There is a basic rule in business, politics, sport and almost every human exchange worth discussing, and which the Celtic board has staggeringly overlooked. If you are trying to sell something, you do not begin by telling everyone why it is difficult to sell.
You do not walk into a room of investors and say, “our product is viewed as inferior, our market is weak, our competitors are richer, and frankly we are not sure we can close the deal.” Yet this is increasingly how Celtic sound.
That is the point getting lost in the noise around agents, English Championship wages and persuading players to come to Scotland. This is not really about one signing, one window or one negotiation. It is about optics. It is about projection. It is about the picture this club now presents of itself to the outside world.
And the picture is awful.
Celtic are one of the great football institutions in Europe. Not because of television money or balance-sheet boasting, but because of history, culture, support, pressure, trophies, European nights and the emotional scale of the club. That should be the pitch.
Instead, we get public mood music which makes us sound like a club explaining its own limitations before anyone has even asked the question. We hear about agents. We hear about England. We hear about wages elsewhere. We hear about the difficulty of convincing players that Celtic is worth choosing.
Imagine any other business doing that.
Imagine Apple launching a new phone by telling everyone that Samsung has better screens. Imagine a hotel trying to fill rooms by explaining that the city it is based in is not attractive enough. Imagine a university trying to recruit students by saying brighter young people would rather go elsewhere.
You would think they had lost their minds.
Yet Celtic’s senior figures appear comfortable with this kind of language around the football club. They may call this realism. It is not realism. It is defeatism. And defeatism, when repeated loudly enough, becomes branding.
We are not simply failing to project strength. We are actively projecting weakness. We are training the market to see our drawbacks rather than our positives.
If you keep telling the world that your marketplace is weak and remind everybody that there are better places to be, you’re dooming yourself out of the gate. Because you are telling the world that not only do we think we cannot compete but that we don’t even have the will any longer to try.
And once that idea takes hold, it does damage to confidence, negotiations, reputation and the club’s sense of itself. It tells every external audience that Celtic’s own leaders do not fully believe in the thing they are selling.
A serious Celtic executive should be walking into every conversation with pride. Nobody is saying we can outspend the Premier League. But we can offer something real, something powerful, something many clubs in richer leagues cannot manufacture.
At Celtic, matches matter. Trophies matter. Europe matters. A player can come here and become important. He can play under pressure, win medals, face Champions League opponents and walk into a stadium that feels alive in a way most stadiums never do.
So why do our own people sometimes talk as if all the cards are stacked against us? The defeatism of this club is appalling to witness. Our leaders lack a vision; we all know that. We are now seeing the full consequences of it. They approach clubs, players and agents and they cannot come up with coherent answers as to why they should choose to do business with us. They have no idea how to paint a positive picture.
They sound like men who have absorbed every insult ever thrown at Scottish football and turned those insults into policy.
The optics stink. The whole this club presents itself right now stinks. Imagine O’Neill had turned us down. What was the pitch to the new manager going to sound like? “We play in a crap league. We have no money. We have no real long-term plan. So what do you say? Want to take a chance on us?”
They make Celtic look timid. We are a club run by people who see the limits before the possibilities. Worse, they make us look like a club whose executives do not understand the power of the institution they are supposed to represent.
Celtic should never plead poverty when we are not poor. We should never advertise weakness when we have strength. We should never talk down our own marketplace so often that we end up doing our rivals’ work for them.
This is reputational self-harm.
If the people running Celtic cannot understand that, then they do not just have a transfer problem. They have a leadership problem, a confidence problem and a basic sales problem.
Because the first rule of selling anything is simple. Believe in what you are selling. And they don’t and that is absolutely crystal clear and the tragedy of this club is that it is so rich in history that it’s the easiest sales pitch in the world.
Except for these jokers.
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Sack the board are Desmond get tae fuck
Henderson is doing a Ratner. He should be sacked
Who is Henderson ???
Who are Henderson/Ratner??? Is that Boston Celtics stuff??
I assume Ratner is a reference to Gerald Ratner. As for Henderson, your guess is as good as mine.
The collective are playing the same game of poker as nicholson, moaning and whinging about problems but doing nothing constructive to resolve them.
When I was a Project Manager and I heard someone at the morning meeting (usually the safety guy) saying “we’ve got a problem” I said “tell me your solution first and I’ll try and guess what the problem is”.
Why would a “Project Manager” introduce another perceived problem (in your mind “the collective”) into a discussion that has nothing to do with them?
Nicholson is now on record confirming he can’t perform the duties of his role. We all knew this, but the fact he has said the quiet part out loud is staggering. Any competent business would have removed him a long time ago, he is the walking definition of the Peter principle, promoting way above his limited skill set.
Good piece, Shame that the people your referring to don’t listen & don’t care .?
Ironically enough they know well enough how to sell the club to the season ticket holders. The annual blurb always tells of excitement, history, community and togetherness.
