You can tell when a crisis is brewing at Ibrox, the emergence of a spontaneous statement is a sure giveaway. Far from apologising for using club funds in an ultimately pointless legal defence of Sports Direct’s enforcement of a contract signed last year, chairman, Dave King, reacted to the reality that Newco will complete at least four years of his tenure trophy-less by threatening Sports Direct with further legal action.
This time the action is over a lack of accounting information on the performance of that merchandising contract from a year ago. It is almost certain that Sports Direct are obliged to provide a sales reports and some form of audit, this would be the basis of any sales-linked bonus payments.
Dave’s court action is likely to be the most expensively purchased accounting report in history. All this gunboat diplomacy may seem wasteful but some clubs cannot exist without a bogeyman.
Celtic are now in the League Cup Final. Those inside the club will realise there is a lot of work to do to complete the first leg of the treble treble, but the majority who traipsed out of Hampden on Sunday will consider the matter a forgone conclusion. They saw a green and white future; the very real prospect of another treble while the chairman with the reverse Midas Touch controls Ibrox.
Fergus McCann built a new stadium and had league trophy in a cabinet in the boardroom when he left Celtic five years after taking control. This character will be at Ibrox four years come March and the greatest achievement in his tenure was a semi-final penalty kick competition win.
Never change, Dave.
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DELANEYS DUNKY on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:26 PM
Last word.
The bookie at the bottom of Dunglass avenue was called Oliver Plunkett.
Known to all and sundry as ” Blessed Oliver`s “
THE EXILED TIM on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:45 PM
MacJay
As Delaneys has said to you, stop playing the man, it’s really no something that a Celtic supporter would do.
HH
======================================================================
Please specify.
MacJay
Remember it well.
My dad frequented it regularly.
Happy Days
YNWA
MacJay
Please specify, really, ffs, you have slagged the support on here tonight and have done over the years time and time again, flag waving, letting off flares need I go on, they like you are part of the club, lock stock and green barrel you called it earlier, so you just have to accept it all, to pick out the good bits that suits you and to discard the bits you don’t find good it not on I’m afraid :-)
THE EXILED TIM on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:53 PM
MacJa
Please specify, really, ffs, you have slagged the support on here tonight and have done over the years time and time again, flag waving, letting off flares need I go on, they like you are part of the club, lock stock and green barrel you called it earlier, so you just have to accept it all, to pick out the good bits that suits you and to discard the bits you don’t find good it not on I’m afraid :-)
==========================================================================
Precisely.
I do accept it all .
Which is where I disagree with those who refuse to accept the Board in general and PL in particular.
Definitely my last word.
For now.
:-)
JIMTHETIM53 on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:43 PM
######
Brilliant. √
Thank you fella.
Take care.
HH
Reports that Celtics income without CL money and transfer fees is circa £60 million.
That our wage bill alone is £60 million.
Can anyone confirm if this is true?
If so .
I can’t see us buying many better quality players in Jan.
TT
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
DD, off to Spain tomorrow. Back for the Hoot. Where and what time? You’ve probably told me 5 times. :-)
CRC
Over in Edinburgh Dec 14th to 16th.
Hope to get to Easter Road for Hibs game that weekend.
Looking for tickets. Have asked Peter Lawwell but he text me to say…and I qoute..” too busy at the moment mate, between Rodgers looking for players and that CQN crowd banging on about my bonus I am thinking of giving it all up and going to open a Vegan restaurant for Transvestites in Troon ”
You heard it here first!!!
BRRB
10th November McChuills High Street fae afternoon for me.
Just listened to Spanish Caravan The Doors there. Hahaha
Enjoy Espana
YNWA
tiny tim
its close to 60ml. not sustainable without cl money but that is a dangerous road to go down, we have to cut wages.
to many outside the team making too much money( including pl)
KEV on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:35 PM
Its simple…..
No harm to Auldheid
but, Resolution 12
its like brexit….it’s like
a masonic kaleidescope
that not even Santa Clause
could bring it to a conclusion.
