How long more must we tolerate this insipid board of directors at Celtic?

I wrote the below article on my old site back in September of 2021, not long after Dom McKay was removed from his position as CEO at Celtic.

It reflects my mindset regarding the club at the time.

Over the years I have taken a lot of flak for my opinions on the Celtic board.

Suffice it to say, the below article shows that my opinion back then has changed very little in comparison to the way I think today.

I decided to re-publish this article on Read Celtic to give you some insight into how I thought even back then.

Not much has changed in the 5+ years since I wrote it.

I wanted the board out then, I still want them out now.

George Orwell was a fine novelist. He wrote some of the most important works of the 20th century. In school, I studied Animal Farm and it has left it’s imprint on me ever since. Almost 30 years later, when I look at the way certain countries and corporations are run today, I often think of what I learned in Animal Farm and I have a tendency to equate it to that. The slogan ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’ especially rings true to me.

Whilst Animal Farm is an allegory for the Russian revolution and the Stalinist regime, within it, there are always similarities to any regime, whether in business corporations or relating to the rule of a country. At the heart of this tale, there is one overriding ingredient that is all too evident in politics and corporations, greed. Greed is what forms the basis of Animal Farm and it is what formed the basis of the Stalinist regime.

Am I equating the current Celtic board to the pigs in Animal Farm? Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I am focusing on the greed that drives them and the fact is, that greed blinds them. It blinds them from seeing what this club is actually capable of achieving and as a result it deprives us of a place amongst other clubs, that are punching far above their weight.

Our board currently has no real strategy, well, they do if you want to call ‘keeping the status quo’ a strategy. The business model is the same, year in, year out: Bleed the support dry, fail to plan for the Champions league and then sell a few star performers to balance the books, eat, sleep, then repeat. There does not seem to be anybody within our board who is capable of thinking outside the box, outside of that failed strategy.

Dominic McKay may have been capable of that and its clear he probably railed against that strategy, because he appeared to be a forward thinking individual. However, forward thinking or thinking outside the box is frowned upon at Celtic Park. It would appear Peter Lawwell’s ways are deeply ingrained in the board members remaining in his stead, which is why this board is no longer fit for purpose. Last year’s total collapse and failure on all fronts displays Lawwell’s strategy as archaic and out of touch with other modern, progressive football clubs.

Let’s simplify it somewhat, if you were the Head of a multi million pound corporation and your main role within that corporation was to generate and increase revenues, if you failed to achieve that goal, then it stands to reason that you would not be fit for purpose and you wouldn’t retain your role. Peter Lawwell oversaw the loss of a potential £200,000,000 in Champions league revenues in the last decade alone. This does not include the 2011/12 season when Rangers 1872 were allowed to compete in the competition despite having the wee tax case outstanding. As we’re all aware he did nothing to fight that injustice and was happy for our club to be deprived of those revenues.

He offset much of these potential losses by selling our top assets rather than retaining them to ensure we were consistently qualifying for the Champions league and thus increasing our strength and our revenues drastically. Every season qualification was a gamble due to a severe lack of preparedness, if we got in, we were lucky to have done so, as he would not spend the money required to bring in the kind of players who would make the passage through the qualification stages easier. Bear in mind that I have not even included the losses incurred on players he brought in, in his de facto director of football role, many of which failed to make the grade at Celtic. In hindsight, his actions were clearly to the financial benefit of him, Dermot Desmond and the rest of the board. It was never for the benefit of the club overall and most certainly, never, ever, for the benefit of the fans.

It is almost conceivable that he grew to see Celtic, our club, as his plaything.

His ridiculous purchase of players who did not make the grade at the club was the equivalent of him playing Football Manager, so much so, that he was the cause of one of the best modern day managers this club ever had, to literally walk out the door in the middle of the night and drive to Leicester, with no regrets whatsoever as to what he was leaving behind. That same man is now being considered for the Barcelona job. The £9,000,000 in compensation received for Brendan Rodgers was invested in binning the CV’s of serious candidates and paying a pittance to a sub-standard manager, who had walked away from our club once before. The notorious Hampden shower scene will live long in the nightmares of thousands of Celtic fans and its legacy thereafter. I’m not even going to go into the McGinn or the Toney fiascos, because that just grates at me.

In any other business, the deliberate loss of those kinds of potential Champions league revenues, the ridiculous and foolhardy waste of millions on players just not good enough to wear a Celtic Jersey and the lack of a clear and concise strategy to attain those revenues, would result in only one thing happening. That CEO would not have a job. But Peter Lawwell was Dermot Desmond’s consiglierie and he ruled with an iron fist for the absentee landlord. A bit of a dictator in his own right, he had fingers in every pie in Celtic Park. It was an absolute injustice and travesty that that man was the highest paid CEO in British football at one point. What he achieved, or more so, failed to achieve did not warrant that level of pay. Ultimately, his greed was his downfall.

Now, we are left with his legacy, a board that thinks, acts, walks and talks like Peter Lawwell. A board that does not have the ability to forward think, because they were never given the opportunity or the freedom to do so under his 17 year tenure. They were all handpicked yes men and not one of them has come up with an original idea to take the club forward. The one man who did, scared the living shit out of them, so they conspired to force him out and now they’re trying to blacken his name by spreading bullshit about him to their pet hacks.

As a fanbase, we talk a good game about getting this board out. The Green Brigade have done some brilliant displays, which help to vocalise exactly how we feel about the board. But it never really goes any further than that. It’s almost as if Peter Lawwell cast some spell over us and he has managed to get our season ticket money, year in, year out, because he preyed on the love we have for this club, knowing that we would support the club no matter what. He has taken us for fools and treated us with contempt in return, yet we continue to take it.

The current board will do no different, they can’t even man up and speak to us about what happened with Dominic McKay

I’m not even going to go into the shitshow that was our year end PLC accounts, there are enough blogs that have covered those already. Suffice to say, not one word, from any board member in them, instilled any confidence in me whatsoever. Ian Bankier may as well be a f**king ghost, he has about as much effect on the club as one anyway, haunting the place like he does. We wouldn’t even miss him if he left tomorrow morning.

This board needs to go and we, the fanbase, need to figure out how the hell were going to get it done. Because if we don’t, nothing will change, we will watch the same carcrash over and over again every July and we will still continue to pour our money into the club. They will continue to take it and give us mediocrity in return in the form of nights like Maribor, Athens, Cluj, Ferencvaros and Midtjylland and on and on.

We need a board who runs the club like an Ajax or a PSV, clubs who have similar revenues and budgets to ours, but consistently punch way above their weight. The question is, where do you start to build something like that? You start by getting the current board out and going on from there. Fan power can be amazing when channeled in the correct way, we need to awake from the trance we’ve been in under Lawwell and now, the remainder of his cronies and work to pull this club out of the doldrums, so it can achieve all of what it’s capable of.

They are what’s holding Celtic back and as long as they are there, this club cannot reach it’s potential. The time for change is now.

Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.