Now is the time....

They've had their chance.....

The on the field part is now in the hands of the Gods, and thankfully Martin O’Neill. We’ve taken a short-term approach to how we will try and retain our title this season. It makes sense because of the situation the club has created for itself. The transfer window is closed barring any potential free transfer moves that would need to come within the next 7 to 10 days for them to have any real value. So…..

The board have had their chance, now it’s time for change….

The focus now shifts to the off-field element which is bigger than the elephant in the room, it’s the room itself. It’s the place that accommodates the problem(s) of which we have many and the vast majority involve “bility”.

Ability?
If competence existed, the club wouldn’t be permanently surprised by obvious problems. Recruitment is slow, everything we seem to do is reactive, and solutions are often no more than sticking plasters that are applied after the damage is done.

Credibility?
Zero. You cannot speak about ambition while behaving like a club terrified of its own potential. Every season, expectations are being lowered in advance so mediocrity can be sold as some kind of prudence. If we swing and miss…. We haven’t even stepped into the batting cage, never mind attempted to take a swing at anything.

Accountability?
Non-existent. Dermot Desmond watches from a distance that Rory McIlroy couldn’t drive if you let him bash balls for a month, Michael Nicholson hides like he’s Nosferatu; a rare sighting was late at night in Bologna, Chris McKay seems to be better at videography than financial planning and Brian Wilson appears says “Unity” and then disappears in a fashion that suggest he’s a descendent of Harry Houdini (typical, I say that and he reappears on Celtic TV). We have a closed loop where decisions are made but never owned and that flows throughout the entire club

Responsibility?
Dumped on the manager every time. Broken and bloated squads, half-plans, mismatched signings, then the manager is left having to try and explain / cover for people. In the case of Rodgers, he like all of our managers over the past 10 years commented on the issues, and our majority shareholder decided to go nuclear and put all the responsibility on him which was utterly ridiculous.

Visibility?
Intentionally blurred. If supporters can’t tell who decides what, that’s by design. Suggestions of Desmond needing to be reached for sign off on certain things, people disappearing when someone dares ask a question of them. Opaque structures don’t protect the club, they protect the people inside them.

Stability?
We have no stability beyond our bank balance. We appear to be stuck in the muddy hell that is stagnation. Celtic don’t build, they wait. Wait for pressure. Wait for embarrassment. Wait for excuses. That waiting has seen us sat with money in the bank that they openly acknowledged was an issue when Lawwell said “The Board recognises the inherent inefficiencies of holding excess cash, and, in conjunction with other cash commitments, the importance of investing in strengthening the team to deliver football success.” And still the money sits doing nothing.

Sustainability?
What we are isn’t sustainable if we want to compete at a decent level. This model, if we can call it a model, survives only because the club is bigger than the people running it. That gap is shrinking fast. Hearts haven’t become an amazing, well-structured club. They’ve become competent and have put themselves on a pathway that can lead to them achieving bigger and better things. The dent they’ve made in the gap between us and them by just becoming competent should be setting of alarms throughout the club because others will catch on.


What Time is it?

Now is the time for real change, not just sacrificing no marks like Tisdale who should never have been there in the first place and trying to blame him for the things they also blamed Rodgers for, and not using Martin O’Neill as a human shield to cover for those above and below him.

This is the time for the club to announce the imminent or immediate departures of the boardroom and their replacements, who should have a good mix of skills that will enhance the football, business and most important of all the way the club communicates with all stake-holders, not just those who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo. Because real reform isn’t about optics or deflection, it’s about ownership, clarity, and standards, and until the club is willing to prioritise those over self-preservation, nothing fundamentally changes and the division between the support and the board will continue to grow.

A new board must take a ruthless, honest look at everything, who adds value and who drains it. And let’s be honest, there are plenty in the latter category.

They must also understand a simple truth about what it takes to gain our belief in them:
Be open. Be honest. Be trustworthy. Engage properly and in good faith.
When there are no skeletons in the closet, there’s no need for us to spin the narrative or scapegoats.

Some will disagree. I’ve heard many of the counterarguments. But unity is impossible when key figures are inherently divisive. There is no trust. The board might occasionally stumble into the odd win or a positive moment, but I feel like we’re always waiting for failure, because when the real acid tests come, that’s exactly what happens. The same mistakes, repeated. Jeopardy created where none needs to exist.

There might be people in the club who privately wish to say they do their jobs to the best of their ability with their hands tied, but won’t because they fear falling foul of Dermot Desmond and his angry offspring. Maybe the huge salaries and perks of being in the inner circle with the billionaire take the edge off him pulling tightly on the strings as he plays Football Manager with his puppets. I’ve never been in that position, but I’m confident that if it came down to it, I’d sooner find the exit like Dom McKay did minus the NDA, than stay and live in frustration, watching a man treat the club I love like a towel that he cleans his drivers with.

The only disappointment with the Dom McKay situation is that it appears likely that an NDA agreement that Celtic are so fond of using from CEOs to managers, coaches and even players block us from being able to hear his side of the story. Like many it’s a story I’d love to hear.

All of the above leads us to what has now brought about a call for a boycott of the game versus Dundee in the cup, and for disruptions to upcoming games. I’m not going to sit here and say you should or shouldn’t do something, last I checked everyone who will read this is an adult and is capable of making their own decision. The call is there, answer or don’t…. I’m not going to judge you for it.