There’ll be more court case’s
and unexpected pot holes etc.
on and on piles a pish!
=================
As auld Keevins would say its all about opinons, to which I would add, informed and ill informed.
GREENPINATA on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 9:28 PM
That’s all very well, but what have the Board ever done for us? ;)
SID1888 on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:23 PM
Auldheid @ 9:56
Thanks for providing some balance and from a well informed position but while I appreciate you doing that, even you have expressed frustration at the PLC’s approach to Res. 12 have you not?
====================
Indeed I have and I hope lessons are being learned as a consequence of those frustrations.
I believe mistakes have been made but that is how we humans learn what works and what doesn’t.
Listening to the new Etims podcast. Very good. Just agreed with the comments about Scotty’s penalty. My heart was in my mouth. Wondered about his confidence. But he done it! Brilliant. I thought he might have gave the shot to Eddie. But no, he stood up.
THE EXILED TIM on 30TH OCTOBER 2018 10:13 PM
Auldheid
I admire how you always see the good in the suits at the club, I have told you this more than once.
Take the Ogilvie re election, why didn’t Celtic put forward a candidate, that would have sent out a massive get it up you message, but no, they just followed on like sheep.
The LNS review, so they just accepted the sfa’s refusal then, when knowing fine well that LNS didn’t have the tools to do the job, the tools that the spl didn’t give him btw, Doncaster didn’t furnish him with the relevant info, your admiration is admirable mi amigo, but ffs, you know more than most what is going down.
HH
===============
I don’t see suits, I see people , people doing what they believe to be best.
If I didn’t have that attitude I might never have met the fine fellow and even more fine good lady that I did as opposed to a grumpy old troglodyte living in a Spanish cave. :)
Why would Celtic put forward a candidate in 2011? It would have to have been more than on the basis he was a hun. It predated ebts and side letters and he was viewed by the media as a fine chap and great administrator and next in line to the throne. Did any SFA President ever face a competitor before or since?
Without backing from the other SPFL clubs on revisiting LNS Celtic had no option but to accept the SFA rejection, but not after making a case that to any neutral observer made total sense.
You can read all the correspondence between SFA and Celtic in Sept 2017 at the following link. One quotes the end of the CW trial and Supreme Court decision as a reason to do so.
http://cdn.celticfc.net/assets/downloads/SFA_Correspondence.pdf
As I recall, waiting for both to conclude is exactly the advice given to Celtic by Res 12 requisitioners in December 2016 after UEFA refused to engage further with the Res12 lawyer that year.
Hardly the action of a club not listening is it? The letters also challenge the view Celtic did nothing.
That is not to say more could not have been done, I would have taken up the suggestion by Regan to approach LNS himself with Sir David Murray’s FTT testimony re the competitive advantage Rangers sought from using ebts, plus a bit more flowing from the UEFA Licence breaches in 2011.
That could yet happen, which is why the SFA tried to send Res12 down the JPDT route, which now looks like a cul de sac.
WHAT IS THE STARS @ 9:59 PM,
Interesting observation… heard you were thinking of joining the Board..;)
http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DB9FzVhw8_bY&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjg-oHmsK_eAhWOWsAKHfRjBgMQtwIIVDAO&usg=AOvVaw2HgImnWtWftcX8vqHdOMqM
Hail Hail
SFtB @ 8.53 am,
”Seems to me that there were, at least, 3 points of transfer tension in the recruitment and retention department. Without inside knowledge it is difficult to discern blame or responsibility in each.”
Apologies for being so late in replying. While I agree there is certainly value in looking more closely at what went wrong and how not to repeat mistakes. The fact is some of those transfer “tensions” have been repeated for several seasons now, through three managers.
I’m not really interested in blame as you say we have little inside knowledge and if personalities are to blame, then hopefully the egos have landed:) Yet for me most of the tensions seem strategic or maybe even philosophical.
