You and I are both optimistic types. So every year on this day, we remind ourselves that ‘these things even themselves out’, and after a run of difficult group stage draws, we expect Celtic to get a favourable Champions League draw this evening.
Pot 3 could make or break the draw. Celtic are in this pot and it is undoubtedly weaker than Pot 4; Pot 3 has only one club from a ‘big five’ league, whereas Pot 4 has six. Drop your cynicism and allow me a few more hours optimism before Uefa’s new computer system determines our fate.
Earlier this week we discussed that Matt O’Riley will become a case study in how to recruit, manage and sell a football player. Within a few days, Matt is subject to another case study. He was injured after six minutes football for Brighton. Today it was confirmed the injury is serious and will require surgery.
This is football. At any point, your biggest asset can be a second away from being finished in the game (not that Matt is in this situation). When you are sitting on an offer for a player, but have a game to play against an ‘industrious’ St Mirren, the potential for things to go wrong is a consideration.
In 2010, Andreas Hinkel was subject to a £1m offer to return to Germany. Celtic were keen to get him off the payroll and recoup some of the outlay on him. Andreas suffered a crucial injury in a reserve game and was ruled out for the entire season. That injury cost Celtic £2.5m (wages and lost fee). Michael Nicolson would have been happy at fulltime on Sunday at more than just the result.
Best wishes to Matt, he will hopefully return for the Paradise Windfall Draw during his convalescence. At least £4m of his fee is performance related; the chances of collecting this portion took a hit today.
I’m also sitting on a lot of optimism for what the next 35 hours will bring. Looking forward to seeing Young Boys and Red Star!
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Happy Friday eve!
Happy deadline day eve!
Happy big cup draw day!
HH!
Some waking up to a slightly damp set of sheets?
Off to work, try and behave.
Have CELTIC si……….
naw i did not think so.
What larks – Paul
what larks
Today is Champions League Thursday,
or as the Zombies call it Thursday 👍
Bed wetters v Brown nosers.
Who’s right?
Only one way to find out.
FIGHT!
Harry Hill CSC.
bigrailroadblues on 29th August 2024 11:02 am
Marspapa
Been on the Waverley twice. Found the bar before I got to a seat. 🤣🍺
—————
I should’ve known 🙈🤣🤣
Enjoy your dayoot , you’ve no had wan furra while .😊
https://www.celticquicknews.co.uk/alexs-angle-moolah-most-foul/#comments
Took the advice offered in previous thread and read Alex’ angle.
Some won’t enjoy it.
I did
I was in Belgrade for a Red Star game in February.
Lets just say i would rather none of our supporters went there.
Nice city and people nice but football fans…. Hmmmmm.
Clearly things are never as simple as that which is reported ….
But, if we’ve had multiple bids for Mikey … and it is indeed Mikey’s choice?
I hope he chooses the club who’ve bid the most.
Go on Mikey – you know it makes sense.
DAVID66..
I understand mate, no worries.
Just get yersel fit enough for the next Beer Frenzy !
Ive not been out either since last Thursday when I had just Two Pints in the SHIPPY.
I am STILL a bit unwell at times, feeling a bit Dizzy etc some days cos of ongoing/long term Bowel trouble.
All the best ma big China.
HH Mate.
Morning all,lovely breeze today.Beach walk a pleasure.
Unlike Aipple,I have no work today,and could not give a flying %##* if no one behaves themselves.
Had a nice Beer in the Beach Bar,and whilst having a Ciggie gave a nice 2 fingered salute to the Jackanapes,Starmer.
@MTM..and Fanad… Thanks for info gents….Yes looks like I’m driving..
Think i will use Derry as a base for me and the weans …Then drive to the Head ….
@Fanad where I am it’s windy every day lol …So will be well happed up….
H.H
Injuries to players made me recall a time when I sub contracted to one of the big consultancy firms. They were doing analysis of lending to professional sports clubs UK wide. This was around the time rugby was becoming professional, though focused mainly on football.
