitous, error in judgement, and it would have been that even if he’d been ten times better at the job he did. Yes, whoever was brought in would have been judged very harshly for that window last summer, but it’s highly doubtful that they’d have had to leave their job because of it … he got no benefit of the doubt and he was never going to get any. That second name is what doomed him.

Peter Lawwell’s ascension to the role of chairman was an equally big mistake, and especially when his son was in the building at the same time. The optics of it reeked, and anyone who works at Celtic Park and thinks that the optics don’t matter really ought to think again, because that has implications which go beyond what the people in our stands think.

It stinks. It looks like amateur hour or something much worse, and coupled with Desmond talking about leaving his shares to his kids and about establishing a family legacy it creates an impression that these folk have confused their personal selves with the identity of the club as a whole.

But they are not Celtic. Celtic does not revolve around them. Kevin Kelly used to talk about being a mere “custodian”; they aren’t even that. In a proper corporate structure, they’d be considered mere hirelings, paid functionaries. They should not confuse this issue.

As a smart man once said, “Don’t get high on your own supply.”

But I think some of them do get high on it, and although it is not unheard of in a corporate culture for people to mistake their judgement for Absolute Truth, it is a different thing entirely if people in authority labour under the self-evident delusion that they are the sole selfless voices in the kingdom, that they are the only true keepers of the flame, and that when they speak they do so not as themselves but as the instruments of the institution.

For many in our support, the way they feel about this might be well summed up by a line from the first season of the quite amazing show Billions; the ADA Chuck Rhodes is arguing with his wife Wendy and he says to her “I work for the public good,” and she tells him “No, you work for the good of Chuck Rhodes; sometimes they intersect.”

When folk look at the transfer policy they see, rightly or wrongly, something that reverts back to a period we thought we’d left behind, when the manager does not run the show and when he is second guessed by non-football people in the backroom.

As I’ve said repeatedly on here, right and wrong and fact and fiction and truth and untruth could not matter less in a debate like this. That’s not something any of us should be happy about, it simply acknowledges the world we live in and the way the world works.

Is it fair? Hell no, but fair? Give me a break, that doesn’t exist here. That’s not a factor in these things, it never was and it never will be. Governments have been toppled by negative perception; the Biden administration has presided over falling crime figures, falling immigrant numbers and rising wages and yet survey after survey in the US shows that a majority of the country believe the opposite in all three cases. Fair has nothing to do with this.

There are father-and-son teams working at clubs all over the place; look at the boards at Arsenal and Manchester Utd. It’s not unusual. You have what amounts to dynastic control at half of the big clubs on the continent; that is not an uncommon situation.

The problem is with perception. And perception and reality aren’t the same, which is why when I write about one, I always talk about the other as well, to keep them separate, to make it clear that we’re talking about two different things.

But even the reality contains warnings for those who open their eyes to look. Man Utd fans detest the Glaziers and wish they had never gotten their hands on the club, and they don’t believe that being a family owned operation is a good idea. The Arsenal fans feel much the same way about Stan Kroenke and his own brood being in control of their club.

You know one of the clubs who bucks the trend? Manchester City.

You know why they buck the trend? It has very little to do with the success they’ve enjoyed over the last few years.

It’s about something much deeper than that. It’s because they’ve worked incredibly hard to create the perception that none of that success could have been had without the backing and the partnership of the supporters, something which to an outsider seems like an absurd proposition … and yet, they’ve acted in such a way that their fans actually believe it and they actually feel as if the club got where it is as a result of them.

The reason it works at City – and people at Celtic should know this – is because the owners at City were conscious of the need to involve the fans in the project, and to reach out into the supporters community and make them feel part of it, and the way they did that was to establish, early on, a blueprint and a plan which told the fans what they were aiming for and how they would proceed stage by stage to build a world class operation.

Stage by stage. They held meetings with fan groups, and they laid it all out. They presented them with a vision. A strategy. And they asked “what do you think?”

They made them feel as if none of it would, or even could, be happening without them and of course that’s about as real as fairies at the bottom of the garden. But it worked.

