The enormous building maintenance costs for Celtic Park

Over the years I’ve gone on about the cost of running a football club the size of Celtic.  Before you start to employ a footballer, coach, or someone to put the cones out at training, you’ll be pushed to spend less than £17m.  If you want to have appropriate resources in place, you’re going to spend more than this.

The club spend a lot of money each year on building maintenance at Celtic Park (have a guess?).  The fabric of the building, plumbing, painting the steps, fixing the locks, ensuring electrics and heating systems are safe, costs a small fortune at a stadium that size.

There is a tendency to think of Celtic Park as ‘new’, but it’s not.  It recently entered its third decade, and like any building that age, with large areas exposed to the elements, it requires a continuous programme of renewal and repair.

Structural damage can happen to any building during a storm, it’s not necessarily a sign the building’s been under-maintained or is otherwise dangerous.  But when parts of the roof hang free over the heads of spectators, as happened at Ibrox last night, lots of things need to be checked.  Starting with the maintenance records.

My preference would be that games are cancelled during high winds.  Better safe than sorry.

Annual building maintenance cost of Celtic Park is £800k (not counting Lennoxtown or the Superstore).  That’s a lot of money to find, if you were scrapping by on emergency loans.