Quite apart from the chance of some non performing assets (the players) my biggest light bulb moment was on the true value of the stadium.
Essentially, should a lender take possession of a stadium in the event of default (eg St James Park) what the hell do they do with it? Who wants a 50k all seater in the middle of Newcastle? Not spurs, Chelsea, Liverpool or even Sunderland. That’s for sure.
The report was very detailed and was pretty damning in it’s conclusion. Esentially – don’t even think about lending.
This was before oil money, though there were already several million roubles being cleansed.
Disclaimer- my involvement was very minor. Some commercial and emerging markets shit.
we must put some of the success in the application of the recruitment model in the case of MO’R down to MO’R down to MO’R himself. He isxa gentleman, without ego, grounded and a listener; very unusual in I world we live in.
Am I right in thinking that we bought Sutton for 6 million and between then and now we have bought one other player at a price higher than that?
Big Jimmy on 29th August 2024 9:16 am
BRRB….
As a wee Bhoy my DA would take me for short holidays to DUNOON. We would use a ” Family Farm Hoose” that was literally 15/20 yards from the Beach at a place called ” TOWER POINT”.
000000000000000
Jimmy, do you mean TOWARD POINT, down at the very tip of cowal peninsula ? beautiful views from there.
https://hiddenscotland-gallery.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/wp/2020/08/604767c7-2c5b-41b3-9f33-0360011280ba-1024×683.jpg
Glenowen on 29th August 2024 12:21 pm
The Clydesdale bank and Deloittes used to do a financial year report on scottish football.
To me , a non accountant, I always found the property value of assetts, ie the stadium as just baffling, to put a value on ibrox of multiple nillions in the middle of kinning oark for a stadium that can only ave one purpose, a venue, was to me the most obvoius manipulation of the numbers.
not even worth the price of the land.
Good afternoon all from the Argyll Hotel, Dunoon. Fish n chips at Anselmos then a tour of the local taverns. They know me well. 😉
Drambowie, ta for that distraction about Malin Head, better than the transfer discussions.
Unspoilt beauty
Take a journey as far north as you can go, and you’ll reach the edge of Europe – otherwise known as the wild, rugged and romantic Malin Head.
https://www.ireland.com/en-gb/destinations/regions/malin-head/
Paul67
I see your optimism wasn’t referring to the transfer deadline
BRRB,
Me and the missus went over to Dunoon to see The Saw Doctors,good while back,stayed in the Log Cabins.Went to Anselmos next day for the same.
Two Fish Teas,bread and butter,the lot.
Marvellous.
Really disappointing news for Matt O’Riley who seems like a genuinely good guy, although it might be said that from his POV ( and ours but definitely not Brighton’s) it’s better that it happened now than a week or two before , as he’ll be on far better money as he recuperates.
Maybe some on here with a medical background could comment but if the injury is as bad as they feared at the time than why was he not stretchered off and weight kept off the ankle?
It might be my advancing years but was it not the case ( or at least claimed to be the case , perhaps in the subsequent legal action) that Ian Durrants career damaging injury was actually as much down to him being allowed to walk off , as opposed to just the tackle itself?
Serious question: what retrospective action has been taken against the thug who crocked MOR?
Buzzing for today. Like also on Xmas Day.
So keen to see what presents Santa brings.
2 xmases in a row though. Today it’s the draw and tomorrow it’s deadline day.
Then onto Sunday.
Oh and in between we might see our nearest domestic rivals lose £2m if Hearts get into Europa and even more millions if they have to play all their Europa games at Hampden.
4 away trips is great too. And a nice bonus of a couple of new places to visit would be great as well.
Just caught up re Matt. Really horrible news. He is such a good lad from a great family. The good stuff he does is not for show. I know that for certain.
Burnley.
