“You get what you pay for.” – Peter Lawwell, Celtic’s AGM 2023, when asked to defend the large salary increases handed out to him and his fellow directors.
Since that statement—since that arrogant, preening, overconfident statement—we’ve had the January transfer window, which the same guy admitted in the annual accounts had been “disappointing.”
So disappointing that nobody bothered to make any changes to either the transfer policy or to hire an overseer for the recruitment department itself. Rodgers highlighted his obvious disgust at that at the weekend when asked about the scouting and recruitment side. It’s clear that he has made his feelings plain inside the club.
And to have called the January window disappointing? That’s an understatement.
It was a colossal, unbelievable failure, and we got damned lucky that we have an elite-level manager who squeezed the last remaining morsel of energy from the players he knew he could count on, and that got us over the line.
In addition to the January window, we’ve had this summer and the utter fiasco that it has been.
Now, I’m not going to go over old ground, and I have no inclination and feel no need to defend myself from people who are too damned ignorant to go and learn some facts. The piece I put up yesterday morning wasn’t a criticism of our new left-back, who will get all the support from me that I’m able to give him, and I hope he’s a huge success.
No, the criticism was of the club and a policy which has been absolutely shredded during this window and the last, and more specifically, it was a criticism of those who oversee that policy, who got it wrong last summer and have only gone backwards since … the very people Lawwell thinks deserved that pay rise.
We’ve been looking for an experienced, quality signing at left-back for two years now, and we’ve arrived, after months of inaction, at a guy whose highest career level is in Spain’s second tier. I couldn’t care less what club he originates from. In terms of his experience in football, the highest he’s achieved so far is a year playing in Spain’s second tier.
That’s a fact. If that doesn’t gel with what people want to hear, or what they want to believe—too bad; it’s a fact, and it cannot be refuted with a lot of bluff, bluster, or bullshit. It’s a fact. And the manager explicitly said he wants strengthening, and it’s just not clear that this does that. He said he wants experience, because you need that for the highest competition in football, and he definitely didn’t get that in this case, did he?
So it should be blindingly obvious that the criticism is not directed at the player but at the people who have brought us to this place. My argument is with the policy.
I am not going to try and placate people who can’t figure out the difference between criticism of the policy and criticism of the player. I stated the facts about the level he’s played at. It’s not worth a second of my time further explaining this.
It was Lawwell who dared to defend that increase in executive salaries in that dismissive, contemptuous way he has. As far as I’m concerned, this is the window where he and his defence of the people at that table with him ran out of road. As far as I’m concerned, a lot of the people at Celtic’s boardroom table are little better than parasites, taking out what fans put in, and I couldn’t care less how they feel about that characterisation.
Some of them should consider their positions after this window; Lawwell could personally do this club an immense final service by announcing his own departure at the end of the season. I would not be terribly disappointed if he took Michael Nicholson with him. Somebody should assume responsibility for this summer. If they had an ounce of respect for the fans, to say nothing of the manager, somebody would.
And you know what? That person would earn a lot of credit for doing it. One of the problems at Celtic is a shocking lack of accountability at the top, and anyone who fell on the sword whilst pointing out that the standards were allowed to slip would set the bar for everyone else, and that would do tremendous good. It would set the right tone going forward.
Here’s the point of this article. Here’s the point of this piece.
I’m tired of having people cast up in our faces the success we’ve enjoyed under this board. What makes our board so damn special? Let’s go over the rest of Lawwell’s statement at the AGM, the part before that “You get what you pay for” throwaway.
“It’s not by chance our profit was £40 million, it’s not by chance we have huge value in the squad,” he said.
Of course, it wasn’t by chance. But nor was it due to some brilliant strategic genius on his part or the directors. Let’s get this right just so it’s clear, so it’s understood.
Let’s do some division of responsibility.
The players play the games. The coaches train the players. The manager manages the coaches, picks the tactics, selects the team, and runs the show.
The scouts look for players to sign so that the manager can develop them or use them in the squad. The directors hire the technical people who hire the scouts, and the directors themselves run the financial side of the business.
So, it seems to me that what Lawwell is suggesting here is that he and the board want the credit because they sold the manager’s players, who they didn’t find and identify, when they didn’t train and develop them, and had no role whatsoever in any element of making those players into bankable assets in the first place.
They didn’t personally go and watch them and recommend to the manager that these guys be signed. They didn’t work with them on the training pitch and turn them into assets. That was the coaching staff who did that. The scouts found these guys, the coaching staff coached them, the manager made them top-class talents, and all these guys did was listen to offers and sell them on when they wanted to boost the bank balance.
So, what exactly did the directors do in that process that entitles them to claim the credit for the team filled with high-value players and the £40 million profit made on selling those players?
Cut through their PR bullshit, and you see that these guys are background boys and bean counters. That’s all they are. They sold sellable assets to willing buyers. That doesn’t get you the Nobel Prize for Economics. Junior accountants fresh out of the LSE could do that. Hell, barrow boys down at Candleriggs Market can sell stuff to willing buyers.
What makes these guys so special? Why are they so feted?
