Celtic’s crisis is an accountability crisis.
Sometimes you need someone with absolutely no dog in the fight to say it.
No Celtic background, no agenda and no axe to grind with Dermot Desmond, Michael Nicholson or anyone else inside Celtic Park. Just somebody looking at Celtic as a football business and asking a question many of us have been asking for years:
What exactly is this club trying to achieve?
Charlie Methven, the former Sunderland executive director who is now involved at Charlton Athletic and co-hosts The Business of Sport, has delivered one of the most brutal assessments of Celtic’s business model I’ve heard from someone outside our support.
And I’ll nail my colours to the mast straight away.
I agree with an awful lot of it.
The line which jumped out immediately was this:
“They basically bake in their own failure as part of their business model.”
That sounds incredibly harsh.
But is it wrong?
Methven’s argument isn’t that Celtic deliberately want to lose football matches. Of course they don’t. His point, as I understand it, is that Celtic have created a financial model so capable of absorbing sporting failure that the consequences of failing don’t appear to force any meaningful change.
He actually goes further, saying:
“They’ve built an entire business model out of failure.”
Again, forget whether you like Charlie Methven for a minute.
Listen to the argument.
Celtic have suffered Champions League qualifying eliminations against AEK Athens, Cluj, Ferencvaros, Midtjylland, Kairat and now LASK across recent years.
Different managers, different players, different opponents.
Same football club.
Indeed, the LASK catastrophe made it six consecutive failures to reach the Champions League proper through the qualifying route.
At what point are supporters allowed to stop treating these as individual disasters and start asking whether something fundamentally isn’t working?
That’s where Methven absolutely nails it for me.
His criticism of Celtic’s transfer strategy could practically have been lifted from discussions we’ve had on the Bhoycie Bus for years.
Celtic sell players, bank the money and then seemingly wait for opportunities towards the end of the transfer window.
Methven identifies the glaring problem:
“The European qualifying games happen before the end of the transfer window.”
Exactly.
This isn’t complicated.
You can tell me all about transfer-market value, or why prices become more attractive closer to deadline day.
Or you can spend your time telling me agents are difficult, clubs don’t want to sell and deals take time.
I understand all of that.
But Celtic know when the Champions League qualifiers are.
They aren’t sprung on us every August as some enormous UEFA surprise.
We know months in advance.
Yet once again we’ve watched Celtic enter the most financially significant matches of their season with work still needing done.
Then LASK happened.
Celtic were 3-0 ahead from Glasgow, went 1-0 up in Austria and somehow managed to lose the tie 5-4 on aggregate.
Martin O’Neill deserves criticism for that. The players deserve plenty as well.
However, Celtic’s problems didn’t begin when LASK scored their first goal.
They began much earlier.
Who built the squad and who determines the recruitment structure?
Which person decides when Celtic move for players and what they’re prepared to pay?
Who decided it was acceptable to reach another Champions League qualifier without everything the manager required?
Those are boardroom questions.
And Methven isn’t simply talking about transfers.
He questions the entire football operation, including the absence of a technical director and the influence Dermot Desmond exercises despite being a non-executive director. His description of Celtic’s structure was frankly astonishing:
“It’s so dysfunctional as to be almost unfathomable.”
That should sting.
“But look what happened at Sunderland…”
I’ve already seen the obvious response to Methven’s comments.
Sunderland.
People don’t like his record there. They watched Sunderland ’Til I Die. They remember how that ownership period ended and therefore, apparently, everything he says about Celtic can immediately be put in the bin.
I’m not having that.
For me, that’s playing the man instead of playing the ball.
Methven was part of the consortium which took over Sunderland in 2018 following consecutive relegations, with the club carrying enormous debt and substantial annual losses. His spell there certainly wasn’t some roaring footballing success story and nobody needs to rewrite history to pretend otherwise.
But here’s the thing.
What does that actually change about the specific argument he’s making about Celtic?
If somebody can demonstrate that Celtic don’t repeatedly enter qualifiers before completing their recruitment, let’s hear it.
Attack the argument.
Simply shouting “Sunderland!” doesn’t answer any of those questions.
In fact, experience of things going wrong inside a football club doesn’t automatically mean somebody knows nothing about football business. Sometimes failure gives people a pretty useful education in what doesn’t work.
