A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece on Graham Souness and how his behaviour has become increasingly erratic, detached from reality. I argued that the people around him should be concerned enough to get him off the air for a while, and perhaps a lot longer.
This same logic applies to Hugh Keevins, whose commentary has been like this for far longer. Keevins is out there like few other people in the media. The Ancient Embarrassment should have cashed in his chips a long time ago. What does he bring to the discourse?
Not a goddamned thing.
Today’s column from him is especially incoherent. Someone forwarded it to me, along with another piece he’d published the day before. Neither article is up to much, but in the one published yesterday he at least stumbles onto an amusing truth.
In today’s pieces, he fixates on a supposed minority of Celtic fans who still haven’t forgiven Brendan Rodgers for leaving the club for Leicester. If these people exist at all—and I suspect they’re largely a figment of Keevins’ imagination—they hardly deserve attention.
Any fans in this category are an absolute minority, and the vast majority couldn’t care less about their opinion. Honestly, I suspect they exist more in Keevins’ head than in the real world. And given that head, well, it never held that many marbles in the first place.
Keevins’ work is mostly drivel. He seems to think that his tiny group of radio station callers represent the broader Celtic fanbase. A caller complains about the manager, and Keevins takes that as a sign of some deep-rooted dissatisfaction across the entire support. It’s ludicrous.
In the other article, he goes on about Dave King, hinting that King will make a big move if Sevco lose to Aberdeen. What is he hoping for here—the Pulitzer Prize? It’s obvious. Anyone with a basic understanding of King knows that he’ll wait for the moment of maximum vulnerability before he strikes. But King, as far as his influence goes, is finished. He tried to call for an AGM to rally the fans, and the club wisely ignored him.
Keevins, who claims to have his finger on the pulse of Scottish football, doesn’t seem to understand either the Celtic fanbase or the state of things across the city.
King has already played his best hand, and it only worked so long as the board didn’t respond. The moment they pushed back, he was out of moves.
There will undoubtedly be more posturing, especially if Sevco lose to Aberdeen on Wednesday, which will push the club to the brink.
However, anyone could make that observation—it’s painfully obvious. Come Thursday, if Sevco lose, the club will be in full-blown crisis mode, and a managerial change will be the only potential remedy. People everywhere will seize the moment, myself included.
But Keevins seems to think King has some masterstroke up his sleeve.
King can’t force anyone’s hand here; he can’t muscle his way back onto the board. He can call for an AGM but only they can grant him one. Even calling in his debt would be a Pyrrhic victory, potentially driving the club into administration, which would hardly make him popular.
So what “master plan” does Keevins think King will execute?
Sevco is a public company—there are legal limitations. All the noise King makes in the press won’t alter a single material fact about his shareholding or the board’s opposition to him. Only a well-orchestrated, coherent PR campaign could possibly change things over time, but that’s a sustained effort, not a last-minute flurry and he does not have the patience for that.
Expecting Keevins to explain any of this is like looking for fairies at the bottom of the garden. The man isn’t a journalist; he fancies himself as a shock jock, but the only shock here is that someone’s still willing to pay him a salary.
As I said at the top, Keevins does stumble across something accurate here.
He touches on a rather interesting fact—although it’s no great secret. I don’t think he fully grasps it, but he at least sees the rough outline when he calls King “the man who plays the Celtic card.” Because, in reality, that is King’s only card.
It’s the only way he knows to rally Ibrox fans behind him: by holding up the spectre of Celtic overtaking them in the trophy count, challenging the so-called “Survival Lie” that’s central to the club’s identity. King knows that Celtic surpassing them would be an existential crisis.
Keevins half acknowledges—and half understands—that King is utterly consumed by Celtic. King spends nearly every waking moment fretting over what Celtic are doing, what we’ve achieved, and where we’re headed. He’s constantly watching our club, and it terrifies him. King only resurfaced now because he senses his own grim prophecy collapsing around him. It was supposed to be Celtic who folded like a house of cards after an Ibrox title win, not them.
Though King is obsessed with Celtic and haunted by his legacy—a legacy that’s already set in stone and beyond his control—the irony is that he refuses to acknowledge the role he played in his own club’s decline. It’s his decisions, since their promotion to the top flight, that have nearly crippled them.
Last night, I covered what UEFA’s regulations reveal about King’s tenure. It was explicitly under his and his board’s watch that they reached the point where 70-75% of their earnings were being burned up on player and coaching wages. This wasn’t some fluke; it was down to choices made under King’s direction, which drove the club to the brink.
And yet, through all this, King still looks to shift the blame. He obsesses over what we’re doing while refusing to accept that his own actions laid the groundwork for the turmoil they now face. At the end of the day, we’re the itch King can’t scratch, the unyielding fixation on his mind.
So while I won’t give Keevins much credit—this is hardly news to anyone paying attention—the fact that he even acknowledges King’s obsession with Celtic brings me a great deal of satisfaction and, if I’m honest, not a little amusement.