Detail in our annual accounts for the year to 30 June 2014, released yesterday, are bitter sweet. It was a good year financially but the successes were underpinned by qualification for the Champions League. This season’s revenue will be lucky to rise much above £50m, from last season’s £64m.
I see lots of comment on Peter Lawwell’s £400k bonus. The key figure to concentrate on executive pay is the basic (in this case £524k), not the bonus. Celtic executive pay, including manager, chief exec and scouts, should heavily incentivise qualification for the Champions League. If we’re in the Champions League, all other objectives become possible. Failure to qualify brings a range of risks; so the execs should feel the pain of failure in the pocket.
Basic pay should be appropriate for the work (this goes for all staff at the club, of course), but there is ample room to incentivise everyone, from executives, to kiosk staff, to stewards, on club performance or service objectives, as appropriate. Would doing so tackle many of the stewarding and service issues we see regularly? Would be interesting to find out.
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Happy Green Bunny –
You restore by opening Control Panel and Recovery. That allows you to select a recovery point. Choose a point prior to when the problem first arose.
Will take an hour or two but should do the trick.
Good luck.
Happy green bunny
Run malwayrebites and then a boot scan. It usually places a regenerative in your start up which the boot scan will get
Hh
Tom McLaughlin, very disappointed to read that, may be Hunterlopers among them but no doubt also dome of our wonderful caring “family”.
Stupid idea to even give them the platform.
Happy green bunny
Not sure what version of Windows you are using but if you click on the start button and in the search window (first box up from start button) type “Restore” and it should give you a link to “system restore” shortcut.
Use this to restore your system a date before you started having problems.
HH
Neil canamalar Lennon hunskelper extrordinaire
09:33 on 18 October, 2014
Remind me about the position the sectarian Dallas holds in UEFA
______________________________________________________
If Dallas was sacked by the SFA for the stuff that he did
why did Uefa / Fifa employ him?
Efe a fantastic servant to our club who has not had a rest for two years and plays where ever he is asked., suffers the rap for being left exposed and lack of movement of by those playing in front of him .
Couple of quid on him now to score anytime in 90mins,:))))
Till later all
report back later fae my Mams in sunny ML4:))))
KevJ- like it or lump it they are registered as Rangers FC, so that is their name.
What Would satisfy me is basically a cut and paste of the Livi programme notes.
SNAKE
Pardubice,in Czechoslovakia.
Close enough for that twat.
Kevj,
Likely no one objected
goldstar10
09:37 on 18 October, 2014
______________________
It disny matter what they’re called – they’ll always be the animal / huns in my book.
The Livi programme guy – brilliant, just brilliant :)
Happy Green Bunny
Press Globe in bottom left or C Drive
Control panel
System and security
Review you computers status
Recovery
Open system restore
Follow instructions
This will not loose any info and can easily be reversed.
Canman
aye like no one objected to Ogilvie being re selected either…
KevJ- indeed he was, but he was only telling the truth and that’s what really hurts them.
I expect no less from the custodians of Celtic FC, any attempt to fudge the issue will be the end for me.
BOBBY MURDOCH’S CURLED-UP WINKLEPICKERS
Pardubice in in the Czech Republic.
I suppose for the moronic they wouldn’t see a difference.
Neil canamalar Lennon hunskelper extrordinaire
09:39 on 18 October, 2014
Kevj,
Likely no one objected
__________________
Celtic should have objected!
A rebel Celtic supporter on the ‘bored’ who had stood in the Jungle and was a TIM should have kicked-up one hell of a fu#k about Dallas and got the eyes of the world on him and at the same time – kicked the lid off the can of worms that is Scottish Football. imho
But, as there isny a supporter on the ‘bored’ of the type described above, it was the usual roll-over Timmy pi#h.
Just noticed its armed forces day at the bigotbox today….
cue rampant jingoism and bigotry.
KevJungle – MURDO MacLEOD’s Title Winning Boots 4-2 LEGEND
09:33 on
18 October, 2014
goldstar10
09:30 on 18 October, 2014
______________________
Last seasons Glasgow Cup Final had the official Celtic website billing the game as,
Celtic FC v Rangers FC.
What does that mean?
_________________________________________________
Don’t think Celtic had any say in the matter it was the SFA tournament and should have been Hampden.
Goldstar 10
Strangely enough, not by the whole SMSM.
In evidence to the BBC Trust, BBC Scotland stated:
“A football club, once incorporated, is indistinguishable in Scots law from its corporate identity.
If a club was separate it would need its own constitution,Committee members, trustees etc.
Rangers Football Club does not have that, as it is incorporated”
Not opinion, not wishful thinking, the Law.
