Celtic is trapped in a 20 year cycle of stagnation.

In 1966, a guy called Peter Drucker — already famous as the thinker who could explain why some institutions succeed while others fail — wrote one of the best business books ever published. He called it The Effective Executive. It is still read across business, public service, politics and every field where leadership actually matters.

Drucker acknowledged the value of intelligence, charm and the ability to finesse people — the soft skills and, yes, the capacity to bluff. He said that the rarest skill in any organisation is effectiveness. That is as true today as it was then.

Management’s duty, he argued, is to ask what the company needs and what matters most. On the purpose of a company, he was more direct than anyone before or since: “The purpose of a company is to create customers.”

Not merely to find customers, but to create them.

Everything else flows from that.

Profits, market share, reputation — whatever you want to point to as evidence of success — arise from a simple truth: a company exists to create and keep customers. Which means it must prize excellence, service and customer value above everything else. Lose sight of that and the enterprise becomes a self-satisfied, directionless bureaucracy, divorced from the very people it is supposed to serve.

It is hard to imagine a better description of Celtic Football Club in 2025. What we have at Celtic is efficiency without effectiveness.

Hand Drucker a copy of our latest accounts and he’d be impressed for about a minute. He would see turnover of £143.6 million and profit of £33.9 million and he’d recognise the competence it takes to keep the machine humming.

If he listened to some of the people around this club they’d call it a modern business miracle — evidence of genius in the harsh world of Scottish football.

A lot of bean-counters would nod along.

Drucker would not. He’d flip the pages and ask a single, devastating question: What about the customer?

The first test of a healthy organisation is not how much money it makes but how well it creates, retains and grows its base — and how well it serves those people’s needs and interests. That is what keeps tills ringing and people coming back.

On that test, Celtic fails. We are not growing our base, we’re milking it.

We are edging from shearing sheep to skinning them. Worse, we are doing it at a time when disposable income is shrinking and the perception of club contempt is growing.

That is a recipe for disaster.

Our board appears to be the last group in the building to recognise it.

Anyone fresh out of business school could tell you that when your customer base is already squeezed, the last thing you do is insult it.

Drucker would be appalled. The club has turned the support into a static, captive audience — a group it assumes will pay no matter how it is treated.

There is no strategy to reach the next generation. We have no creative campaign designed to interest people who wouldn’t otherwise pay attention. That is obscene when you consider Celtic’s origin story and the magic that surrounds this club — the mythos they should be building, developing and sharing with the world.

Take a single example. The board does not believe there is a commercial case for a Celtic Museum.

Is a narrow commercial case really the only reason to do it?

A monument to our history would draw those who already love this club, and it would be a magnet for those who don’t know they love it yet. That is how you create customers — by turning the story into an experience.

The founding of Celtic, the social purpose of the club, the European nights, the Lisbon Lions, the heroes and the heartbreaks — all of it is the raw material of identity. The fact that the board sees this purely in transactional terms tells you everything about what is wrong here.

They are obsessed with numbers, obsessed with profits, obsessed with the illusion of success — and they measure it by all the wrong metrics.

So, let’s look at the numbers in the way they refuse to do, because that is where the truth lives. You will not find a business that is growing in any meaningful sense.

You will not find a strategy that reaches beyond the current customer base — a base they are actively pushing away.

Go back twenty years.

In 2006 our turnover was £57 million. In 2025 it is £143.6 million. On paper that is astonishing growth. To appreciate what it represents you have to adjust for inflation. At today’s prices, that £57 million is about £93 million. Real growth over twenty years is therefore roughly 50%.

As we will see, even that can be accounted for without attributing much to genuine innovation at Parkhead.

During the same period UEFA prize money has tripled. Transfer fees have quadrupled. Wages have spiralled to levels unimaginable two decades ago. Judge Celtic’s current revenues by those standards and the picture changes. We have not grown at all.

Between 2006 and 2015 — the Lawwell decade — Celtic’s income in real terms actually fell. Wrapped in the rhetoric of prudence, the club delivered stasis, not progress. It was efficient at maintaining itself and ineffective at moving forward.

Something did change in 2016. The curve finally bent upwards.

That was not because the board discovered innovation.

It was because football’s economics changed and because Brendan Rodgers was appointed at just the right moment. Fan confidence in the direction of the club soared at just the point where European prize money and TV revenues started to make success more lucrative than ever.

The wider market exploded off it. Champions League payout money began to soar just as the transfer market spun into madness. For the better part of a decade our executives have ridden that wave while contributing next to nothing to the expansion, growth or development of Celtic as a business.

We are here because of inflation, not innovation.

That is why the modern era looks prosperous. Turnover soaring. Profits hit records. Look closer and the mirage shimmers.

If Champions League qualification in 2024 paid what it did in 2006 (inflation-adjusted), record revenues collapse. The same is true for 2025. We modelled it: 2024 drops from £127.7m (2025 pounds) to £111.9m; 2025 drops from £143.6m to £111.9m. Those are not rounding errors. They are the inflationary lift of UEFA’s modern prize structure, not the product of a smarter Celtic.

Go back to 2017 and 2018, Rodgers’ first peak. Strip UEFA’s inflation and those seasons live around £76m. The difference between the “record” numbers and the counterfactual is nothing Celtic did; it is the money sloshing through Europe.

When you remove UEFA’s prize-money inflation and the transfer bubble, the core business — matchday, commercial, sponsorship — has not grown in any meaningful way since the mid-2000s. The wilful rejection of a growth strategy is clearest where the club refuses to invest in infrastructure at Celtic Park.