You don’t have to like Charlie Methven.
You don’t have to agree with everything he says either. I certainly wouldn’t automatically endorse every conclusion anybody reaches simply because it suits my own opinion.
But I find dismissing uncomfortable truths because you don’t like the person delivering them far too convenient.
The supporters’ money
This was perhaps the section where Methven resonated most with me.
He points out that Celtic’s situation is unusual because supporters are generating huge amounts of the club’s money.
Normally, Methven says, he’s inclined to defend owners when supporters demand they continually reach into their own pockets.
With Celtic, he sees something different.
He said:
“It’s the fans who put money into the club.”
That’s it.
Nobody is asking Dermot Desmond to spend his personal fortune attempting to turn Celtic into Real Madrid.
I certainly am not.
We’re asking Celtic to utilise Celtic’s money to maximise Celtic’s potential.
Supporters fill Celtic Park.
They buy season tickets and merchandise.
Millions upon millions are poured into this football club.
Yet the cash continues accumulating while the same European cycle continues.
Methven puts Celtic’s cash position at around £90million and even points towards the Main Stand as an obvious infrastructure opportunity capable of creating further long-term revenues.
Now we can debate the exact amount of cash actually available for spending, because obviously no sensible football club empties its bank account into transfer fees.
Nobody serious is asking for that.
But there’s an enormous space between financial recklessness and Celtic’s level of conservatism.
That’s where I sit.
Judge Celtic against what Celtic could be.
This is ultimately why I endorse so much of what Methven said.
He’s not judging Celtic against Rangers.
He’s looking at the size of Celtic, the support, the revenues, the history and the financial position and comparing that with what we’re actually achieving.
That is exactly how I believe Celtic should be judged.
Domestic trophies matter. Of course they do.
But domestic superiority cannot become a shield protecting the people running Celtic from questions about the club’s wider potential.
We aren’t asking Celtic to win the Champions League.
We’re asking Celtic to behave like a football club obsessed with becoming the best version of Celtic it possibly can.
There’s a world of difference.
And when someone who has worked inside football clubs, who isn’t emotionally invested in Celtic and who isn’t part of our ongoing supporter-versus-board argument takes one look at the operation and reaches many of the same conclusions, I think it’s worth listening.
Not because Charlie Methven is infallible.
Listen because the points themselves deserve answering.
That’s how debate should work.
Play the ball, not the man.
Because shouting “Sunderland” at Charlie Methven might make people feel better about dismissing him.
It doesn’t explain why Celtic keep failing in Europe.
And it certainly doesn’t explain why a football club with Celtic’s extraordinary advantages continues to achieve so much less than I believe it could.
That’s the argument our board needs to answer.
And after LASK, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide from it.
Keep Your Eyes On The Board.
Great article, Russell, thanks.
Good article Russell, unbelievable that our board keep repeating the same mistake.
It’s the same every year so there’s no much hope of it changing. One thing that could change is a better preseason, next year there’s no World Cup so we can structure our preseason properly and obviously with the likelihood of early European qualifying games we need to be up to speed quicker with a strong enough squad to cope with fatigue after a lot of early games
Great analysis of Methven’s hard hitting article Russell.
What I’m finding strange though is that the board, after giving MON and the team the ultimatum that the signings currently being negotiated were dependent on CL qualification.
Now after failure to qualify, it looks like they’re pursuing those same signings. Why in that case did they not secure those players before the LASK ties?
I think folk are getting fixated on the club not throwing money at the transfer window.
When a team like LASK on a miniscule budget can annihilate us, there is a bigger problem to consider. Great as he once was MON is not cut out for the modern game. He seemed bereft of ideas against lowly LASK and his team appeared to be terrified when not up against the dross we have for opposition at home. I think Martin needs to pack it in, maybe offer him a job upstairs if he is desperate for money. He doesnt deserve the pressure he is going to receive at his age.
A total restructuring of the recruitment and coaching should be the priority here. Maybe throw money at that, or send someone to see how clubs like LASK, Bodo, Midtjylland operate on a far smaller budget than us.
Great suggestion Mr. Mojorisin, but can you imagine DD bringing in football professionals who would want to reinvent his failed strategy?