Nothing that they claim credit for is their accomplishment. This isn’t Apple, being run from the top down by a handful of visionaries; a football club runs from the manager down—that’s where the magic happens—and the job these people have, the only job, is, as Brian Clough once told his board at Derby, “to keep writing the cheques.”
I pointed out the other day that nobody calls the 1960s success story and the first nine in a row the board’s success; that’s Stein’s success, his and the players’.
But if you want a present-day equivalent, try this: nobody in sports journalism south of the border, ever equates the success at Manchester City to the Etihad Group and to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Why not? That’s his money that flows through the club and which has built its entire modern structure. No, who gets the credit? Pep Guardiola and the team he has assembled.
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan built City. None of our directors funds our club with their own money; they take money from Celtic, and as of last year, they take an ever-increasing amount of it out of Celtic. So why are they more entitled to credit than a guy like that who has sunk his and his family’s fortune into a club and genuinely built it up … and is perfectly happy to have the manager credited with having worked the miracle?
Likewise at Liverpool, where Klopp got all the glory. Perhaps he shouldn’t have?
By the standard our board wants to be judged by, none of it should have gone to him, since he was a mere hireling and an instrument of policy. And yet John Henry, the owner, is effusive and fulsome in his praise for Klopp and credits him with being the man who achieved it all.
Lawwell’s comments reeks of arrogance and ego. My friend contributed a piece for this blog the other day on entitlement; that statement stinks of entitlement and contempt for those who actually did score the goals, train the players pick the team and all the rest of it. The guy directly responsible for a lot of our success was sitting a handful of seats down from him and he must have felt like laughing out loud at that pompous bullshit.
These guys always want the credit but never want the blame. Like I said not that long ago, Rangers won the last three titles before they went out of business and nobody at the executive level at Celtic Park felt the need to throw themselves on the sword.
They happily doled the blame out to others; they had no problem sacking a manager and none of us complained; Mowbray was the guy in the dugout and those failures were mostly down to him. But Strachan pleaded for a striker in the Willo Flood window and didn’t get one and Ibrox won the first of those titles. Lennon got the gig after Mowbray but had to work with a hand tied behind his back. Nobody at boardroom level felt like the failure might be down to them.
In fact, Lawwell frequently turned up at the AGM in good form, cracking jokes at Ibrox’s expense. And look, the joke was on them the whole time.
Their club was a basket case, and virtually on its knees.
But see, that’s rather the point; when a club that’s on its knees can take three league titles in a row from yours, when you have three different bosses on that run, maybe, just maybe, that required a hint of introspection and a reconsideration of the policies under which the club was run.
And we didn’t get any of that.
Lawwell was right about one thing at last year’s EGM though; it wasn’t an accident that we posted a £40 million profit and were able to go boasting to the bank manager and everybody else about how well we were doing.
It’s just he seems to be a little bit unclear in his own mind, I think, where the credit for that belongs, because the reason that we made a £40 million profit is that Ange Postecoglou, still coming off the back of two transfer windows where his decisions and his network, much of the time working entirely outside of that of the club, had built in the spaces of that time a £100 million team which was largely still intact at that point and which had won us automatic qualification to the Champions League and a multi-million-pound jackpot from UEFA.
Note that I said that team was largely still intact because, of course, Giakoumakis and Juranovic were no longer there. And Ange Postecoglou himself was no longer there. Because this incredibly well-run organisation of ours couldn’t foresee at the midway point of the first campaign that this was a guy we had to lock in a room until he signed a multi-year deal.
Of course, by the time the chairman stood there at the AGM and gave that statement, there was no Jota at Celtic either. And it was his £25 million sale, on top of that Champions League money, that enabled the club to post that £40 million profit in the first place. And neither Lawwell nor a single member of the executive board had anything to do with any of that.
Their contribution was to bank the money, count the pennies, and accept offers for good players who the scouts had spotted, the coaches had coached, and the manager had managed to turn into assets.
And he wants us to forget, too, that Ange Postecoglou was not Plan A, but a hastily cobbled-together Plan B, and it burns me to this day that his hiring is still hailed as evidence of some genius on the part of Lawwell and other people on the board.
It was not some masterstroke.
It was a move made in a panic after yet another catastrophic failure at the boardroom level to close a deal with Eddie Howe, after they had let him keep us hanging on for months as if we were pitiful minnows and not a major institution.
None of that seems to matter to certain people.
But you know what? If they are insistent on giving this board credit for all the trophies and titles of the last decade or so, then great. I think that shows a colossal disrespect and disregard and even a certain contempt for the people who are responsible for them – Rodgers, Lennon, and Postecoglou – but yeah, maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of this.
Maybe instead of Jock Stein holding the European Cup outside Celtic Park, we should have, instead, a statue of Sir Robert Kelly, and whilst we’re commissioning that and removing the big man from his current place there, we should maybe think about taking down the one of Billy McNeil whilst we’re at it and put up one of a moustachioed Irish billionaire and his golf clubs.
After all, isn’t the success theirs … and not that of a mere manager and captain?
Hell, if we’re going to do that, why does a simple player get a statue? Let’s get Jimmy Johnstone out of there as well so that we can finally honour the man at the heart of all this modern success—Chairman Lawwell, the architect, the master, the genius.
It’s the least we can do to show our gratitude.
BRILLIANT!!!!