I’m minded of the window where we sold VvD. He remained a Celtic player while we aimed to qualify for the UCL, when we failed he was transferred, we knew this was going to happen whatever the outcome of our UCL qualification campaign, so we weren’t surprised. What did surprise us, or at least the gullible like me, was when he went we didn’t get the top striker we thought we’d been promised… in fact Ronny said we’d already got our top target… Ciftci… True!!
1) Failure to land Players: The Sporting Lisbon RB and John McGinn are the alleged “failures” here though there may be others, as yet unidentified , undiscussed and, therefore, not subjected yet to partisan blame-shifting.
The ones we know about are Cristiano Puccini who left SL for Valencia for £7.2 m and McGinn left Hibs for Villa for over £3m. In both cases, the allegation is that PL’s dithering left them open to us being gazumped by other clubs. The alternative possible explanation, i.e. that, like most players, their selling club and the player’s agent did not commit to the first acceptable bid (even if it is from Celtic) and waited out the window to see what alternatives came in, does not get much consideration. It seems both players and clubs can be happy that a form of the latter strategy may have been pursued. Sporting got a higher transfer fee, possibly than we were willing to pay, and the player gets a top La Liga club rather than a sideways or downwards move ( from Sporting to Celtic). McGinn gets a much higher weekly salary to a big English club with a solid prospect of getting back to the Premiership; that is a fair compensation for not getting to the club you support; as a potential Bosman he could have exercised his right to turn down Villa’s generous offer and go to Celtic for less.
The frustration here it seems to me is the difference in the way we conduct our business regarding transfers out and transfers in… we seem to be thoroughbreds when we are selling and shire horses when we are buying. A contrast was not lost on the football department. If we had been pursuing these players with “bulldog” determination we would have landed some much needed quality additions.
2) The Dembele sale- It is interesting that a player who forced through his own last minute transfer did not hit out at PL for his treatment (maybe, that is a form of support for the argument that PL was helping him get sold) but instead hinted that it was unfair to restrict his chances of a dream move whilst the manager had been planning his own move away from Celtic and was wishing to take Moussa with him to his new club. It’s only rumour, I know but so is the view that PL was actively assisting the sale and, at least this rumour came from one of the participants.
While I agree speculation is not helpful ignoring facts is also not helpful. My point in this regard would be firstly take the personalities out, for the sake of commenting on a blog it is often easier to attach ownership of a directive or strategy to an individual, Celtic have obvious silos in play here.
Let me give you an example, the growing frustrations regarding our transfer dealing and lack of public scrutinization of the footballing authorities has coincided with the departure of Lord Reid and the tenure of our current Chairman who operates under the radar. This is why I like to distinguish between the executive and the Football Club. Also there will be executives under Board level who will be involved in our transfer dealings.
This brings me back to the tongue in cheek comment I made this morning which was a direct response to Por Cierto’s comment – ”I’m not going over all this again. BR has the final say on ALL football matters. The board cannot sell or buy a player without his say so, por cierto
Now it is NOT speculation to suggest that we were negotiating with Lyon, it is a fact. Likewise it is no speculation that Moussa and his agent were given permission to speak to Lyon and they did. We had a situation where MD’s fee and personal terms had been agreed. This is a fact.
The Dembele transfer was a fait accompli when it was presented to Brendan to veto, hardly a situation BR was in control of and a recipe for the resultant disaster.
3) ”The Boyata non-sale. The allegation appears to be that, in letting Boyata speak to Fulham, PL was going against the wishes of the manager that he be allowed to leave. Whatever truth there was in this version of actuality, the outcome does not support the narrative that the CEO can sell players from out beneath the feet of the manager.
Boyata stayed. As a Bosman he can walk for nothing in the summer or we can get less money for him in January and he can probably do better than Fulham. That begs the question who won this alleged” battle. It is hard to argue that it was PL the money-grabbing CEO as the transfer was not forced through.
Was it BR who insisted Boyata stay and if so, why did Dedryk not do a Dembele and make himself eminently sellable?
Or are we seeing a cordial agreement between player, manager and club representative, PL, that, in our current defensive injury crisis, it suits all parties to keep Dedryk for a part or the whole of his final year even though the money grabber takes a bath on what could have been £9m for the heated driveway fund.