Morning and God Bless all here
neilbhoy
08:00 on 18 October, 2014
Have a fantastic day with your daughter mate – my 11 year old is currently huffing with me because Her mother won’t allow me to take her to Windsor Park today – I shouldn’t go either in her view !!!
Really excited about today get the feeling today is going to be the day it all clicks into place for us & Ronnie
C’mon the Hoops and the Reds !!!
goldstar10
09:44 on 18 October, 2014
______________________
Don’t make it the end for you – make it the end for them!
Get rid of the colluding charlatans from the Celtic ‘bored’ and maybe even folk like me will go back?
What’s all this about a trip to Belfast ?
bigmike
09:06 on 18 October, 2014
We are all sick Tim’s mate. We are all sick Tims at the moment but that’s part and parcel of following Celtic unfortunately.
Keep the Faith!
Hail Hail!
Would that be the same LAW that applys to an Edinburgh jury?
FMM – The huns are the LAW!
blantyretim is praying for the knox family
09:45 on 18 October, 2014
Just noticed its armed forces day at the bigotbox today….
cue rampant jingoism and bigotry.
————————————————–
And here’s us talking about Semtex
Well, back to league duty after what feels like a very long break. Hopefully one or two will have had a rest although for others there have been international games and travel to deal with.
Three points is a must today. And a couple of early goals to make life easy would be nice.
BigMike
09:46 on 18 October, 2014
_____________________
It was put on the Celtic website by – Celtic.
Maybe the Livi programme ghuy would have told it differently? :)
Has the Pieman developed a new language.Is he now speaking in codes?.
“Dave is a fantastically respected businessman”
“I would call of the Cowdenbeath game again.If you have FOUR OR FIVE players on international duty,why should you play with a weakened team”
“If Ashley and Dave can get together it would be great for the club”
The first two ridiculous statements are being touted by fat boy this morning.Not a word from the MSM,on King being a convicted fraudster,or that the huns only had ONE player on international duty.
Its the last piece of nonsense that beggars belief.Fat boy wants Ashley and Dave to cuddle up and be best buddies.The same Ashley who has called an EGM to remove Wallace and Nash from the board.The same Wallace and Nash who have,in panic,called on King to buy enough shares to fek Ashley right off.Astonishing example of heads in the sand,fingers in ears that the MSM have been dishing up for years.
We know Sleekits agenda.Everyones pal.Has a wee sit down with anyone over a cup of tea,and backs them to the hilt.They walk away with the dosh and he carries on seemingly bulletproof.Its the sheer lack of any honest reporting by the SMSM that disgraces their profession.
If ISIS turned up at the bigotfest today with hun scarves on they would be welcomed by the hordes,and the SMSM would be telling us “Really,they are not such bad guys after all”
Is that the time…..
Cliftonville Celt 8))
Hootenany trying to be moved to Belfast for a wee change next year to give Irish based bhoys a chance to meet some of the drunks you have been fortunate enough to avoid up to this point.
BT
That’s unfair that Sevco are being made to play today.
Surely all of those players they had away on international duty deserve a rest, especially as they are playing in the best league division in Europe!
TB,
Unfortunate timing;)
Dont install any adobeflash player on an ipad or smart phone and only install it on a PC or laptop if you know you need it.
I feel real sorry for Ronny. He is caught between convincing his new employers that he can be trusted with a budget and therefore fully backed and keeping us happy. He needs time and he needs the tools. Has he been given those tools yet ?
I believe the PLC think they have done so with our summer purchase and loan deals. The question is does Ronny believe in these players ? and do they believe in what he is trying to do
I think they are getting the vibes that he is not convinced by them going by his selections which seems to be a repeat of why Neil and Gordon and even Big Tony very quickly became dissillusioned.
Can Ronny buck that trend with even bigger constraints ?
We are about to find out.
He needs our 100$ backing snd understanding.
HH
“Quite frankly, I can’t get enough of soccer,” says Billy Beane. “I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there’s a reason why it is the world’s No1 sport. The rest of the planet can’t be wrong.”
Yes, this is the Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and the unassuming lead character in Michael Lewis’s best‑selling tome Moneyball – which, since its release in 2003, has became a sort of Book of Genesis for sports analytics proselytisers; shining a light on terrain once shrouded in darkness and superstition.
An aside: when Beane’s wife heard that Brad Pitt had been signed up for the 2011 film she said to him: “Brad Pitt’s playing you? I feel like I’m being ripped off.” Beane, meanwhile, calls Pitt a “wonderful guy, bright and intuitive”, although they did not delve too deep into advanced metrics. “Who wants to get really granular with sabermetrics when you’re going to see a two-and-a-half-hour Brad Pitt movie?” he asks. “You don’t go to the cinema for a maths lesson.”