They talk about the cost of expanding the stadium.

Expansion is not a cost without a benefit. Build more capacity and you can host more people. The deeper truth is awkward. End the waiting list and supporters have a choice — buy or don’t buy season books — and the club loses leverage.

Worse, if uptake doesn’t fill the ground every week, this board has no idea how to create demand. It does not know how to create customers because it treats its present customers with contempt. That is why they maintain scarcity. It masks the failure to inspire.

For all the talk of global reach, Celtic remains provincial in its imagination.

We are a big fish in a small pond and the fish is content to swim in circles. Other clubs build academies abroad and take youth development seriously across borders. When they link up with others, it is to exchange players, ideas and innovation.

We do not. We barely use our power in Scotland to force a better broadcast deal, never mind carve out our own distribution in new markets. Scottish football is going under and dragging us with it. The board is content to go down with the ship.

Elsewhere, clubs launch streaming platforms and build digital fan experiences. Celtic is only now talking about an app. You can already picture the half-measure version. We’re only now hiring a head of commercial development who might finally prioritise this. We still rely on season books, shirt sales and nostalgia.

Ask yourself the Drucker question: if you were not already interested in football, what is Celtic doing to reach you? Our supporters — the people — do more to sell Celtic’s values, through solidarity campaigns and community work, than our directors have ever done. The club does not even seem to appreciate it.

Go back to the museum idea for a moment and imagine taking someone to their first game, then to a world-class exhibition of Celtic’s origin, purpose and triumphs. Imagine letting them feel the place as a living story.

That is how you create customers. That is how you lock in the next generation — by making them part of the myth. The people in charge cannot grasp it.

We do not run campaigns that captivate outsiders or explain what Celtic is.

Paulina, who lives in Poland, discovered Celtic by accident.

She was passionate about Scotland and Glasgow and found us that way. The club did not “get” her. She stumbled on us. You will struggle to find a more passionate supporter. Her story is a microcosm: so many come to Celtic through life’s side doors — not through anything the club has done to make them feel welcome.

When she visited last month, we were at the Hibs game. She loved the day, even though the football wasn’t great.

She noticed what so many notice: the matchday experience is walking through a turnstile and sitting in a seat.

The club does nothing to sell that as a bigger moment or experience.

Paulina and fans like her would embrace anything we built.

They would visit the museum every trip.

She has been on the Stadium Tour twice to my once.

We went to the Celtic musical two nights before the game, and to feel more connected she bought a full training kit in the new Queen Street store. If it had been left to the club to capture her interest, she would never have found her way to us.

We do not sell ourselves globally.

Right now, our campaigning for Palestine has opened a door to an audience that believes in the same values this club was born to represent. The board won’t walk through it. There is potential gold dust here — financial and moral — and they cannot see it.

Celtic is a mythic club. The whole world should know who we are and what we stand for. The people in charge either don’t want to sell that or don’t know how; either way, we’re neglecting a vast opportunity which is wide open to us.

They are not doing strategy, they are doing maintenance.

This board are not trying to move us forward. All they are doing is protecting what they think they have, and they are failing even at that because they are doing it on the backs of the current fan base, who they seem pathologically determined to antagonise.

Are they doing anything to keep the next generation invested?

What is the median age of a Celtic supporter? Why is our digital presence not twenty times bigger than it is? We are still posting dated content that would embarrass mid-table English clubs. For all the talk of modernisation, there is none of it where it counts. We are an analogue club in a digital age.

Drucker again: the customer is the foundation of any enterprise.

Lose touch with them and you lose your reason to exist. Jock Stein put it in our language: football without fans is nothing.

If we lose the fans and fail to create new ones we are already dying. It may take a while to notice, but the direction of travel is clear.

For twenty years this club has leached every penny it can from the same sources.

Strip out inflation, UEFA’s prize money and transfer fees and the revenue line is flat. Everyone knows what a flatline means on a hospital monitor. This is not growth. It is extraction. We are richer on paper and not better in any way that matters.

A rising tide lifts all boats, Kennedy said.

That is what you see in our accounts — the world reshaping itself around us while we stand still. Revenues increased because the economy of football expanded. We have not built a new revenue stream in an age. This board did not extend our global footprint. We did not improve our digital presence or the experience of the ordinary supporter. This club harvests loyalty. It does not create customers.

Look at the evidence. The turnover curve mirrors UEFA’s prize curve almost perfectly. Profits rely increasingly on the sale of key football assets, not operational strength. Worse, we are flirting with a transfer policy defined by “value extraction” rather than squad improvement. That risks the very qualification cash the model depends on.

It tests supporter loyalty while endangering the income stream the accountants brag about. This is what Drucker meant when he wrote that efficiency is meaningless unless you are doing the right things.

Profit is the result of doing the right things. Growth and success come from creating new fans, from making new people care as deeply as we do and helping them belong. The next generation has to love Celtic as much as this one, or the club’s future is already being written. To bastardise Chuck Palahniuk: on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every failing business drops to zero.

This club has not truly grown in twenty years. The numbers prove it.

Without a change of direction, we will be fortunate to recognise the place twenty years from now. We will not be maintaining our position then; we’ll be trying desperately to claw it back, from a virtual standing start. The longer these people remain at the helm, the harder the turn becomes and the longer the road back gets.

This club desperately needs renewal, and it needs to happen soon. We need a new plan. We need people who can execute it. If this board doesn’t have the capacity for that, and if they truly love Celtic, they need to make way for someone who can.