Certainly, Dedryk’s subsequent playing performance suggests he is happy with the outcome and we, as a club, have a right to be so too.
Well, this is in many ways a template for the Dembele fiasco with a different outcome. I’m not sure I can extrapolate your conclusions from what happened here. We need to look at what is known and keep the, albeit necessary, speculation to a minimum.
It was thought that Dedryk was not going to sign an extension to his contract and would be going after his World Cup exploits. We know that Brendan wanted some quality players in to bolster certain positions and replace the players we were losing in the summer transfer window. He wanted the players in early to bed them in (as this is Brendan’s preferred way of working), we had a humongous challenge in our Summer schedule.
This did not happen, quite the opposite in fact, none of our targets were secured at all, never mind in a timely manner. As with Moussa later, we had negotiated a transfer fee with Fulham and Dedryk was finalizing personal terms. Brendan had to announce in a press conference(s) that DB was going nowhere as he didn’t have a replacement. A highly unusual and embarrassing situation for Celtic, yet an action Brendan obviously thought was necessary. It became very plain that the executive were running a different strategy from the football club. In fact BR had to state, unuvically he was in charge of the footballing side (which was news to me).
I suppose we have to find a reason to square the circle between the differeing outcomes in the Dembele and Boyata situations. I find it hard to discern the evidence for a view that sees PL undermining the managers wishes as pound signs over-ride all other considerations. If that were true, Boyata would be gone by now (and we would have seen the selling on of peripheral figures like Hayes, Allen and, until the weekend, Christie and Kouassi).
We have to explain it all and it all has to hang together. Any view that sees PL as all bad and BR as all good, or vice versa, does not fit the observable facts.
Others may have more inside knowledge. I can just try to negotiate my head around what the runes (the observed outcomes) might possibly mean. They do not all fit the narrative of an all powerful CEO who over-rides the manager’s wishes.
That does not mean there is no tension between the 2 of them. It just means it cannot be as black and white as some (not yourself) would like to believe.
Here I believe you get to the heart of the matter, yet as I’ve stated here and on posts before for me this isn’t about individual player’s circumstances, yes look at McGinn, Boyata, Arzani, Dembele etc etc. Yet this debacle was brought about by pursuance of different strategies.
I’m not sure and what part the personalities played in the summer fiasco that sent us back three Seasons but one thing’s for sure, if either Brendan or Peter or both let their egos loose and this led to the loss of income, credence and performance of our football Club they should be hanging their head in shame. Celtic are bigger than both*10000….
Still, lets not point fingers, let’s examine the strategies…
Firstly Brendan’s: we first and foremost target our football objectives… we hold on to our top players, we strengthen our weak positions with quality and we replace the quality players we are losing. We do this early in the transfer window to negate the loss of World Cup players and to allow for bedding these players to give us the best chance of qualifying for the UCL and making a good account of ourselves there and by extension domestically.
The executive’s approach, same as previous seasons, we sell our most valuable players, we look for value at incoming players hoping to identify good prospects who can add value to the suad and their transfer fees in European and domestic competition. We look at the budget necessary to accomplish our objectives and spend accordingly. We will fill gaps with loanee fringe players from top academies/clubs.
Now if we had followed Brendan’s route I believe we would have brought in an additional three quality players above and beyond OE, including a central defender. We would have sold Armstrong, Boyacá and as many fringe players as possible. Those not going we would find loan deals.
If we followed the Executives strategy we would have sold £50M in players and looked at bringing in top prospects and loaners with a potential right to buy). Use the skill in our coaching staff and the domestic and European competitions to enhance their ability and value. Don’t underestimate our domestic competitions, maybe tin pot for some but players who have won trophies and medals gain confidence and value.