Beane’s wife was also inadvertently responsible for his late-blooming passion for football. In 2003 he bought her plane tickets to London for her birthday; and while in the capital he got sucked into the bubble and high-energy pop of the Premier League. He never played as a kid, or showed much interest in his early adult years. Now, though, Beane tries to watch three Premier League matches shown live on US TV on Saturdays, the earliest of which kicks off at 4.45am Pacific time.
“If I don’t get to watch a match live, I tape it,” he says. “Even if I know the score I go back and watch. I find it fascinating. I love the sport. I love the business. I love the fact there’s such a dichotomy between, say, the Emirates and Turf Moor. It’s an education for me.”
On Monday night Beane enjoyed dinner with Liverpool’s chairman, Tom Werner, and owner, John Henry. He occasionally speaks to Arsène Wenger and knows Ivan Gazidis. And when you ask whether he would be tempted to become a director of football in England when his contract with the Oakland Athletics runs out in 2019 he says: “Oh, yeah, absolutely.”
But there is a caveat: “I say that with a tremendous amount of humbleness and respect for people who do the job already,” he adds. “I say it humbly because there are challenges unique to soccer that I wouldn’t be privy to until I was there.”
Nor would he promise any quick fixes. “Remember, when I started in baseball, a lot of it was low hanging fruit with inefficiencies going on, and those inefficiencies usually evaporate pretty quickly.”
While Beane, 52, confirms he has never been approached by an English club, he does sometimes wrestle with whether his methods could work in football. Certainly what he has achieved in 17 years at the Oakland A’s speaks for itself.
Since 2000 the A’s have reached the play-offs eight times despite having the fifth or sixth lowest budget among the 30 teams in the major leagues. This year they did so again, only to lose a one-game play-off 9-8 to the Kansas City Royals a fortnight ago. The Royals have since swept into the World Series – which begins on Tuesday against the San Francisco Giants – leaving Beane to lick his wounds and plan yet another rebuilding job. “The hardest thing for us is the continuity,” he says. “It doesn’t exist here. Our roster will turn over about a 30% clip every single year, and it’s very hard to regenerate year after year. But there is certainly a lot of satisfaction. And being a smaller team gives us some creative licence to do things compared to say New York or Chicago.”
There is no parallel to what the A’s have achieved in English sport. Imagine Southampton, having sold so many of their established names in the summer, finishing in Europe this season – and doing it every other season during the next 17 years. That hints at the scale of Beane’s success.
So how do the A’s play a big-money game of Buckaroo without falling off? Eyelids can droop at terms such sabermetrics, but the underlying concept of Moneyball is simple to understand: it is about using data and detailed analysis to find value.
Sometimes a player is valued incorrectly because he is perceived as too injury prone or defensively weak. On other occasions an organisation finds a way of measuring player performance – and likely future success – that is better than their rivals.
As Beane puts it: “Our aim is to properly allocate credit and blame to a player. In baseball you can do something poorly and still get credit. A pitcher could throw a bad ball, the batter hit a screaming line drive, and an outfielder make a fantastic diving catch. Yet when you look at a historical databases, 80% of the time when a ball is struck with that trajectory and velocity it is a hit. So because a superior defender caught it on that play, you should probably credit the hitter in some way and take away from the pitcher. Traditional stats don’t do that. They only credit outcome. They don’t credit process.”
But it is harder to implement Moneyball in football, Beane concedes, for several reasons. The game is more fluid and interdependent, which makes it more complicated to track and analyse. The distance between rich and poor clubs is wider – Beane gets the Deloitte report into football’s finances and says he is “absolutely amazed at how large the gap is; even greater than in the US in some respects”.
It is also arguably riskier for an English manager to place huge faith in statistical analysis because, unlike in American sport, there is relegation.
“You don’t have a lot of time to be right in football,” he says. “So ultimately, before you mark on anything quantitative, you have to make sure you have scrutinised the data and have certainty with what you are doing, because the risk is very high.”
Yet there are fundamentals that do cross the Atlantic. Crucially, Beane believes, you have to run a club along business lines, particularly when it comes to recruitment. That means detailed and lengthy analysis of potential targets, not falling into the familiar trap buying someone because they played well against your team. It also means thinking long term wherever possible.
“When I first came into baseball people didn’t want to hear that a team was a business,” he says. “But it is. And the better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be. That is why I admire Arsenal. If I’m buying stock in a football team that’s the one I buy. They’ve got revenues. They’re successful. They pay down their debt. And ultimately in today’s world that’s the best way for a long-term success.”
Beane also stresses that sporting organisations must continually be open to new ideas. In one of the more memorable lines of Moneyball, Lewis writes: “It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.” A decade on, however, Beane prides himself for another quality. “Being the dumbest guy in my own room.”