What I will say is that supporting the club to me means that sometimes we are required to seek and recognising the truth of what we are and deciding the best course of action for ourselves.

My truth is this:

I want Celtic to be the best version of the club it can be, filled with the best people who are strong, ambitious and honest. Most important of all I want it to be true to its roots, or as much as it can be in what is a very different world.

Right now, I don’t believe that to be true, but with the work I do it means a lot of what the club does doesn’t affect me in the same way it does for people like Eddie P or Andrew or Gary C etc. All I can do from here is tell you how I understand good clubs to be run, and be honest with my views on how Celtic compare, and as you will have read it’s not a favourable comparison. I take no joy in that at all, in many ways I sometimes wish I wasn’t as interested in the inner workings of football clubs but when you work in it, it’s best to be informed.

Your truth and the actions you are willing to take will come from how you engage with the club and what you want it to be, but what we all should in theory have in common is our love for the club, our want for it to be ambitious.. and for it to try and fulfil it’s potential. We’ll all have our own views on how that happens, but again I ask the questions of anyone who wants to say that we are in a good place and being run by the right people….

Should we accept a boardroom that does everything it can to avoid engaging with supporters, not just specific groups or ultras, but the support in general?

Do you think the recruitment processes that have encountered the same problems that multiple managers have called out are acceptable?

The cronyism issue; Our processes that have brought many, many people into the club with CVs that wouldn’t get a second glance if it were not for their links to friends and family inside the club. Acceptable?

Do we believe that allowing mad statements and a mad rants from a shareholder and his son are going to lead to anything positive for the club?

Is having an academy that’s under-performed for years, whilst sitting on millions of pounds and then building basic structures like the one at Barrowfield, and then trying to dress it up as a long-term investment a positive use of the clubs money?

I don’t think the club gets everything wrong. But I genuinely struggle to remember the last time they got more right than wrong. Fundamental failures, especially in communication are repeated. Empty words are continually used. Failing people and processes are continually protected. And supporters are painted as emotional or stupid for noticing these things.

The reality is more uncomfortable for those in power, not that they’ll admit it….
When a large element of a support base independently spots the same patterns, problems and failures, they are far more likely to be directionally right than wrong. Not always spot on with the causes or solutions, but right that something is wrong or broken, and don’t start me on the “silent majority” argument that some will use to counter that. Silence doesn’t mean agreement and silence isn’t engagement. Those kinds of words are used by people who want to create an idea that noise means disloyal idiots, and silence means loyalty shown by intelligent people. That is total and utter bollocks.

Others will say we sit in a period of dominance that’s never been seen, and that is true. However, we have to question how good we were when a now competent Hearts setup hasn’t just closed the gap, it has brutally exposed how fragile we actually are. Against anyone running a club properly, we wouldn’t be resting on laurels or ignoring all the warnings we’ve had over the years versus clubs like Kairat, Bodo, Qarabag, Midtjylland and the others.

Last season:

This season (to date):

We cannot just can’t sit and accept what is glaringly obvious, the board and majority shareholder have been the root cause of the vast majority of the issues we’ve encountered and have done nothing but make excuses, they need to go no matter what happens this season, and it needs to be continually said, especially as we head into a summer that will require a rebuild that will make the one that Ange, Dom McKay and his agent managed in 2021/22 look like a 6-piece jigsaw.

Kindly bare with me… I’m almost done.
I’ll finish off by answering a question I was sent, and by saying one more thing about the board.

I had a message asking me why I think our structures are awful and why I’ve said a few times that the club excuses around recruitment are piss poor, especially given that we have had multiple changes of manager? It’s a fair question that I think anyone who reads my articles is entitled to know the answer to, but I don’t want to make this a long-winded thing in this article, it’s long enough.

A good structure is filled with good people, and the right tools for a job, but there is something more important than that, and that’s the processes that run from start to finish….

The reason the top clubs with great structures work so well is because you could take any person out of the setup including the manager, and the structure won’t break, you won’t notice much difference, if any at all. You won’t hear new managers or coaches coming in and having to talk about having to start from scratch, or talking about having to constantly pivot because someone left. That only happens if the structure is weak or non-existent, and requires people to be spoon fed instructions on what the club needs. That has been shown up by the words from MON, Maloney, Rodgers, Ange, Lennon (although he now denies it) and others over the years, and still exists today because the club has a lot of people who are not good enough, and many who value self-preservation more than anything else. Quite frankly if I was sat listening to manager after manager saying we had to totally start from scratch, I’d be embarrassed.

Hopefully that answers that question.

Last but not least it’s important to remember that board have been asked politely many times, by many different people including every contributor on CU, various other sites and groups to inform us of what the strategy and vision for the club is. It shouldn’t be a hard question to answer. Yet, their response for years has been to sit in silence hoping the questions will go away, but they won’t, not until they provide an answer that is clear, coherent, and backed up by evidence rather than empty words and shrugging of shoulders.

Silence and tokenism are not leadership, and it is certainly not a strategy that leads to unity. It is nothing more than a disgusting case of avoidance and self preservation. And until that changes, the questions and noise will keep coming….

Ross H