Peter Lawwell

I really can’t think of any reason at all for this * continued presence at the club.

 

We didn't get rid of him, he was never leaving, even when he stepped down as CEO it was reported that he was keeping a place on the board, loads of fans just never read past the headline of stories and started jumping up and down celebrating about him being gone, when he never was.

 

Celtic are paying Lawwell junior money to do the square root of * all.

 

Because we've regressed to the point where we're now a "good ol' bhoys club".

Rife with * nepotism that sees Lawells, Desmond's and Strachan's in key positions theyre either no longer fit to be in, or woefully unqualified for. (Maybe not Gavin, no clue about him tbh).

The fact that John Kennedy has been assistant manager to 4 different managers, and that we're only one of two clubs in all of Europe that have rehired ex managers TWICE in the past 30 years says it all. Desmond is a * control freak who thinks he's the * pep guardiola of club owners.
The other club is Real Madrid, who rehired Capello and Zidane.

And it rarely works out, ever. Daglish at Liverpool, rednapp at Portsmouth, Keegan at Newcastle, pulis at stoke, Lennon at Celtic, Jose at Chelsea.. All * canned.

 

He makes his tory pals richer

 

Word is ML's remit at City was to collate scouting reports to go to the recruitment team. He majorly over stated his importance in the process. He wouldn't be here if it wasn't for his old man bcos he isn't qualified.

He on his Linked-In and Celtic when employing him listed his job title as... Head of Scouting and Recruitment at the CFG (City Football Group) which covers clubs in Europe, Australia, Japan, South America and the USA.

According to the Celtic statement the new man had spent 10 years in this role. He was 37 when we hired him so apparently rose to this lofty position at just age 27. Impressive.

Strangely his job title listed on UEFA was 'Scouting information and content manager’. Something not quite right there. If the rumours are true we've basically got a rookie overseeing our whole scouting and recruitment side. I wonder how that happened.

 

It's possible that his position within the CFG changed over the course of a decade.

 

Also, do we really trust either our bullshit grandiose talk or trust City Group filing everything honestly above board with the footballing authorities? The flagship team of that Group - Man City 115 suspected violations and all

 

Stealing a wage. *.

 

He needs to go.

Whenever he’s involved disharmony soon follows.

The best times I remember at Celtic were Rodgers first season and Ange’s seasons and the common thread was this * had minimal involvement.

He causes nothing but conflict and ill-feeling at the club.

Just give him a whack of cash or something to * off forever. I don’t care if someone wants to argue he has no influence. His presence is * toxic from what he’s done in the past.

 

A parasite.

 

Both lawwell s need to get to * as his son looks clueless one player recruited and a couple out the door I wish both these * were out the door .

 

Too many old habits returned along with his appointment, Slow ponderous transfer windows that ultimately end in no quality being added whilst fighting clubs for pocket change differences in valuation. This is definitely not a coincidence.

Desmond needs to get with the times or f*** off and take his backwards past it cronies with him.

Being run as a investment dividend payout company and not a football club.

Soul destroying.

 

Aye there's just too much bad feeling that clearly won't disappear with sections of the support..

I don't know how much of this is purely down him, my gut tells me it isn't/he isn't as hands on as some think but that he's back and very much a part of what's going wrong at the club just now..

We need a freshness across the board..

 

Ffs is he still here

 

Any other walk of life our history of signing * all or duds would get him the sack....
p.s. DD is also a *.

 

He doesn't need to be that hands on to cause problems. He can tell the CEO how to go about his job, set priorities and budgets etc for him. Tell him how to go about negotiations.

 

I've just read this piece on KDS from a poster, in their Board of Directors thread. It's an exquisite post by DuffSticks over there. Hope he and they don't mind me sharing this but it's one of the best pieces I've seen written.

I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgeable about the comings and goings at Celtic. I don't have any insider info or goss, I can only judge what's going on inside the organisation based on what I can see from outside.

From a professional perspective, I do find Celtic to be a slightly bizarre organisation, in that the things it does well, it tends to do very well. It's very easy to take things for granted when they go smoothly, but from big one-offs like infrastructure projects to the club's pretty seamless commercial and retail functions, the consistent high-profile sponsorships the club gets, the level of financial control across the organisation ensuring ongoing stability and so on, the club tends to do things to a pretty decent standard a lot of the time. None of these things happen by chance and all are the result of a lot of hard work and strategic planning throughout the year. And that's pretty consistent year-on-year.

And yet, on the footballing side of things, life is fairly consistently chaotic with really clear signs of strategic incoherence. Short-term signings, repeated losses of promising academy players, lack of proactive squad-building, missing out on the pick of Scottish players etc etc. To me, that speaks to a lack of effective direction at the top of the organisation and/or the lack of a single point of focus with sufficient authority, whether that be on the board or not.

