Ronny Deila’s dream of reconstructing the Dundee United team of 2014 is on track as United have agreed terms for the sale of striker Nadir Ciftci, who is set to join Stuart Armstrong and Gary MacKay-Steven in green and white hoops.
United are feeling sore at losing three players to a rival but it could be argued this deal is a positive result for them. They are no different than Celtic in needing to acquire good players who will enhance their team and generate transfer fees when they leave.
Armstrong and Mackay-Steven gave Celtic a timely boost when they arrived in the team in February. If Ciftci adapts as quickly he’ll do well.
Signing a backup goalkeeper is a tricky call. Do you blow a large slice of budget on a genuine contender for the goalkeeper’s jersey, or perhaps promote the next teenage David Marshall? Both are viable calls. If we sign Logan Bailly (29) for a fee from Belgian club Leuven the expectation at Lennoxtown is that he will push Craig Gordon.
That would leave us with competition across the field, apart from the left back slot…..
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However….last day at work until after the CQN Open. Which is very nice ;-)
saint stivs
01:23 on 8 July, 2015
I played for Star of the Sea they were my club
Doc Conlon ran it and was a legend
To see ourselves as others see us:
extracted from the book ‘Fear and Loathing in World Football’ by Gary Armstrong, Richard Giulianotti.
apologies for the length of the post, I found it interesting and with all the talk of late about consumers/fans/supporters etc.
Evidently, the cultural identities surrounding Rangers, and their antagonistic
relationships to other identity constructs, have undergone some changes
throughout the club’s history. A useful way of explaining these changes is to
employ the dichotomy of tradition and modernity. Within the business orientated
football world, as Taylor (1971) and Critcher (1979) long ago indicated,
this opposition can be explained in terms of supporter identity as
we move from traditionalist supporters (with communal ties to the community)
through to modern consumers (whose consumption patterns constitute
their means of club identification). However, this simple opposition perhaps
does not allow for important internal gradations within football fandom. For
example, surely fans who consume club products heavily and identify strongly
with the club culture are categorically different, both to local-standing fans
who have been priced out of attending games, and to fans who buy into
supporting the club from afar. Moreover, there is no overnight, irreversible
shift from a traditional fan base to a rampant consumer one.
To enable a more reality-congruent taxonomy to be advanced, we find it
useful to introduce a further opposition. This additional binary, of hot and
cool, thus refers to a supporter’s cultural identification with the club, its
historical values and its community of fellow fans. This opposition of hot cold
is a modified application of the binary that Turner (2000) uses to explain
the sociology of body fashions and adornments. Hence, hot, traditional fans
constitute fans who tend to have long-standing personal identification with,
or community ties to the club, but make a relatively limited (or consciously
no) consumer engagement with the club. Hot, consumer fans are those fans
who spend significantly on the club, while retaining their strong sense of
community membership with its history and ethos. Cool, traditional fans are
those followers who spend little on football; they may identify with established
club cultures, but have little personal attachment to any of these, since free to-
air television and other popular media are their main sources of fleeting
football participation. Finally, we have the vast number of cool, consumer fans,
a postmodern category which is targeted for football’s brave new global world.
They spend regularly on the game, particularly through subscription television
or on merchandise. They develop relatively circumscribed club allegiances,
beyond an ironic attachment to fashionable teams and celebrity players, but
their market potential is enormous and greatly prized. As we argue here, it
may be that Rangers’ social history puts them in a particularly difficult position
for attracting these supporters, relative to other prospective superclubs.
A long-standing, even intrinsic feature of Rangers’ history has been its hot,
traditional association with deep-seated anti-Catholicism, as a particular
manifestation of Rangers’ Scottish, Protestant and Unionist identity. What is
striking here is the role of Rangers’ cultural identity in countermanding the
financial expansion of the club at important stages. In other words, Rangers
have been successful generally in transforming the club’s corporate culture
from a traditional, wealthy institution centred on fans and playing, to a
business that responds to consumers. But ideological residues have lingered,
resistant to a cultural cooling, and often have threatened the club’s pure
business interests. Anti-Catholic recruitment policies robbed Rangers of
potentially decisive personnel, most acutely during the 1970s and early 1980s
when the club was embarked on major infrastructural investment programmes.
These conflicts highlighted the contradictions behind Rangers’ conversion of
the hot traditionalist identity of its supporters into a hot form of consumer
identity (such as by improving ground facilities and catering).