I was calling it adult Christmas and my wife told me to grow up. Lol
Exciting.csc
KLV
and allow me a few more hours optimism before Uefa’s new computer system determines our fate.
the sfa is doing the draw on behalf of uefa.
in the europa league the rangers have got
Kelty Hearts
Berwick Rangers
Cowdenbeith
Beith
Kilwinning
Larkhall Thistle
Linfield
and the big one Rangers Ladies
and Third Lanark in the leage cup
The game is really about things like book value, amortisation and pure profit.
Tommy Martin: Transformation of football from dream factory to actual factory complete
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Chairman of Manchester City, and Pep Guardiola with the Premier League trophy
Thu, 29 Aug, 2024 – 07:10
VMTV Tommy Martin 4.jpg
Tommy Martin
In the latest instalment of the ongoing tale about how the game is officially gone comes the intrusion of another nefarious profession into the ranks of professional football.
Beset by avaricious agents, absurdly spectacled marketing men and laptop wielding data nerds, the old game had already long lost its magical sheen. But it has become apparent this summer that it is now subsumed entirely, lost in a fog of spreadsheets and calculations, provisions and revisions, profitability and sustainability, all leading to the question of when, exactly, did football become a branch of accountancy?
This one crept up on us. As Danny Blanchflower had it, we thought the game was about glory. Jumpers for goalposts, theatres of dreams, giant killings and last-minute winners. But now, as the deals are being done and the transfer window slams shut, it has become clear that it is really about things like book value, amortisation and, that great tautology, pure profit.
Proof that the accountants have taken over football has been accruing (accountancy word) over the last year or so since one of them spotted that the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules made it better for clubs to sell homegrown academy players than to actually have them play football. Because they had not spent any money buying them, any money received would be recorded by the giddy bean counters as, you’ve guessed it, pure profit.
And so, the transformation of professional football from dream factory to actual factory was complete. Transfers like Cole Palmer’s move from Manchester City to Chelsea last summer, Conor Gallagher’s from Chelsea to Atletico Madrid and Scott McTominay’s looming move from Manchester United to Napoli are all examples of the new game of accountancyball.
Getting rid of a young player who has been at a club since he was practically wearing nappies now carries the same emotional weight as an investment bank bundling up some financial securities or a multi-national conglomerate divesting itself of its Slovakian concrete manufacturing arm. Clubs treating players like assets on balance sheets is nothing new, but only now is it the actual object of the exercise. This chunk of pure profit, it’s one of our own.
The influence of the spreadsheet merchants is everywhere. Why are Manchester City in hot water, facing 115 charges for various breaches of Premier League financial rules? Because crack teams of accountants high up in Abu Dhabi skyscrapers told their dastardly bosses they could get around financial fair play by all manner of crafty means, like makey-uppy sponsorship deals and treating Roberto Mancini’s charisma as tax deductible. Allegedly.
The multi-club model, that other modern scourge, is all the accountants’ fault as well. It was they who saw through the age-old trope that football clubs were community institutions where ordinary people shuffled along every week to feel a part of something bigger than themselves.
Read More
Hybrid draw, ‘exclusive weeks’, tennis seeding: how will the new Champions League work?
What they actually were, it turns out, were franchise opportunities. The abacus wielders spotted the potential for scale at Big Club Inc by having lots of branches in various places where you could shift your product around as you saw fit. So, the good people of Salzburg, Troyes, Girona, Strasbourg and elsewhere now get to go along to their local outpost of whatever multi-club conglomerate has deigned to loom over their town like a giant Hollywood movie UFO and wonder if they still should scatter Dad’s ashes over the place.
It’s important to note here that not all accountants are bad people. On the contrary, there are lots of good ones out there, helping coffee shop owners to not spend too much on Colombian arabica or turning around struggling childcare facilities by pointing out they could rent out their building for Zumba in the evenings.
And they have been around since the earliest days of human civilisation. Clay tablets dug up in modern Iraq tell us that the first form of writing was ancient Sumerian peoples keeping records of selling each other bushels of barley and suchlike, meaning accountancy is basically the second oldest profession.
