Celtic fans are always amused when a name from the past appears on the horizon to give us a little pro-Ibrox spin.
On the other side of this city, there have been some of the stupidest people ever to get involved in senior football—anywhere in the country or, in fact, any country. Some of them have woven little myths around themselves, and some of those myths are tied up in a lot of personal torment and pain. None more so than a certain Nacho Novo.
Different people have different ways of handling rejection, and I guess it depends on several factors. If you’re thick-skinned, you can handle anything. If it’s something you don’t particularly care about, something you’re just chancing your arm on, then it really doesn’t have a downside.
It’s like asking out a girl you’ve just met in the pub—if she says no, what of it? You didn’t go in there that night with any specific intention. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Or maybe it’s like going for an audition for a movie or a play even though you’ve never acted in your life—just something you do for fun.
Something like that, you can shrug off rejection and take it on the chin.
But if it’s something you desperately want, if it’s something you’re really, really keen on, if it’s something that means a lot to you and you get rejected, then it can hit differently. Maybe it’s like going for a job you’ve worked really hard for or making a pitch for a big promotion. If you don’t get it, that can be crushing. I can see how that would hurt.
But most of us can handle even that, and very few of us are so thin-skinned that we spend the rest of our lives warped by it.
There’s a story about Jose Mourinho going for the Barcelona job and finding out they gave it to Pep Guardiola. The story goes that Mourinho was so devastated by that rejection that everything he did in his career afterward was built as the exact inverse of what Guardiola was doing at Barcelona. Their rivalry became legendary, and Mourinho considered his triumphs over Barcelona particularly sweet in the early part of his career.
Even that doesn’t come close to Nacho Novo. It doesn’t come close to the way he’s built his entire life around the lies he tells himself and others about how he rejected Celtic to sign for the club across the city. He even titled his ghastly autobiography I Said No Thanks. Even if the central conceit of it were true, it would still be one of the worst book titles in history.
But that’s the thing—that’s the book about his life.
That’s the central moment of his existence, as revealed in the title, and it’s categorically false. He’s built an entire fantasy around what actually happened to the extent that I think you could strap him to a lie detector and he’d probably pass.
Then again, he’s not a very trustworthy person, nor one with a particularly well-developed conscience, and people like that usually do well on lie detectors anyway.
We all know what really happened.
The story is on public record. He went to Celtic Park for talks. He made certain demands. We made him an offer that was not in line with those demands, and when he and his agent pushed for his terms rather than accepting ours, we told him he was free to go somewhere else. We didn’t think he was worth the money he wanted. We made an evaluation, had a specific number in mind, and we didn’t think he justified a penny more than that.
This wasn’t him rejecting Celtic.
This was Celtic refusing to overpay for a guy who was only ever going to be a squad player at best. And that has to hurt. That has to be painful, because everyone knows we were the club he wanted to sign for. He came to Celtic Park expecting the deal to be done. He came to Celtic Park dying to sign a contract, but he overestimated what we thought his worth was. When he found out that we didn’t think he was worth it, he ended up across the city instead.
The pain of that rejection by us is why a Spanish Catholic wholly embraced that club and every negative element of it, becoming one of the uber staunch. The pain of it is still so acute that he didn’t just reference it in his autobiography but actually titled the book based on the lie he tells himself about it all. He never stops mentioning it, even today, like someone who has long since stopped trying to convince others and now does it constantly because he’s still trying to convince himself.
He’s spent years telling himself that Celtic fans hate him because he chose them over us. It’s so preposterous. I’ll tell you about someone who did choose them over us: Dariusz Adamczuk, another player signed from Dundee. All these years on, nobody cares, and the reason nobody cares is that he never made a big deal about it. He never weaponised it against us. He never made it the central plank of his appeal to their supporters.
Novo, though, indulged in every negative action the worst of their supporters could indulge in. Not only did he embrace the We Are the People nonsense, but he also embraced loyalism, hung out with terrorists and sectarian murderers, and still does the whole bit to this day. He’s a loathsome human being. Would he be a better person if he hadn’t been rejected by us? That rejection clearly had an impact and turned him into a hateful person, so yes, probably.
So, why are we talking about him today? What’s the story? Why is he back in the news cycle? He’s back because he’s one of a number of people right now offering advice to Lennon Miller. I’ve written a lot about Miller, and I wish the media would leave the boy alone to play football and get on with his life before the transfer circus gets underway in January.
Novo has nothing to add to this conversation except telling Miller that if the chance comes, he should snub Celtic like Novo claims he did. It’s incredible to me that the bitterness remains after all these years. But the bitterness is what has defined his whole life since that moment.
What’s worse is that his “analysis”—if you can call it that—is completely wrong. He says Miller should pick them over us because he’ll play more games there.
It’s an argument we’ve heard before, but it’s laughable every time.
Brendan Rodgers has addressed this, Ange Postecoglou addressed it, Aiden McGeady recently addressed it—it’s always the same answer. If you want to play every week, there are clubs where you can do that. They just aren’t clubs that do big things.
But if you prove you’re the best, if you prove you can handle the pressure, then you’ll play every week, no matter where you are. Miller’s question isn’t about which club gives him guaranteed minutes—it’s about whether he’s good enough to fight for a place at a top club.
Celtic will have their own valuation of Miller’s worth. They won’t push the boat out beyond what they think is realistic. But everyone knows this: before the boy even sits down to talk to Celtic, the club will have to put serious money on the table to compensate Motherwell.
And this is where Novo’s intervention is so ridiculous.
Who’s writing the cheques that even gets Ibrox to the negotiating table? Who’s covering the cost of this transfer? Their directors have already said they can’t compete with Celtic in the transfer market and most sensible people seem to understand this.
But I have to remind myself who we’re dealing with here—someone who has built his life on a fantasy and ignores facts, logic, and truth at every turn. At his age, there’s no chance of that changing now. I’ll tell you this though; Miller is a smart, switched on kid with good people around him. He certainly doesn’t need a clown like this offering him “advice.”
Huns are worse than skint, being seriously in debt and existing prior to now on directors’ loans.
That is no longer available to them, so where will the money come from?
They are not able to compete in this market, despite what fannies like Novo say.
End of story.
His book should probably have been titled IF ONLY, seems his hatred of all things celtic is due to us seeing him as you say James, a squad player, not the superstar he imagined he was .
As for his nature hopefully no one has forgotten how he repaid his team mates kindness by allowing him into his home to stay , if you know, you know how this ended up with the said team mates life spiralling out of control.
A dirty sleekit bastard still to this day .
Odious little bastard, as he’s continually proved. Crossed the line of common decency numerous times. Absolutely lived off the attention he received from the ibrox support and that included joinin in the sick vitreol, with the completely moronic element among them. Untrustworthy individual. Even Chris Sutton called out his character.
Nasty Novo is an obnoxious wee toad, a hateful hun full of bitterness and a completely horrible human being? One of his most memorable vilest moments was when he bared his arse to the Aberdeen fans, men women and children in the Pitoddrie Main stand. It was swept under the carpet as the SFA did nothing about that outrage and I reckon ii was because there were no complaints from the Dons fans as the sight of his sphincter was much more preferable than seeing his ugly mush!