Celtic’s CEO is no genius, no matter what some idiotic hacks might say.

Picture the scene: thirty years from now.

A smart, inquisitive kid is being taken to Celtic Park for his first-ever visit. The sort who loves history, the kind who asks too many questions.

As they stroll along the Celtic Way, the kid pauses, distracted by one of the towering advertising screens lining the path. The screen displays an ad for a new history book about America.

The cover is striking: a huge granite statue of a man sitting on a chair.

It’s Donald Trump.

The kid stares at it, brow furrowed. He’s seen that image before, of course. Most kids have.

But this one’s sharper than most, and he remembers that it used to be called the Lincoln Memorial, before the rewriting of history really hit its stride.

His guardian nudges him, and they continue up the Celtic Way towards the frontage of the 100,000-seater Celtic Park. Along the way, they pass a collection of statues commemorating the club’s greats. The first one stops the kid in his tracks.

It’s a grinning, moustachioed man holding a set of golf clubs.

The kid recognises him immediately; all Celtic fans do. Dermot Desmond.

But the kid is puzzled. How did an absentee investor—who, as history notes, never spent a penny of his own money on the club aside from buying shares—get a statue here? What makes it worse is what the kid knows used to stand there: the statue of Brother Walfrid, the club’s founder.

The next statue perplexes him even more. It’s of a man holding aloft the European Cup. But that’s not Billy McNeill on the plinth. It’s a man in a suit, a bit soft around the waistline.

The plaque reads Peter Lawwell. The kid knows the name, of course. And he knows that Peter Lawwell’s grandson is the current chairman of the board. But still, a statue? Here?

They walk on, and the third spot stops him cold. There’s no statue at all—just an empty plinth. The kid knows the history of this space too. It’s where the statue of Jimmy Johnstone, Celtic’s greatest ever player, used to stand. The reason for its absence remains shrouded in controversy.

There are whispers online, the kid knows, from fans and critics alike. They call the spot The Memorial to the Invisible CEO. The plaque on the plinth offers little clarification. It reads simply: Michael Nicholson.

A dark fantasy? Not for some people.

Their ideal future apparently.

Remember; for every person who thinks “dystopia” there are some who will see Nirvana.

For everyone who mourns the death of liberal democracy there will be others who will welcome the dictatorship.

And there are a handful of people will embrace anything.

It’s incredible what you read online sometimes.

Honestly, if you took some of it seriously, you’d think the only people standing between Celtic and oblivion were the current directors. According to certain people, every shred of success we’ve had over the past decade is solely down to their unmatched brilliance.

Take this morning’s Record, for example. There’s a piece in it by Copeland, starting with an assertion so laughable even Keith Jackson would have binned it as a premise.

“Michael Nicholson masterminds Celtic ‘crazy economics’ as chief told he should be the CHANCELLOR for stunning £42m feat” reads the hysterical headline.

I read that first, wondering “Who in their right mind came up with this shit?”

But curiosity got the better of me, so I dived in.

And as always, I should have known better.

Only someone completely detached from reality could spin the idea that Michael Nicholson is some sort of genius based on the Jota and Kieran Tierney deals.

Then when I read the opening it all clicked.

Of course. My mistake wasn’t in reading the piece—it was in underestimating my own naivety in not immediately realising who had come up with that bizarre, lunatic assertion.

Only one person in Scottish football journalism could churn out something so absurd: the same guy who pens guff for the Sunday Mail.

This is a man who should have been put out to pasture two decades ago, and frankly, probably should never have been allowed near the field in the first place. I’ve been following the game for decades, and I genuinely cannot recall a single meaningful contribution he’s made to Scottish football journalism in all that time.

For people like this, I just want to scream in their faces the things that are obvious to all of us—normal, rational, reasonable, right-thinking people.

Yes, we sold those two players for £25 million each, and yes, that was good business. But let’s not pretend it was anything extraordinary. These were good players sold during an era of overinflated transfer market prices.

Clubs came in and paid the going rate. What’s so special about that?

Where does the board get any credit for it?

None of these guys ever trained a player, developed a player, or changed a player’s position in a game to make them more viable. All they did was wait for offers to come in. That’s it.

That’s their contribution. Michael Nicholson did nothing more than sell saleable assets at a reasonable price. Your average shopkeeper does that every single day.

As for bringing those players back—one on a free transfer and the other at a knockdown rate—does he really get credit for that?

Let’s be honest. Kieran Tierney is available at a reduced rate because he’s been injured a lot and is out of favour with his current club. He’s coming back to Celtic because the pull of the club he loves is too great to resist.

I’m not sure what Nicholson did to bring that about unless he’s got a Kieran Tierney voodoo doll and has been snapping its legs now and again.

And Jota? He failed in Saudi Arabia because, from the start, it was obviously the wrong move for him. He went chasing the money—fair play to him for admitting that much.

But when that move failed, and he ended up at Rennes, and who could have foreseen that deal collapsing too? A change in management did for him there. Once again, I’m not sure how Michael Nicholson had anything to do with it.

It’s pure luck that these two players are available at the same time.

To believe otherwise is to believe in the benign version of the Ibrox fan conspiracy theories I’ll be mocking later on.

If people want to know what Michael Nicholson’s contribution really is, they should look at what I wrote this morning. He and the rest of the board have presided over the building of a scouting department that the manager clearly does not trust.

Look at the signings of Tierney, who he’s worked with before, and Jota, who he was looking forward to working with when he arrived here. Whatever other options the scouting department has given him, he doesn’t like them.

He has his own judgment, and he trusts that more than he trusts the board’s.

The genius of Michael Nicholson and his peers can be summed up thus: they sold our best striker just before the final Champions League game. They sold him without having a replacement already in the building.

They sold him while he was still under contract, simply because he wanted to go.

It makes you wonder what contracts are even for anymore.

If, by the end of this window, all we have to show for it are two players who have been here before—brought in because the manager has no faith in the scouting department’s other options—or if we’re moving Maeda into the middle as a makeshift striker, or even worse, if we’re developing another club’s player on loan for six months instead of buying the quality the manager needs, that will be Michael Nicholson’s legacy.

Let me tell you what some of these people overlook.

It’s easy—easy—to swell the coffers of an organisation when you’re asset-stripping.

And unless we emerge from this month stronger than we went into it, that’s how it’s going to be seen by a large number of our supporters: as an asset-stripping window.

It doesn’t take genius to do that. It’s corporate vandalism. But I wouldn’t expect the stupidest person in Scottish sports journalism to know the difference.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

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