Our board appears to believe the polar opposite, in that they sometimes act as if they think everything we have is down to them, when that’s just as ridiculous and fantastical.

Let me tell you who understood the perception problem; Fergus McCann. He did the same as they did at City, and initially he took the fans with him. And he kept every one of his promises. What reward did he get? Booed whilst unfurling the flag, and why? Because for a section of our support, perception swung the other way.

You think he cried about unfairness? You think he spent any time lamenting the tragedy of that moment? The Hell he did. Fergus has never held that against the wider support. Fergus is beloved by the fans in a way none of our present incumbents ever will be.

You knew Fergus was special right from the off.

I went to one of the sessions where he laid out his approach and asked the fans to support it with their cold hard cash. Fergus won the trust of fans.

That’s not easy to do. I watched Charles Green try to do it across the road at Ibrox, and he bluffed and blustered and bullshitted his way through it.

He didn’t present a vision worth a damn.

He talked about projections which were not even remotely realistic. He talked about creating hundreds of thousands of North American fans and making the club into one of the biggest sports brands in the world … none of that was even close to being achievable and so of course he didn’t even try to pretend that it was; he didn’t set out a step by step strategy for how he was getting there, he just presented bombastic claims and knew fans would fill in the blanks and that the media would trumpet it as some kind of game-changer.

And when those crazy ambitions were not met – and they couldn’t be met, and he knew that right from the start – that had an impact that was completely predictable; it sowed distrust. Fans realised that they couldn’t believe in a word that he said, and that was a serious problem for him which grew, very swiftly into a fatal one, and contributed to his decision to quit.

He was perceived as a liar and “a spiv.” Once that happened, he was finished. Those are allegations too serious to change people’s minds about.

But Fergus did it right. He never promised more than he could deliver.

He had it all laid out. He did as Green did and asked the fans for money, but unlike Green he made no crazy claims or set unachievable goals, and he told them exactly what he would spend it on and what it would accomplish; every time we go to Celtic Park and look around our magnificent arena, we can see where virtually every penny of it went.

Our stadium is the monument to the fans who put their money into Fergus’ plan, and I have always been proud that I was one of them. My family bought shares, and I bought my first season ticket for the glorious new north stand.

We built Celtic, and Fergus told us how we would do it. Right from the start, he created the right perception. He got us off to the right start.

And Fergus was booed when he unfurled the flag which all his honesty, integrity and hard work had got us to. Why did that happen? How could that happen?

Because it’s difficult work building goodwill, and the right perception, but it can be destroyed much more easily. There was no fan media at the time; if there had been, some of the character assassinations of McCann would never have been permitted.

For example, can you even imagine how Celtic fan media would have responded to the Saddam Hussein headline from The Daily Record? God, it would have been explosive. It would have scorched the Earth. I recall vividly the fan media reaction to “Thugs & Thieves”, which rocked The Record and other outlets back on their heels … and that was before there were so many of us with combined readerships many, many, many times that of the mainstream titles.

And yet, this is where the hope lies for this Celtic board, because what happened to Fergus shows that perception can be shifted, it can be moved, although creating a positive one from a negative one is much harder than doing the opposite, and it requires work and time.

How do they do it? What would it take?

They have to want to for a start. In short, they have to want to engage more openly with fans, take criticism more readily from fans and they have to acknowledge not only our voices but that those voices have something to say that is worth listening to.

See, this is what nobody ever wants to talk about. They allow us at media conferences, and to question the players and the manager. But they don’t allow us to ask those much wider questions about the strategy and the direction we’re headed in. Our “access” is cut off at the exactly the door beyond which we might get some proper answers.

More to the point, they don’t take our concerns seriously.

The key thing in preventing negative perception is communication. Get people in front of the cameras and make them answer questions, and not just the questions of those who work inside the club itself. Tell people facts. Stop speculation and rumour dead.

And for God’s sake, listen and maybe even learn.

Secondly, they need to lay out a five-year strategy and a blueprint, in an objectives document, and tell us what they intend to do to achieve the goals set out in it.