I appreciate none of this is likely particularly interesting to folk, but the Corporate Governance Statement on the Celtic website is fairly illuminating. This is required as part of the club's AIM listing and as such will likely have been signed off by the board. It gives as close an insight into the running of the club as you can really get without actually working there.

Celtic Corporate Governance Statement

The document has a real focus on risk management, which is not surprising to anyone who's watched and/or commented on Celtic's corporate activities before. It details the various financial and non-financial controls that exist, and (broadly) how they are implemented, how the budgeting process works, how the club assesses emerging risks etc.

It goes into a little detail on who makes the day-to-day decisions (the two executive directors, Michael Nicholson (CEO) and Christopher McKay (CFO)) and has a reference to a "senior management team" sitting underneath them, with an "appropriate level of autonomy" to do their jobs. Which is all pretty standard, but does beg a question - who is the senior voice of the footballing operation within the senior management team, if there is one?

We have first-team managers on the men's and women's side, a head of recruitment, a head of first-team recruitment, a head of analytics, a head of sports medicine, a head of sports science etc. That's a lot of individual silos with no clear overarching manager - in fact, the only focal point for where all of these disparate departments converge is the CEO.

All of this points to a bit of a vacuum in the organisational structure, where there is no single senior sporting expert in the senior management team (you could argue it's Brendan Rodgers, but that would be by dint of his personality, not the design of the structure). There is also no senior sporting expert on the board - Nicholson and McKay are both very experienced and Nicholson does work in sporting arbitration, but that's not the same as actively running a successful sporting operation.

There's a load of other details including that we perform appraisals of transfer dealings, which presumably leans on the first-team manager's input. What we do about those appraisals (especially given we are actively marking the chair's son's homework, in effect) and who inputs into them would be interesting to know.

There's also a bit on pre-agreed authority limits for transfers before the CEO gets involved. Which again, is understandable, but I'd be fascinated to know more about, especially what level we start to get the CEO's input on. I would expect the limits to be pretty small, but I do think back to how we continued to make small signings when we didn't have a manager before Ange, and wonder if there's a limit for e.g. coaching or academy staff and another, higher limit for the manager. It could be why we are successful in getting smaller deals done but really struggle with the big ones.

I'm not a shareholder and have no intention of becoming one, but if I were I would have a few questions I would want to pose to the board (in a constructive manner):

• What is the club's appraisal system for player acquisitions/disposals based on, and what (if any) actions have been taken as a result of these appraisals?
• How often are the club's "pre agreed authority limits" reviewed with regards to player transfers, what are the limits and what is the involvement of the CEO/CFO when such limits have been breached?
• Does the club's organisational structure include a single permanent head of all sporting operations, or do the various heads (academy, first team, scouting, medical etc) report into the executive directors as part of the senior management team?
• Who conducts the quarterly financial and operational review referred to in the governance document for the footballing side of the business?
• Who, from a sporting perspective, inputs into the club's business risk matrix?
• The club's corporate governance Statement makes reference to the risk management frameworks considering opportunities as well as threats. Who from the footballing side inputs into this, and how formal is the process?

In my opinion, the most likely thing that is happening within Celtic is that footballing decisions are getting taken either by folk who do not have a lot of experience in the discipline, or by individual managers within their own departments, or both. We have a finance director who heads up the finance department, we will almost certainly some form of commercial/retail/marketing director who is on the hook for all of that good stuff, an operations manager, someone who heads up our IT team etc. But the football side is fractured, with no clear leader from within the department/function.

That's clearly a decision the board have taken - they have a responsibility to make sure that the board have the right range of experience and skill to carry out their duties. And we did have Nicky Hammond in a sort-of Director of Football role, but he would never have the clout to take on someone like Brendan Rodgers anyway. It's a weird way of dealing with the core part of your business - every other industry you'd look at would have at least one executive director with hands-on experience of the industry helping to make and inform decisions. Celtic, by the looks of things, either don't want that, or don't think they need it. Which I would respectfully disagree with - continued domestic success has been despite of, not because of, the footballing strategy. You can see where we truly sit by comparing us to the genuine competition in European competition.

Apropos of nothing, I sometimes daydream about a world where Tommy Burns beat that effing cancer and evolved his role from youth academy to a broader sporting director remit. He would have been perfect for the role, with the right level of profile to interact as an equal with someone like Brendan Rodgers but who also clearly had the support and respect of the board (and likely Desmond by extension). I think we'd be in a far better place if someone with his knowledge, wisdom and gravitas had been contributing to the strategic direction of the club over the last couple of decades.

TL/DR: the board does business-y things pretty well, but doesn't have the experience to do footballing things well, and doesn't have a football professional with enough clout running the footballing operations for them.

 

I agree Jim..

 

He should never have been allowed to return. Time to make our voices heard again in the stands. We need to be relentless until meaningful change happens.