“I’ve got brilliant staff,” he says. “One of my right-hand guys, Farhan Zaidi, has a PhD in behavioural economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He never played much baseball. He followed American sports when his dad was working for the Asian Development Bank.”
Isn’t that a disadvantage? It would be hard to imagine many English clubs doing the same. “Yes, but he has no experience-bias when he comes to my office, so he is able to question the obvious,” says Beane. “A guy like myself, who has been in the game his entire life, may not be able to spot when the emperor is not wearing any clothes.”
I tell Beane that there are performance analysts at English football clubs who, when one manager departs and another one arrives, can be left burrowing away in a distant office – their methods and analysis completely ignored. How can that change?
“Someone at the top has to sponsor their ideas, give them muscle in meetings and to believe in them,” he says. “It’s hard in football, though. Two weeks ago I was listening to 606 and I heard some Liverpool fans questioning Brendan Rodgers – a man who nearly won the Premier League title this year – and I was thinking: ‘Really?’ But that’s the challenge and noise you face.
“What also makes it difficult is that every year between a third and 50% of league managers leave. As the old saying goes, no plan interrupted is ever successful.”
But those same managers – spouting the same cliches, making the same mistakes – get hired and fired and hired again. The story is familiar to Beane: it describes the major leagues two decades ago. “The advantage I had was being a former player,” he says. “I was the Trojan horse. Because I came up in the locker room that gave me a big advantage.” It bought him time: not just to develop and improve, but for his ideas to congregate and congeal. Time is not something English football cares a lot about.
But Beane believes that across sport the winds of change are blowing. In ice hockey last summer many of the best amateur analytics bloggers, often crunching numbers in their bedrooms, were signed by NHL clubs. Beane says that anyone keen on soccer analytics should create their own blog, because if you’re good the clubs will find you.
“It is not uncommon for a blogger’s post to show up in a general manager’s Twitter feed – a level of access unheard of a decade ago,” he says. “But even in the embryonic stages of the internet, in 1997, my assistant Paul DePodesta and I would take ideas and information from this little underground website called Baseball Prospectus.
“One of its writers was Nate Silver [now a US election polling guru] and he gave me ideas. Sometimes we would be getting ready to do a deal based on our analytics and they would post an article with the same conclusions as us. We wanted to shout: ‘Stop!’”
These days when Beane dips into Moneyball he says it “feels like I am watching an episode of the Flintstones” but he agrees that its impact still reverberates. “The best thing about the book was that it blasted the door open for people who were really bright,” says Beane. “Baseball is no longer sort of a closed-insiders’ club where you had come up through the business or be a player to be part of it.
“Because of that, it became a lot smarter. And that’s great. Sports should be a meritocracy just like everything else. I live right here in Silicon Valley – Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter – they are all right down from the street from my office. Yet I’m lucky that people will come and work for less money just to get involved in sports.”
Can he see something similar happening in English football? “Our situation was public because of the book, but in football, data is already permeating more decisions than you probably know,” he says. “And once its effectiveness is shown in a high-profile situation that will only accelerate.”
Beane knows there are still sceptics who believe stats are hokum, or that it is a sort of sacrilege for a game imbued with such emotion, drama and beauty to be reduced to spreadsheets and numbers. He is too polite to say it, but he has no time for such flat-earthers.
“Numbers are essentially just facts,” he says. “And ultimately every sport is about numbers. How many points you get, how many wins you get – all numbers. It’s like watching a card‑counter in Vegas playing blackjack. Once you have learned how to count cards, why would you ever go back to doing it on a hunch?”
$=%
Does Scottish football still have a fit and proper person test?
And if Dave King passes it, is there anyone at all who would possibly be ruled unfit?
A rough analysis off the top of my head about Scepovic(sp)
I make it he’s had 3 chances to score in his tim on the pitch.
3 chances?
Anyway, he put 2 of them in the net and both were chopped
off by the MIB.
The other chance was going into the net but, hit one of his team
mates on the way. I stand to be corrected.
But, I mean….3 chances – playing as a striker for Celtic?
WTF is going on?
KevJungle – MURDO MacLEOD’s Title Winning Boots 4-2 LEGEND
09:54 on
18 October, 2014
BigMike
09:46 on 18 October, 2014
_____________________
It was put on the Celtic website by – Celtic.
Maybe the Livi programme ghuy would have told it differently? :)
______________________________________________________
Sorry just thought with it being a cup competition and Hampden out of action that it would be the SFA who would dictate proceedings. That aside it never should be allowed we all know the bassas died.
KevJ
Liquidation is a legal process.
If they’re the Law, how did they end up liquidated?
Or did that not happen?
If not, tell me the date they came out of administration.. . .
And stop shoutin’ !