These need to be concrete goals, not “we aim to be regular competitors at major tournaments …” that vague, wishy-washy, draw-your-own-conclusions stuff won’t fly. It needs to be specific and within our reach, and they need to outline a proper structure for delivery, and accountability, so ordinary fans can go and properly evaluate their performance.

Third, they need to start doing what they do right now better, and that’s just about the simplest way I can put it. When Mark Lawwell was hired a serious perception problem was created that this was a “jobs for the boys” type organisation with no real ambition or forward thinking, just an insular wee group bigging itself up and hiring its mates and family members.

But had we gotten the first transfer window under Mark Lawwell right – and I wrote about that window at length the other day, and how the only real success story from it was Aaron Mooy, a player the manager identified and signed (because you have to leave out Maeda, Carter Vickers and Jota, whose deals were made permanent in that window, as he’d played no role in identifying or signing any of those guys) – people would have stopped wondering why he’d been hired in the first place. If he’d then got the second one right no-one would have cared.

But Mark Lawwell left here after four transfer windows without a notable stand-out success story … and that is why the perception that he was hired for all the wrong reasons is essentially immovable now. Perception has become the reality.

Success can change negative perception. So can simply doing things in a different way, and the more radical the change the more quickly you can shift it.

If you are perceived as a being a staid, boring, stay-at-home type you who suddenly starts wearing silk shirts and going clubbing you’ll shift perception pretty damned fast (and have people thinking it’s a midlife crisis or something) … but if you’re posting your latest Amazon delivery on Facebook and it’s a housecoat and a pair of slippers you’ll have a hard time changing minds.

Even the perception that this board lacks ambition and is made up of people who treat the fans with utter contempt, as solid as that perception is, having been established over years of them showing no ambition and treating fans with contempt, even that can be shifted if they simply stop treating the fans that way and actually reach for the next rung on the ladder.

It is not easy to correct a negative perception, and I do not expect us to do something radical, so if the people at our club even care – and they should care – it will take time to do. But unless they try, the negative perception is only going to grow until they have real problems.

Lastly, one of the surest ways to change negative perception is to change the faces at the top, and that is so self-evident I shouldn’t even need to point it out, and the most obvious name is that of the chairman Peter Lawwell, who some think is too powerful and others claim has no power at all.

Okay, say that’s true. What function does he serve, then?

If he’s powerless and has no authority then he’s a cardboard cut-out, basically the guy who opens and shuts the meetings, and we could have hired any well-known Celtic fan in business, academia or a dozen other fields to do that job and sit in that seat. Instead, we have a divisive figure who is better at taking acclaim than criticism and that won’t stand.

Is it fair? Like I said, no-one cares about fair. It plays no role here.

Ask Henry McLeish about fair and unfair; he resigned the Scottish First Minister job he strove after for his whole career over what he still claims to this day was an honest mistake, and I for one believe the guy. “A muddle, not a fiddle,” is how he described it.

Ask Wendy Alexander, who was actually cleared by an inquiry into a donation to her Scottish leadership campaign of a mere £950 … she was still consumed by a firestorm of controversy and had to quit.

Ask Humza Yousaf who, like McLeish, actually resigned the First Minister’s job for what wasn’t even a political scandal but a simple tactical error; he ended a power sharing arrangement with the Greens just hours before they intended to do it instead … ask him about fair, and he’ll sing you the full album on negative perception.

Ask Joe Biden, forced to relinquish his chances of a second term because Americans don’t believe he’s up to the job. Fair? No-one gives a damn, people in these positions deal with the perception, they know it’s really all that matters, and if they know that changing that perception is difficult if not impossible, they act accordingly.

It’s tough at the top. The rod draws the lightning.

If Lawwell does nothing, if he has no role, then it does us no good to have such a drag on the club to no material benefit, because it’s his presence which is in large part responsible for the negative perception that currently exists and fair or not, until that changes, we might not shift that perception even if we do everything else that’s laid out for people in this piece.