From the mid-1980s onwards, Rangers’ English-Unionism became more
prominent, increasingly among its hot consumer fans. This stance represented
a counterpoint to the aggregated Scottish identity of rival teams outwith the
Old Firm, just as Scottish political and civic autonomy was intensifying. But,
like the Irish-Scottish identity of Celtic, Rangers’ Scottish-Unionist identity
served to point up the potential for diverse expressions of Scottishness. The
core–periphery antagonism of Aberdeen and other clubs towards the Old Firm
adds a regional inflection, again illustrating that the seemingly homogenous,
new Scottish polity contains internal realms of difference and division. These
other stances towards Scotland have proved conducive to the establishment
of a Rangers identity that can ignore the constitutive interests of the Scottish
football team or the Scottish football authorities. The construction of Rangers
as a genuine, global club player (not merely a national one) is certainly viable
in terms of starting wealth and market trends. But how might that modernization
be vitiated by cultural baggage from the late-nineteenth century?
In terms of cultural reinvention and social representation, it is instructive
to consider two sets of parallels faced by Rangers and the Blair political regime.
First, in relation to the old emblems of ‘Great Britain’, some analysts posit
that there is no possible future for the perishable symbols of the world’s oldest
modern state. According to Nairn (2000: 57–9), the Labour government under
Blair (its landslide victory and ultra-modernist media patina notwithstanding)
was merely a curator for the British state and its symbols. Nairn scoffs at
Blair’s conservationism, his lack of qualities and ineffible predilection for
youthfulness and ‘cool’. Certainly, New Labour’s arrival in office was tied
crassly to the envisioning (ultimately doomed) of a reinvented, ‘cool britannia’,
culturally primed for the new millennium, featuring the greatest theme park
(the risible London Dome), the greatest rock bands (the fragmenting Oasis
or the onanistic Radiohead), and the greatest festival on earth (the 2006 World
Cup Finals, given to Germany).13 The social meaning of ‘cool’ is also redolent
of a lack of ‘hot’ membership, and thus numerically unstable.
Second, and developing this point, the technically successful reinvention
of Labour under Blair does shadow Rangers’ uncertain pursuit of what we
would dub here the cool consumers, that is those free of ideological or
membership concerns. In sephological terms, the existing institution (Labour
or Rangers) is detraditionalized to attract these cool voters or consumers.
Traditionalists are encouraged to forfeit the old hot bonds of community
(Labourism or anti-Catholicism) in return for cold, instrumental benefits
(more votes or more victories). Modernizers argue that, however alienating
the cool reincarnation may be, the old hot supporters or consumers will not
desert the ship, since they have no obvious exit points into rival clubs or
parties. Traditionalists point out that a cool, consumer attitude in politics or
football gets you no guarantees of future loyalties, in support or finance. Yet
unlike Blair’s Labour, Murray’s Rangers are still surrounded by far more regular
gatherings of the hot elements, and their celebration of symbols and songs
from an earlier age.
Rangers’ proposed role in a European league of semi-peripheral nations
might appear to suspend these potential conflicts, between British and global
imagery, and between hot and cool forms of consumption. This kind of league
would represent only a partial celebration of the globalization of club football,
in terms of political economy and cultural identity. Rather than compete with
Europe’s real elite clubs, and thus turn the club into a global commodity
sign, this European tournament would encourage Rangers to return to its
established supporter base, to its ‘hot consumer’ group and its lingering strains
of Scottish-Protestant, English-Unionist and anti-Catholic ideology. Certainly,
Rangers still have to test the extent to which these hot consumers may finance
future initiatives, such as more European fixtures or pay-per-view television.
Nevertheless, as Graham Spiers and other sports journalists have noted, there
must be limits to the hot consumers’ demand for club products (Scotland on
Sunday, 2 April 2000). As we have stated, the hot significations of these
supporters (notably anti-Catholicism) may be considered off-putting to a
global market of multicultural, transnational consumers. But there remains
one market, in England, which has not been adequately tapped. There are
millions of fans at dozens of English clubs who, in European competition,
would support any other team than those English sides which dominate at
home (especially Manchester United). In Rangers, these cool (television-fed)
supporter groups may find a club to warm to, a club which retains English-
Unionist connections and harbours a very strong supporter culture replete
with British symbolism. Some English fan groups already proclaim warm
Rangers’ allegiances, and claim to have informal ‘twinning’ ties with hardcore
Rangers followers. Most of these English followers might fall into the
unusual category of cool traditional followers of Rangers. They develop a
reversible interest in the club, initially through their apparent English
connections; their support is sustained only by catching the club’s regular
victories on television, while there is very limited consumption of Rangers
paraphernalia. It is within this cool market that Rangers might find the seeds
of a possible warm consumer group, willing to ignore the question of cultural
modernization at the UK’s biggest ‘British club’. But that must still be
considered a ‘second-best’, relative to the cool, global ambitions that Rangers
should have if they are to compete with the world’s superclubs.
