Celtic’s great wealth is not the reason Clement is floundering, and his own fans know it.

As regular readers will know, one of the things that annoys me most—but also kind of makes me laugh—is the ongoing obsession the manager across the city has with our club. I’ve mentioned before how he constantly points to our club’s wealth as the reason they’re struggling to keep up with us.

Everyone knows this is absolute nonsense, of course, but it’s a convenient fig leaf for him to hide behind. And he was at it again yesterday.

About a month ago, Brendan Rodgers decided to call out this tiresome excuse. He slammed the suggestion, saying all of Celtic’s success has been earned—that the success came first, and the money followed.

This is as true as anything Brendan has ever said. I’ve always been proud that we don’t rely on a sugar-daddy owner. I’ve always been proud that we’ve built our club in a sensible, structured, and sustainable way.

But it’s not even just this which makes his comments so ridiculous. They’re ridiculous because Celtic aren’t even the club Clement is really competing with right now.

The longer he’s allowed to retreat into this fantasy—that their league position is only because of our financial strength—the harder it’s going to be for anyone to mount a credible argument in his favour when their board finally meets to decide whether to sack him or not.

Yes, it’s absolutely true that Celtic has more money than their club. That’s a function of being better run for years now.

In fact, we’ve been a better-run club than them since long before the current incarnation of the Ibrox side even existed. For nearly three decades, we’ve outclassed whichever version of that club was playing out of Ibrox.

And yes, because we’re a better-run club, we can spend more. That allows us to build a squad of the size and quality we have, rotate that squad effectively, and keep players fresh and key personnel relatively injury-free.

But let me repeat: they aren’t really competing against us.

If you look at the two head-to-head league games this season, we won the home fixture 3-0, and they won theirs by the same scoreline. The Scottish League Cup final ended 3-3. These results have led some people to conclude there’s not much between the two teams. The truth is, there’s actually a huge gulf between them. But I use these stats to illustrate an important point Clement would rather everyone ignored.

His problems haven’t come from battles against Celtic. They’ve come from battles against everyone other than Celtic. If he thinks he can indefinitely excuse their abysmal away record in the league—against clubs operating with a fraction of their resources—he’s got another thing coming. His own fans aren’t daft enough to swallow that, even if some in the mainstream media think they are.

Clement cannot hide behind Celtic’s wealth as an excuse for his inability to win more of those games or secure the points they should be taking

An Ibrox manager—any Ibrox manager—is allowed to take his fans for fools in a way no Celtic boss would ever be permitted to do.

This is a classic example of that in full effect. Clement gets away with things that a Celtic manager would be absolutely crucified for. We can’t even use the excuse of clubs having greater resources when we play in Europe, where we frequently face sides assembled for four or five times what the Celtic squad cost.

Clement is the architect of his own bad situation. No club with such a poor away record should be looking at anything other than the failings within its own walls. That’s why Clement is where he is right now—in big trouble, facing the very real possibility that every game could be his last.

Yesterday, a hack at The Record published an astonishingly weak piece about how Clement is apparently safe for the season. And what was he basing this on? Inside briefings from Ibrox? No. He concluded it from the belief that a single victory—against Celtic—had bought Clement enough time to see out the campaign. Yet halfway down the page, he basically admitted that everyone involved realises Clement will be sacked if there’s a sufficiently bad run of results.

Talk about something coming from nothing. It’s an awful lot of words not to say very much. A whole lot of waffle to start with one point, reverse yourself entirely, and then end up saying what’s already perfectly obvious to everyone else. Clement is literally surviving week by week right now.

They have a massive game tonight—away to Dundee—with a number of key players missing. Raskin is out, most of their backline is unavailable, and they’re without their first-choice goalkeeper.

These absences will provide them with plenty of excuses if they fail to win.

But let’s not ignore the reality: the players they’ll put on that pitch—the starting XI and subs—will still cost far more than Dundee’s squad. That’s also been true of their recent matches against St Mirren, Motherwell, and Hibs. Those sides have inferior resources to the Ibrox club, and a better class of player by far.

Whilst none of their players would get into our team, almost all of them would be considered starters at most other clubs in the league.

So, Clement can invoke Celtic and our supposed “vast wealth” all he wants. He can do it all day, every day, if that’s what helps him sleep at night. But no one believes it. I doubt even he does. He knows full well what he’ll be judged on, and he knows the thread by which his tenure now hangs.

Celtic isn’t his biggest problem. His biggest problem is that he doesn’t know how to beat standard SPFL opposition. If he could get results against them week in, week out, he’d have nothing to worry about except Celtic. Only then could he even try to justify hiding behind our financial position or the strength of our squad.

This is just another pitiful Clement excuse for why he isn’t getting it done. And only a club completely obsessed with ours could let him get away with it for much longer.

Photo by Craig Williamson/SNS Group via Getty Images
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