Is the reason Celtic cannot get a new Chairman simply down to the fact that nobody wants to work under Dermot Desmond?

Yesterday, Celtic plc published the annual results for the year ended 30 June 2026, and everybody went straight for the numbers.

You can hardly blame them, because the numbers are grim enough on their own.

Revenue down 22.7% to £111.0m, from £143.6m the year before.

A loss after tax of £4.8m, against a profit of £33.9m last time out.

But the line that stopped me wasn’t a number at all.

Here is Brian Wilson, in his own words, on the small matter of who is actually going to run our club:

“The need for new Board appointments was apparent, and I welcome the immediate appointment of Mark Keane and soon to be appointed Raymond Buchanan. This process of refreshing the Board will continue including identification of a successor to myself.”

Identification.

Not appointment, not announcement, not even a shortlist.

IDENTIFICATION.

Ten months in, and we are still only at the stage of identifying a new Celtic Chairman.

Peter Lawwell retired from the chairman’s role back in December, and Brian Wilson was asked by his colleagues to step in on an interim basis.

That was the best part of a year ago.

Here we are in late September with a full set of accounts signed off, and the interim Chairman is still telling us the search for his own successor is ongoing.

Ten months to fill the chair at a club of this size, with this support and that trophy room.

That isn’t a recruitment process.

That’s a struggle.

At Celtic, “interim” has a habit of lasting a lot longer than the word suggests it should.

I’ve made this point before and I’ll keep making it until somebody at that club takes the hint.

Michael Nicholson was the interim CEO after Dom McKay walked away, Neil Lennon was the interim manager after Brendan Rodgers left for Leicester, and Martin O’Neill was the interim manager right up until the moment he wasn’t.

So forgive me for raising an eyebrow when another interim appointment goes sailing past its first anniversary.

Although in fairness to Wilson – and I’ll grant him this much – he has at least put it in black and white that he is looking for a way out.

But it does beg the obvious question.

If the man sitting in the chair is openly hunting for his own replacement, and ten months of hunting has produced precisely nothing, what exactly does that tell us?

It tells us that nobody wants the job.

A debt-free club with £66.4m in the bank, a double-winning season just banked, and a fanbase that turns up in numbers nobody else in this country can get anywhere near.

On paper, people should be falling over themselves for it.

In reality, we are ten months into an “identification” process that has identified nobody.

So what is putting them off?

It isn’t the money, because the money is clearly there.

It isn’t the profile either, because there is no bigger job in Scottish football than this one.

Which leaves us with one thing, and we all know fine well what it is.

Make no mistake, our club is a despot dictatorship, and nobody wants to be the front man for it.

Because that is the actual job description, isn’t it?

You don’t get to chair Celtic Football Club.

You’re the one who gets to sit in the chair while Dermot Desmond decides what Celtic Football Club does next.

You take the questions at the AGM for decisions you played no part in making.

You put your name at the bottom of a statement defending a strategy that was handed to you fully formed.

You’ll get the abuse, while he keeps the control.

And here is the bit that says everything about this club.

Go and read those results from start to finish, every last word of that Chairman’s statement, and count how many times the principal shareholder gets a mention.

Not once.

Do you not find that just a wee bit strange?

The man who actually runs Celtic does not appear anywhere in Celtic’s own annual report.

That is not an oversight.

We are getting a reputation far and wide for the way we do business.

Desmond plays the biggest part in that, because he genuinely believes that he is answerable to nobody.

Not to the support, not to the board he appoints, and not to a single person he does business with.

When a man believes he is answerable to nobody, he starts treating people accordingly.

We’ve all seen how managers get treated at our club.

We have all seen how players get treated at our club.

We have all seen how the clubs and the agents on the other side of a deal get treated at our club.

Word travels in football, and it travels a lot faster than any of them seem to realise.

The credibility we spent a century building is being burned through by one old man who simply will not be told.

So no, I don’t believe for a second that this is Celtic patiently holding out for the perfect candidate.

I think the approaches have gone out and the answers have come back.

I think the right sort of person has taken one long look at what this job really involves and politely passed on it.

Wilson tells us the work is ongoing.

It’ll still be ongoing this time next year, because until the absent meddling golfer is gone from our club, nobody worth having is walking through that door.

Who on earth would want it?

Answers on a postcard…

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