However, our final point here relates to the very nature of football rivalry
that emerges through such a European league. The founding of a new league
for the purposes of television might itself be blighted by this medium’s logic
of consumption. Television is a ‘cool medium’ belonging to ‘cool times’, with
low intensities and affects, compared to the ‘hot’ public rituals of the past. In
terms of a prospective European league, artificial, ‘cool rivalries’ emerge;
matches are viewed through the distanced medium of subscription television
or with analytical detachment from the stadiums’ stands. For example, Rangers
versus Sporting Lisbon (ironically in Celtic-style colours) has no underlying,
hot antagonism, except for the professional rivalries between players or
marketing machines. Such a virtual form of rivalry does appeal more obviously
to the new, cold consumers, rather than to the old, hot consumers that still
predominate at Rangers and many other European clubs. But in order to win
their fair global share of cool consumers, and to join a global elite, Rangers
may struggle harder than other top European clubs to jettison the hot social
forces that have largely taken them this far.
apologies for the formatting too.
Kitalba @ 02:38
Superb Kitalba; Thank you for posting this! :-)
Apart from the stunning 7-1 scoreline of course, there are 2 things that really strike me about this article…
The first is the sheer quality of the journalism and the neutral disposition.
The second is this quote which ever since has been taught to every Rangers-leaning Referee before all future Celtic Vs Rangers games to be remembered and feared lest a repeat scoreline, or worse (Better! :-) ) should be allowed to happen. i.e. This is what can happen if you dare to referee the game fairly and neutrally:
“Without a referee of his power of control we would almost certainly not have seen Celtic’s superb football.”
And there’s the lesson! :-)
Yours in Celtic,
TB&F.
Good read on the train Kit
Cheers
Anyone been to this ‘Celtic’ Bar in Toulouse?
https://goo.gl/maps/I6VGx
I was going to post more from that book but unfortunately I can’t figure out the formatting and I’m buggered if I’m going to retype it all. Basically, it confirms the Rangers brand as toxic and if there was a European league then the Celtic brand would be much more attractive to the neutral fan, hence increased income would flow into the Parkhead coffers. Academic now though post the ibrox implosion.
There is a good chapter on sectarianism in the six counties set up.
Well worth the read on a bleak cold night.
Regards our global brand, just an observation on my part, I haven’t seen a Celtic strip in any of the international airports since we last qualified for the Champions League proper, neither have I seen a strip in any of the big sports outlet stores in Australia.
Are global sports stores brand buying policies a reflection of Champions league participation?
Getting odegaard would be interesting a definite bonus talent wise. If the rumours about his attitude and fall out with Zidane are true then that may be an issue.
For me the biggest issue would be a loan deal would surely only take place with a guarantee of him playing every week, if thats the case who’s place does he take?
Thats potentially someone elbowed out who could develop for us long term!
kitalba
I have noticed the same, i only ever see the big two in spain and Germany and chelsea shirts!
Morning all.
After a bleak start down here, yesterday turned out lovely.
The lovely Judith has just been telling us that today things will be improving. It is already showing signs of that improvement.
Has the mood on CQN shown any signs of improvement? Really hope so.
Any word on the young Norwegian lad? It will be great if he comes, as he seems genuinely class.
I’m very nervous the day, first day of the ole Ashes.
At long last we get some proper sport.
Come on you bhoys in baggy green!
1001. Cleans up.
DBBIA I support England in cricket!
JJ
Modren more reality-congruent taxonomy is rubbish.
Jungle Jim- what’s not to support ? ;/)
Rats , snakes and huns? Not rubbish at all. Apart from rats and snakes having redeeming qualities.
JJ
I see Cyril Horne is being mentioned. My Dad’s Supporters Club always had him as a guest at their functions. He was one of the very few who told it as he saw it back in the day. And he could write.
The 2005 (?) series was my favourite sporting event not involving Celtic. Almost every ball was exciting.
