Dermot Desmond, the man who would save Celtic? Or the man who will eventually kill us?

Dermot Desmond, whether we choose to accept it or not, is the most powerful man at Celtic.

Simply because he is the largest shareholder at our club.

He owns the biggest chunk of Celtic, so therefore, he acts like the de facto owner of the club.

And why shouldn’t he?

Nobody stops him from acting that way, so that’s exactly what he does.

Desmond, as the media likes to tell everyone, is a double billionaire.

As if that mattered to those of us who have never – and probably will never – have access to finance like that in our lifetime.

Having billionaire status is a privilege that belongs to just over 3,000 human beings worldwide.

Most of us can only dream of accumulating a fraction of that kind of wealth.

So therefore, it is very hard for us to view somebody like Dermot Desmond as one of us.

People like him live in an insulated bubble, and view people like us as anti-establishment.

We are not – and never will be – compatible in any way.

For the likes of me, and thousands of other passionate Celtic fans out there, Celtic is a way of life for us.

For Dermot Desmond, it is a plaything.

A status enhancer.

Something he can boast to his golf buddies about, while smoking big expensive cigars, and drinking Remy Martin Louis the 13th, at a cost of £140k a bottle, at the 19th hole.

For someone like Desmond, liquor like that costs the same to him as tap water costs to us.

Because when you’re a double billionaire, money is no longer an object.

You don’t think about it in the same way you or I would, it is something you have a limitless supply of.

Just like we have a limitless supply of tap water in our kitchen tap.

Of course, billionaires always think of ways to make more money, and they are ruthless in their accumulation of it, irrespective of who they hurt along the way.

Just like the human body cannot survive without water, billionaires cannot survive without money.

They cannot envisage a life without it, and most of them who reach that status rarely ever have to thereafter.

Most billionaires aren’t very nice people either.

And Celtic’s principal shareholder certainly does not strike me as a nice individual.

The billionaire class are brilliantly put into context in the first episode of the excellent comedy-drama series, Succession.

For those of you who don’t know, Succession is a series which portrays the Roy family, billionaire owners of the fictional media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo.

What money means – or more to the point, what it doesn’t mean to them – is portrayed quite eloquently in that first episode.

During Logan Roy’s 80th birthday celebration (the head of the family), he takes his family to his traditional birthday softball game.

In the middle of the game, Logan’s son Kendall has to leave, so his brother Roman – played by Kieran Culkin – asks the groundskeeper’s son to replace him.

He offers the boy a million dollars if he hits a home run and even writes a cheque, only to tear it up in the boy’s face once he gets tagged out by his brother in law, Tom.

Roman is crassly ignorant of the effect this has on the boy.

But it is clearly evident he doesn’t care because money is utterly meaningless to someone like him.

Logan shakes the boy’s hand and congratulates him on his attempt at almost hitting the home run.

What is notable here is that Logan is also completely ignorant of the mental and emotional impact not hitting that home run has on the boy, and by extension, his parents, who are watching on.

The boy had just watched financial security for him and his family being snatched away from him with the last base in sight.

To him, and his family, it was a hugely defining moment in their existence.

It could have resulted in them becoming millionaires, had the boy managed to hit a home run.

Logan’s attendant has the groundskeeper’s family sign an NDA and gives them the Patek Philippe watch Tom gifted to Logan moments earlier.

The watch cost Tom around $15,000.

What this scene portrays for us is how meaningless money is to billionaires, but that through having so much of it, they can cruelly use it to toy with other people’s emotions.

In essence, it shows us that they themselves are devoid of the emotional effect money has on every day ordinary working people.

Whether Roman’s cruelty was by design, or through sheer ignorance of the boy and his family’s feelings, is irrelevant.

That scene was a perfect example of how detached from reality billionaires are.

They live in an alternate reality to the likes of you and I, and their status affords them the ability to lack any kind of empathy for people outside their bubble.

Since we entered into this decade, Dermot Desmond has shown no empathy whatsoever for the thousands of us who support Celtic.

He has toyed with our emotions on a regular basis, and he could not care less about the effect that has on any of us.

He has overseen a sharp and unnecessary decline in this club’s fortunes, and displays no urge to stop it either.

Right now, Celtic is at a crossroads.

As hard as this is for me to say, Dermot Desmond has the power to save this club should he choose to do so.

But he also has the power to kill it.

And from what we’ve been witnessing of late, it seems he is hell bent on the latter.

In a recent article, I said that Celtic’s slow and managed decline throughout the 21st century, especially since 2003, has been akin to death by a thousand cuts.

‘Death by a thousand cuts’ is an idiom for a scenario where many small, seemingly minor issues accumulate to cause a major, fatal problem.

That ‘fatal problem’ is now close at hand.

But it is entirely self inflicted.

What is harder to accept is that should we lose this season’s title, and in the worst case scenario – finish 3rd – the route back to the top is going to seem a million miles away.

In the last decade or so, we had many opportunities to put our foot on the neck of the Ibrox club and keep them down.

As they floundered around hopelessly, we never took the opportunity to ensure they stayed down.

Do not ever doubt that they will happily afford us that courtesy should we find ourselves in a similar position.

If they manage to get ahead of us, especially through Champions League qualification, they will spend to a level that will leave us flailing in their rear view mirror for some time to come.

Dermot Desmond could alleviate the risk of this happening in the morning if he wanted to.

The question is, does he really care any more?

Because if he did, don’t you think the people in the Celtic boardroom would act like they did too?

The Celtic board shows no urgency, let alone willingness, to recognise the monumental task that lays ahead of this club, regardless of whether we win or lose this title.

If Dermot Desmond even cared in the slightest about what we as fans are going through, he would be the driving force behind reform at this club.

But he doesn’t.

He and his son see us as ‘anti-establishment’ upstarts.

Which by default must mean he sees himself as part of the ‘establishment’ simply because he’s a ‘double billionaire’.

Money does buy you status, I guess.

It can also buy you a football club, but what a lot of billionaires seem to forget is that when they own a football club, they also own the emotions and feelings of thousands of fans by default.

It is clear that Dermot Desmond doesn’t give a damn about the feelings, or the emotions of Celtic supporters.

If he did, we would not find ourselves in the position we do today.

What is even more clear is that he has only ever cared about what he can take out of Celtic, and that attitude is reflected in each and everyone of the people in the Celtic boardroom.

None of them give to Celtic.

They only take.

But not only do they take out of the club financially, they have also robbed us emotionally of the pleasure Celtic once brought to us.

Ultimately, this is what has become of Celtic.

The plaything of Dermot Desmond, to do with what he sees fit.

But while he might see it as a toy, we see it as something entirely different.

It clearly means a hell of a lot more to us than it does to him.

Because if it meant anything to Desmond, he would ensure Celtic was the best it could possibly be.

Instead he does what all billionaires do.

He toys with people’s emotions without a care in the world.

In the past he has done it out of spite, and sometimes, I wonder if he does it for his own personal amusement, just like Roman Roy.

Come this summer, Desmond has two very distinct choices.

He can either save Celtic, or he can kill it.

Because right now Celtic needs to be saved from the doom spiral it finds itself in.

We have no choice but to just watch on, and hope for the best.

The question is, will he do the decent thing?

Will it be another summer of utter misery, like last summer.

Or will it be the beginning of something special?

I guess we’re going to find out pretty soon, aren’t we?

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