It tends to avoid mentioning visiting an increasingly dilapidated stadium with unexplained water leaks, toilets from the last century, catering of sub-McDonalds standard, playing in a tinpot league where most of the visiting diddy teams will just park the bus and hope or a point, getting drenched and frozen going back and forward to games in the middle of the miserable Scottish winter in an area with shocking public transport where you don’t want to be lingering too long after the game.
Two scenarios, to very different approaches to selling it: one to fans, one to players. The only difference is one scenario sees money coming IN the other involves money going back OUT again, which seems to be the part they don’t like.
Has f all to do with that mate, just basic human nature and psychology. The fear of missing out. Pure and simple. Dont blame the support , blame the fuckers that created the conditions that caused the fear.
Do that and i might listen to what you say, they have you when you join the blame game. Be the solution mate, not the problem. Dont be idiots like dangal n broony et al blaming support over a piece of paper? More than that .
If DD doesn’t sack Nicholson after his admission then he should really question his alleged love for Celtic, because not sacking him smacks of sabotage, proving that his “love” for Celtic is not genuine.
In the name of God, DD, please JUST GO!!
No Celtic supporter anywhere, or at anytime, would refer to the Ibrox mob as a ‘great club.’ Desmond is a fifth columnist from Dublin4, doing everything he can to destroy the club from within. We all know where the fat lad’s loyalties belong…and it’s not Celtic Park.
Hail Hail.
Hail Hail.
Every day that goes by this board plumbs new depths of uselessness. It all reminds me of this aphorism: “And out of the darkness a Voice said unto me ‘Smile and be happy for things could be worse.’ So I smiled and was happy and behold things did get worse.”
James, there are only so many ways that you can say that our board are a useless pile of shite and you must be running out of alternatives. Although I agree with all that you are saying, without a constructive method of resolving the situation I am finding the whole dialogue surrounding the board repetitive and tedious. There seem to be no clever solutions and I am at a loss as to where we are headed.
However two or three articles a day saying the exact same thing is soul destroying.
I just couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t suggest any solutions that I believe would actually work, but I do long for some positive vibe. Winning the double was great, but it was more a combination of relief and disbelief when we did it, rather than pure joy. I follow this blog daily, but Johnny, you’re right. We all know what they are and I genuinely believe nothing we could do would impact these guys. They’re here until they themselves decide to go.
Don’t give up your season ticket but just don’t go to the matches until Nicholson has gone. DD will get the point when the stadium is empty.
…. Ooops Nicholson – brain dead Friday ?
I agree with above comments, we have exhausted the criticism of the board. If we don’t have a solution to the problem we need to try to find one instead of repeating the same rhetoric. Selling the STs as quickly as we did certainly didn’t help.
If I was a young player, Celtic academy included, I would not wish a career in the SPFL due to the religious racism attached to football in Scotland and our board certainly do nothing to call this out or do anything about it. The SNP do nothing about it. If I was an agent I wouldn’t consider putting a young player in that arena.
Yeah 3 or 4 articles a day every day saying how shite the board are has become monotonous and tedious
The unprecedented success over the last 15 years surely counts for something
You only have to look at clubs like Benfica Porto Ajax Feyenoord and the rest who were once European giants Is it because they have shite boards as well or is it other factors that have seen them fall down the pecking order
Celtics record signing is £12m which is chicken feed to clubs like even Bournemouth and Fulham never mind the top teams in the EPL
Strengths Weakness Opportunities and Threats should all be analysed and a more balanced argument as to the future presented
We didn’t have any problems signing players when McKay was CEO, and Big Ange was here. Those first two windows were the best that we had in years, or since. The difference? There was no bastard named Lawwell anywhere near the club. Nicholson appears, and it’s same old, same old.
Hail Hail.
The scary thing is MON seems to be buying into Nicholsons excuses saying sign and develope young players,that’s exactly what the board want.Buy them cheap,devolope sell and make a tidy profit.
Never mind making the team the best it can b2.
Please Martin don’t fall for the boards bullshit.
We can’t get rid of the board if they don’t want to go unless we vote them out. Lord Haughey’s crew want to buy shares to give fans a voice. Something can’t be bought unless it’s being sold. CSL who were started by Mr Smillie and Mr Low want to unite small shareholders and find shares that have been dormant and will invite shareholders to support recommendations. This sounds a better way forward and is similar to the Celtic Trust who have been around for a long time and have always stood up for fans against corporate nonsense. The collective are doing nothing but complain and it’s getting us nowhere. We need something that uses the power of shareholders and fans.
I would expect our recruitment team to run on the basis of having realistic options lined up and warmed up – being players for positions we need at a price point we can manage and a willingness of the player to join Celtic. And to have multiple ranked options for the position we are looking to fill such that if we can’t reach agreement for #1 we move quickly to #2.
A simple spreadsheet would tell you the art of the possible across the 4/5/6 positions we are looking to fill.
If MN hasn’t instigated something similar then he should be sacked for negligence. And those in the recruitment team should also be sacked.
As has been said by others, for a £900k salary the job isn’t meant to be easy.
My prediction, come the start of the season. Either Nicholson will be gone or O’Neill will be gone.