The resultant (BR), we would have sold £20M worth of players and brought in about £30M, we would not have sold MD. Pluses – We would have had a great squad, maybe qualified and performed in Europe, been invincible(is) domestically and had a great platform to go from strength to strength with a treble treble and 10iar…
The resultant (Executive), we would have sold £50M+ we would have brought in £20M in players. We had a chance of doing ok in Europe, we would be commanding domestically, we would continue to win trophies and develop our strategy of bringing through high quality players…
What happened in reality was a mess, a farce that sees the quality and value of our original £100M squad fall to £50M. Our turnover fall by £10M and our Kudos as a very well run Club ruined.
Our performances were set back three seasons. We have £40M less talent on the pitch and £40M more spondulix in the bank. Now I’m more than aware the £40M pounds worth of talent costs a lot (wages etc) to keep on the pitch but the question we must ask… where do we get most value?
While we think about that an important aside…
Over five years ago when BR was at Liverpool and we couldn’t imagine him at Celtic someone, somewhere (or a collective) made the decision. Celtic should be going with a 4-2-3-1 formation in all our teams, from Schoolboys through to the first team. This was a strategic plan and was the reason we brought in Ronny in as a specialist coach.
Now who made the decision to play this formation? Who made the decision to bring Ronny in? Not Lenny he was far from happy… we have a defacto Football Directorship at Celtic, is this an individual or a collective, are they still in situ? Questions that need to be understood.
The fact is Brendan is more than happy with this formation and strategy, yet this calls for top technical players, excellently coached who are super fit athletes… these guys cost time and money… we have the big idea, where is the matching investment?
Hail Hail
Cheers G. I should make it ok.
BRRB
When all I Want is You. ??
U2 CSC
Am I wrong..War, depression rise of fascism 100 years ago.
Today
War on terror, Financial crisis, Rise in Fascism.
Or is it just me?
CHAIRBHOY on 31ST OCTOBER 2018 12:28 AM
Wow.
Hi guys and hope alls well.
More for the masses. Hail Hail
https://sentinelcelts.com/2018/10/31/why-doesnt-the-game-judge/
Good read tonight Celts
Auldheid
Thank you for your informative posts tonight,and your patience in detail.on res12
With david Murray’s self harm of rangers2012,
Have any parameters thro financial fair play/banking/terrorist/money laundering laws been introduced by SFA to ensure such ignominy does not fall on any other club?(or different club at same address:-)
Ie- if liquidation of a club happened tomorrow
Is it true they would only go do down one division?
:-)
6 years ago today
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-20141946
Ithappenedcsc
HH
Good Morning from the chilly, Chilterns…
MACJAY1 @ 2:01 AM,
Is that good wow or a bad wow;)
Not been on much but – Great to see you posting again…
Aff Oot
Hail Hail
Good morning CQN from a damp, dark but optimistic Garngad
Bring on the Dundonians, let’s keep the winning streak going, any win will do, but another good performance like the second half from Sunday would be greeeeeeeat.
Hail Hail
D. :)
Good morning all from the Govanhill wanderer. Watching the game in Bhodrun bar ,Benidorm tonight. Embdy aboot?
Morning Tims,,
Celtic v St Johnstone
Badge Badge
Thu, January 01 1970
Kick-off 01:00
details to follow………..
##########
Just clocked this on the website under home tickets for sale..
A wee bit slow with the follow up details eh ?
COYBIG
Right out to the old grind
Have a nice day yall
BMCUWP get oan here
D. :)
CHAIRBHOY on 31ST OCTOBER 2018 6:09 AM
Magnificent WOW.
Backed up FACTS.
DAVID66 on 31ST OCTOBER 2018 7:44 AM
BMCUWP get oan here
========================================================
I`ve just telt the boay.
morning bhoys from a damp looking Cheshire.good debate last night.hh.
Chairbhoy
A contrast was not lost on the football department. If we had been pursuing these players with “bulldog” determination we would have landed some much needed quality additions.
You sure about this? Bulldog determination is enough to get the quality?
I think it is dead easy to recruit. We got Willo Flood very quickly at the last minute. We paid a little more than what he was worth but it did not bankrupt us. However he was not quality nor was he worth the little we paid for him.