Sounds like a story leaked from Steve Thompson. I doubt the fee is right
CELTIC STUMP UP TO FINALLY LAND CIFTCI AS FEE IS TOO MUCH FOR DUNDEE UNITED TO TURN DOWN
Nadir Ciftci was heading for Celtic yesterday in a deal that will net Dundee United £1.5 million.
A flurry of through-the-night activity saw the Hoops finally meet the Tangerines’ asking price.
And the Turkish star was expected to be at Parkhead on Tuesday for a medical to finalise his deal.
That will end a saga that’s been rumbling on since the end of last season and exploded into dramatic action in the last week.
In the wake of the reaction to the sale of Stuart Armstrong and Gary Mackay-Steven in January, United fought hard to prevent a third player heading to Glasgow’s east end.
A week ago on Monday, they accepted an offer of £1.5m from Wigan Athletic and gave the player permission to talk terms with them.
It soon became apparent Ciftci didn’t fancy a move to the third tier down south and on Thursday his agent, Pierre van Hooijdonk, informed the Tangerines he would not be going there.
The Turkish striker opened his scoring account for the Tangerines against would-be suitors Wigan Athletic in a friendly two years ago.
The Turkish striker opened his scoring account for the Tangerines against would-be suitors Wigan Athletic in a friendly two years ago.
That left Celtic front runners but only if they would match the Wigan bid.
At first they’d been reluctant to do that and had offers of £900,000 and then just over £1m rejected.
However, late Monday night, they finally buckled and came up with the right money.
And while it will be painful for Arabs to see another of their stars head for Parkhead, the size of the fee should soften the blow.
It’s a huge amount for a player entering the final year of his contract and who’d already indicated he would be leaving.
And he is still facing a lengthy ban if he’s found guilty of biting Dundee’s Jim McAlister in last month’s derby at Tannadice.
The fans seem to realise that and, despite the disappointment of losing another man to Celtic, the initial reaction has been that the size of the fee made it right to do the deal.
Most, though, also want to see a chunk of the cash re-invested in the squad for the coming season
I think I preferred 06-07.
Parkheadcumsalford:
I tried to C & P but without success. Try this link:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19601010&id=-XZAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=b6MMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2051,5911172&hl=en
JJ
Timaloy29
Where did that come from?
JJ
DBBIA
Was that the whitewash?
JJ
Jungle Jim Hot Smoked,
That report brought back a lot of memories. I was there and the sun was shining!!!
dontbrattbakkinanger
08:20 on 8 July, 2015
I’m very nervous the day, first day of the ole Ashes.
At long last we get some proper sport.
Come on you bhoys in baggy green!
———
Amazing how such a mingling piece of kit has such iconic status.
‘The baggy green does not shrink to fit even the largest head!’
HH jamesgang
JJHS -one of them ;/)
jungle jim hot smoked
08:28 on 8 July, 2015
The 2005 (?) series was my favourite sporting event not involving Celtic. Almost every ball was exciting.
——–
Agree. One million %!
(Modren Hyperbole is rubbidge)
It was incredible.
HH jamesgang
JG
“Amazing how such a mingling piece of kit has such iconic status.”
Well, what do you expect for such a friendly piece of kit 0:-)
JJ
Ciftci:
SFA will now revert to their “balance of probabilities” mantra.
Come on Aussies Come one!
Parkheadcumsalford
Did you look at the Table below that report? Can you imagine how some of the Negatrons would have reacted on a vintage CQN?
JJ
That final morning at Edgbaston in 05, I was literally watching from.behind the couch. The tension was incredible. Still don’t think Kasprowicz was out!
fieldofdrams
Didn’t it subsequently transpire that he shouldn’t have been as his hand was off the bat at the moment of contact. I remember his being quite philosophical about it when hearing the news. Impressive reaction.
JJ – pesky bl00dy iPhone won’t spelt like it’s telt!!!
HH jamesgang
Scorchio – way down south .
Decisions / Decisions .
Watch the cricket and record the cycling or watch the cycling and record the cricket ?
@Jungle Jim Hot Smoked
I think its a local Dundee paper
http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/2015/07/08/celtic-stump-up-to-finally-land-ciftci-as-fee-is-too-much-for-dundee-united-to-turn-down/?
fieldofdrams
I have never understood cricket, i can not see the draw and excitement of it let alone be behind the couch waiting for the next ball.
Apart from football, the only ever time I’ve been off my seat has been fir the Ryder cup and when lewis hamilton won his first title when massa and his family thought they’d won the title
Are the Aussies wearing peaky blinders bunnets?
http://i.imgur.com/BhRKDej.jpg