Celtic Park: A Journey not a destination

Harry on why spending on the stadium is overdue

It’s almost thirty years ago this week I scaled the staircases of the new North Stand for the first time to take my seat at the Celtic-Newcastle friendly on August 8th 1995; the game that heralded the brave new dawn at Celtic Park. It wasn't A seat at Celtic Park, it was MY seat. Like tens of thousands of other McCann foot soldiers, I had campaigned for the removal of the old board and a revolution that would sweep into power new people with new ideas and new finance to transform our tired old club. In just 24 months, we had gone from an old, mid-table, club of former glories, to a new dawn of hope and pride. As Doug Baillie put it, "I don't mind admitting the obvious pride of the faithful returning to their spiritual home was enough to make the hair stick out on the back of the neck. It was a wonderful experience." This was the first step in the rebirth of Glasgow Celtic.

After that, the Lisbon Lions and Jock Stein Stands rose accompany the beautiful new North Stand. Together these three stands towered over the pitch and with the passion of our support, created an atmosphere that could be bettered in few other footballing cathedrals around the world.

But that was 29 years ago and times have changed. The one part of the stadium that was not refurbished at that time was the main stand. It remained in large part the redeveloped stand built from the embers of the fire in 1971 but even within that construction, elements of the early 20th-century stand had remained in place. There had been some lipstick put on the pig of the main stand by the old board in the centenary season with the rabbit warren extension to accommodate the youthful new concept of corporate hospitality and of course there's been the odd lick of paint since, but principally the main stand is the 53-year-old stand of pre-Hillsborough built on the foundations of a 100-year-old viewing platform. An easy thing to do when you undertake such a mammoth infrastructure project as the rebirth of Celtic Park would be at the end to sit back, enjoy, and say ‘job done! Big tick’. And of course the original job was done. In an incredibly short period of time Fergus created a fantastic stadium, but I am sure even Fergus would have admitted that the main stand required a revisit and that is now urgent.

The hardest thing to do when owning or running a football club is to spend money on infrastructure. Unless you are in a position of pre-Hillsborough Britain, nobody thanks you for it. Unless you are Real Madrid or another elite club who's building a world-class stadium at the same time as delivering world-class results, no one will thank you for it. But infrastructure spend is essential.

I don't use the main stand, but my mate who does comments after the first game of every season that nothing welcomes him back than pushing through rusty turnstiles to be greeted with the overwhelming smell of pish!

I understand that in this stand, with capacity for around 7,000, there are two female toilets for the general paying public. There is limited running hot water (if any) and very limited catering facilities. Attending corporate hospitality to watch Celtic is not my preference, but I have been in the main stand at Celtic Park and no wonder they can't get premium brands to invest. Also, the boardroom and access from the boardroom to the seats of the elite guests might be described by a visiting European football club as quaint - a more brutal description might be third rate.

The press facilities are worse.

The original main stand had the skybox for the press, but when it was necessary to provide improved corporate facilities that was taken away and the press were crammed into seats in the upper part of the main stand. They are not provide with proper facilities for the 21st century. There is no adequate space for them to write their reports and there are no screens providing immediate feedback on the action of the game. ‘Boo hoo’, the ordinary supporter might say, but such things matter. Our European post-game press conferences take place in a big tent outside because we don't have adequate press facilities inside. Nothing screams "we don't belong" more than year-on-year temporary press facilities. We may as well have a neon sign writ large over the front door during every European campaign that says "just visiting."

The main entranceway is not a grand, imposing main entranceway that's going to make visiting clubs large or small think that they have arrived at the home of one of Europe’s grand clubs. The glass frontage doors have to be locked through the winter months becuase they rattle and howl as the wind blows through and around Celtic Park. Once you get past these battered glass doors, you come into a cramped reception area with green leather sofas for the waiting guests that look like they've been picked up off Gumtree or found dumped in some country side road. It is frankly embarrassing.

Readers might ask why this matters. Surely the most important thing is the product on the park, a successful football team, and a place to go so that you can watch it. Perhaps. But tell me a cinema you attend that has not been upgraded and improved to offer superior facilities in the last 29 years. Tell me a bar or a restaurant or any leisure activity that you partake in that remains unchanged, undeveloped during that time. It is as much about saying we belong at an elite level because we are an elite club as a revamp would be about improving capacity or enhancing corporate facilities.

I am reminded of the story of GB and Northern Ireland getting trounced year after year in the Ryder Cup. The Royal and Ancient decided something had to be done. The first stage was to make it a competition between Europe and America. That would bring in better golfers. The next thing was to get in a captain of the team who would instill a belief within the players and that man was Tony Jacklin. GB and Northern Ireland had turned up like a ramshackle bunch of guys plucked off the nearest amateur fairway in previous competitions, so Tony Jacklin insisted that he would only take the role if his players felt that they were participating at an elite level and that they were the best. They had to have a uniform that was simple in its style but matching. It had to be tailor-made and custom-fitted to each player. The sweaters had to be cashmere, and they had to fly by Concorde to America. If his players were the elite, they should be treated like the elite.

Celtic need to start spending money on the infrastructure because we are a Champions League club and should behave like a Champions League club. We have been participating at that stage of European competition for 25 years and have had a tent for press conferences for 25 years. We have been visitors it.

The infrastructure spend on the stadium cannot and must not be restricted to the main stand. With the exception of the odd lick of paint the 29-year-old North Stand and its younger siblings on either side are now starting to show their age. My father joined me in that seat 29 years ago and he still sits in the same seat next to me and one of my brothers. We park one mile away from the ground and his 82-year-old legs carry him there and back, but the stairs up to the North Stand upper can be tiring and so he has access to the lifts. Unfortunately, a North Stand that accommodates over 25,000 has only two lifts, one at either end, and each of those two lifts can take four people. On the first game of this season, we arrived 35 minutes before kickoff and got into our seat only five minutes before kickoff, and the queue was not that long.

Last year our corporation tax bill to HMRC was over £7m. This year it looks like it will be similar. Even with an unexpected late raft of expenditure on the first team, we will still have loads of money in the bank. We have a player trading model that is likely to see Matt O'Riley and others leave the club over the next 18 months that will subsidise investment in the team. We have made a decision to raise the bar on the purchase price of players to £7-£8 million per position. It is only the failures within the scouting department and the executive team that have resulted in us not delivering into those positions for Brendan Rodgers but despite all of that, if we had spent the money that we had set out to spend or if we still end up spending the money that we set out to spend and on top of the money we are spending on Barrowfield, we will still have money in the bank.  Investment in the infrastructure is essential because every year that we don't invest is a year closer to the point we will be forced to invest, and it will be on the timetable of wear and tear and not on the timetable of our discretion.

Kevin McCarra wrote that day 29 years ago “As if the matter of catching up with Rangers were not enough, the Celtic team now has the task of living up to its stadium.”  We caught them, surpassed them, and they died in our wake.  With our dominance now established in Scotland and many of us casting our aspirations beyond these shores, maybe we need a revamped Celtic Park for a new generation to live up to.