Jack Hendry took a little more time and, again, we paid a little bit of a premium over the odds, but we got him. So far, I am not seeing that required quality though I am prepared to give it time.
We could even end up paying over £6m for the exotic talents of Scott McKenna but we know it is the on-costs of salary that hurt more than the fee (would we be willing to make Puccini or McGinn or McKenna, the highest paid player in the squad? Would we countenance the knock on effect of other stalwarts like N’tcham, Forrest and Tierney seeking wages commensurate with the new expensive arrivals?)
What form would the “bulldog quality” have taken in order to persuade Puccini to jump for us and not wait to see if Valencia or better came in instead? What form would it have taken for McGinn and Hibs to jump? I am sure we were prepared to throw Scott Allan into the mix but Hibs did not bite even though they wanted that player and may get him soon enough on a Bosman.
For someone who is supposedly better at selling Celts than buying, PL has failed to sell Comperr, Allan, De Vries, Hayes and posibly Gamboa, Christie and Kouassi too, who were all accumulations he managed to attract to Celtic but has failed to get rid.
Those are the actual and existing football transfer (or non-transfer) facts that do not chime with the narrative that he sells from under the manager’s nose.
Now it is NOT speculation to suggest that we were negotiating with Lyon, it is a fact. Likewise it is no speculation that Moussa and his agent were given permission to speak to Lyon and they did. We had a situation where MD’s fee and personal terms had been agreed. This is a fact.
The Dembele transfer was a fait accompli when it was presented to Brendan to veto, hardly a situation BR was in control of and a recipe for the resultant disaster..
And yet, in this scenario, Brendan did veto the move and was then forced to un-veto it by Moussa’s reaction. It was not PL who won that battle (unless we are suggesting that PL colluded with Moussa on the petulance tactics). In fact Moussa suggested it was Brendan that was being hypocritical in exercising the veto (anf I don’t think either of us know if Moussa’s jibe at Brendan had any merit). It is, in fact, entirely possible that both Brendan and Peter were disappointed to lose this player at this time. certainly, it would have required St, Bernard-like (the dug not the saint) tenacity to land someone of similar ability that late in the window, certainly with due diligence, it would be.
Now, if I have your line of argument right, it is your view that giving permission for Dembele and Boyata to negotiate with potential selling clubs (and McGinn to speak to other clubs too though he was not even our player to control) that created the problem in the first place.
Now, I know that clubs can prevent any official appraches for players they do not want to sell. We also know that agents are under no such restrictions and they can have “unofficial” talks with any club about buying their man, without the permission of the club with the player’s current registration. But how many times is a transfer stopped by exercising this very weak “right”?
Players have all the power nowadays. They can down tools and become unhappy over matters as trivial as Yaya Toure’s birthday cake. They can quickly become dead assets by not performing to their level in order to force you to consider how much of a financial bath you can take.
Do you not consider that Moussa was always a sellable asset? Someone who was going to leave before he reached, at the very best, his final year? In my view, there was transfer talk the year before he ws sold and figures above what we earned from Lyon were floating about. Much of it will have been rumour and much of it would have been Celtic-inspired transfer inflation but I do believe there were clubs sniffing around and some would have paid more than we got from Lyon this year. We cannot stop transfer interest in our better players, just as we cannot seem to drum up much interest in our less needed players. It is market forces and not super salesmen or marketing men that create the bigger transfers.
Yet the assett-selling enthusiast that is PL did not sell Moussa last year. Instead he waited till Moussa had an injury record and a drop in performance to “choose” to sell. I would again assert that it was the attractions of going to Lyon that appealled to Moussa, as it was with Puccini choosing Valencia, and McGinn chossing Villa, rather than the half-heartedness of Lawwell, that was probably the deciding factor.
My question remains unanswered:-
If Brendan holds sway neither Moussa nor Dedryk get sold because he needs them for CL qualifications.
If PL holds sway, both players get sold because he gets the bonuses and that’s all he’s interested in.