But I’m betting that top Mesopotamian bookkeepers weren’t advising their clients to sell their cow, the one they had raised up from when she was a little calf for the purpose of providing milk for the family, and buying in its place another, inferior cow – who, for the purposes of this exercise, we’ll call Cow Felix – that had been around lots of other villages and produced very little in the way of milk, or assists for milk for that matter.
The relationship between football and accountancy reminds me of that old line about the shortcomings of rock journalists – that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. I’m guessing that football was always subject to the strictures of debits and credits to some degree but was largely able to ignore the nebbish auditors through sheer force of reckless charisma.
I preferred the days when football clubs were great hot messes, carrying on like drunken sailors on shore leave, bitterly regretting an ill-advised splurge the next morning but only till the next South American striker with a colourful private life came along. Sometimes they would go bust, but they would never really go bust, just sort of stagger back into the saloon the next day wearing a new moustache and missing several teeth.
These were the days when newspapers would write about a manager having a transfer warchest, and it used to be satisfying to think of that as an actual chest, full of doubloons and jewel-encrusted goblets, which he would present to the manager of another team in exchange for the services of their star player, like a dowry for a princess.
But then I found out that there were no warchests and there were barely even transfers. Instead newspapers started to write about this thing called amortisation, where a player was moved from one club to another and his value was written down over the course of his contract, like he was a tractor or a refrigeration unit.
And so, it turns out that the game is not truly gone, it is only amortising.
TommyTheTim
Brilliant article. Now how the hell do we claim our game back?
Saint Stivs at 12.22
Your mention of holidays in Dunoon reminded me of a conversation I had in a pub with a guy whose father used to take their family to Dunoon for the Glasgow Fair.
He said that he often wondered why, during their second weeK, his father paid all their joy rides, fish and chips and pocket money etc in one shilling pieces!
It was only years later that he found out his dad, after the first week, had gone back home, robbed his own electricity meter and susequently claimed the robbery on his insurance, stating that he was on holiday at the time!
You couldn’t make it up!
Hail! Hail!
Terrymac
@ST Stivs…Cheers H checking places to stay 26th to 30th Sept.Beautiful..As weans off school weekend.
A bitter sweet journey ,but one i must fulfill.
Looking at the drop.. mabye have to keep the Ashes in the casket or I might be joining them .
Sooner than i bargained for .lol…..My Granda,My Dad, and My Boy…. Then Me all to The Atlantic..
H.H
Drambowiecelt on 29th August 2024 1:43 pm
reading that bit from you, very enagmatic, keep it lit T.
ffs. i wrote a comment on a tiktok video about mj –
‘great skills no football brain’
It got removed by the al gore rhythm.
wtf almighty. we need cqn mods to do some training in wherever tiktok is located.
Db,
I was out Parklea couple of weeks ago on the saturday and watched 3 different games.
My nephew was playing for the Port, and a 3-3 draw was not to bad.
There is a new building at the nursury replacing the old changing rooms, it is going to be some sort of social hub, money well spent.
I took a walk out to the grass pitches, felt a wee bit disheartend to see the two furthest pitches have been left to go wild, grown over, rusty goals, but with thousands of yellow flowering grass over them.
Had me thinking of the hundreds of games i played there but also saturdays especially when there was not a free pitch at all. A game on every one.
The old timber ponds when the tide was out, they fascinate me.
Just few weeks ago, found another ancestor on the census records, another misspelt name, a John HiggANS , a rafter, in the Port in 1871, hailing from CoalIsland, he is the brother of Edward Higgin (misspell), my great-great-great granda.
His death certificate says his wife is an Anne O’Niel, and she is the sister of Catherine O’Niel, the wife of Edward.
So two brothers marry two sisters , and i recall all that cos old John worked in the timber ponds, what a life they all had.
Again, better than all this angst about transfers.