If, as actually did happen, one player got sold and one stayed, that suggests to me that one player was willing to stay and the other wasn’t. Even though PL had “allowed” them to speak to clubs, perhaps with the inference that he was encouraging their sale. Brendan did not persuade Dedryk to stay anymore than PL did. Both accepted his decision to stay and there may be winners all round. We might have lost the £9m but we get a good player in a threadbare team position to stay and help us achieve our title and trophy aims this year while the player might get better than Fulham in January or June but will definitely get a bigger slice of a transfer cut or signing on fee.
It is not an excuse to say that we cannot buck market forces. We failed to retain Moussa as we failed to retain Van Dijk, Forster, McGeady, Armstrong , Larsson, Viduka, McAvennie, Hay, Macari & Dalglish over the ages, even when we had our pre-Bosman control over events.
We did manage to retain McStay and McGrain in the past so we don’t always lose out.
Even in this harder era we have retained Gordon (whom Chelsea would have bought), Tierney (so far), Rogic and Forrest. PL has negotiated their contract renewals without much credit even though Tiny Tim’s figures earlier suggest we are paying a price for retaining talent as CL rewards are becoming harder to gain to fund this. Yes, we have cash in the bank and we could have recruited more and better this summer. As it stands, the failure to land Puccini to become one of our 4 players vying for RB or McGinn to add to a healthy roster of midfielders does not look as big a recruitment failure as the lack of CB’s we have aquired, 3 of whom look like or are converted midfielders (Ajer, Bitton and, to my eye, Hendry).
I think Celtic’s financial or football situation is not as great as we think it is.
I see us as domestically dominant but slipping down in Europe. I have seen that trend become ever more remorseless with each passing year as the triple threat of Bosman, Big 5 European Leagues, and TV money makes us less and less relevant in the fashionable world of football, where China and the US leagues will soon by-pass our traditional virtues.
I don’t see PL as responsible for this, no matter what kind of a dog he impersonates. I don’t see the CEO of Anderlecht, Legia, Rapid Vienna, Ferencvaros, Red Star Belgrade or Steau Bucharest as being responsible for this trend either but, like us they are victims of it. I predict that even the Dutch and Portuguese teams and the likes of Olympiacos, will also sink (into 2nd tier status rather than the 3rd tier we enjoy) so long as wealth continues to flow into 10 or so English cllubs, and 6 to 8 each of Spanish , Italian, French and German clubs, many of whom have had less tradition and match day attendance than we enjoy.
As we gloat over how many ex- Sevcoites will become Celtic fans, I am seeing so many ex-Celtic youngsters becoming Barca, Juve and Liverpool fans.
Forget Bulldogs! Pl would have to become a super-powered version of Cerberus in order to buck that trend.
But that’s me just making excuses again.
It would be so much easier to inhabit the Scooby-Doo world of “If it weren’t for that pesky PL we would have been chapeens of Europe again.” (and I know that is not your point; I am providing an omnibus response here).
P.S. There would be no tears from me if PL left tomorrow. I think he is vastly overpaid and we could get someone nearly as good for less than half the price. I don’t however, believe that this would alter our stars in any way whatsoever.
So much for happyclapping, eh?
“Chapeens” would be Champeens or champions if the poster could type.
Auldheid
The reason I mentioned putting up a candidate to oppose RC Ogilvie is that he was compromised, the info about his EBT was out in the open, for this alone he should have been sacked on the spot let alone re elected, the fact we didn’t put up a candidate was a disgrace imo, in this instance him being a hun was by the by.
The LNS thing, you yourself were up in arms over it I recall, the fact that the conclusion was arrived at without the relevant info, the club knew this yet all they said publicly was they were surprised, with respect, a tad more shouting about it to the media wouldn’t have gone amiss, in the past x amount of years this is virtually all the club have said publicly, where has it gotten us ?
On the illegal player registration for more than a decade, this is an area where we have them bang to rights, yet we never said a word about the whitewash, our baubles, our money, yet the PLC as well as the club said nothing, for the PLC to say nothing is a serious dereliction of their duty towards their shareholders.
HH
Chairbhoy
Excellent read, Thank you.
HH