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Peter Lawwell

Discussion in 'Celtic Chat' started by eddiebhoy0109, Jan 13, 2015.

Discuss Peter Lawwell in the Celtic Chat area at TalkCeltic.net.

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Ryanm1984

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Celtic_Daft1888 said: ↑

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.
Click to expand...

The guy is absolutely spot on. We are in desperate need of an experience director of football to oversee all footballing aspects of the club.
It's amatuer as * that a fat accountant and his idiot son are running the show despite having very little experience on any of it.
Ryanm1984, Jan 30, 2024

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themouth1888

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This * can * off now. Protests, walk outs etc.. need organised.

themouth1888, Jan 31, 2024

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dbhoy72

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I think even though its wrong is going to get ugly and I mean for him too, can honestly see physical violence playing a part.

Got a feeling this lack of movement and now * shows like Idah and Lagerbielke isn't going to help.

I see probably in these upcoming games and tbh I think Huns could be all but wrapping up the title when we goto Ipox.

Hope tomgod I'm wrong but there's a bad bad feeling around the club and see covid season all over again.

Don't see BR lasting season too, and think he'll walk away.

dbhoy72, Jan 31, 2024

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bhoy81

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* parasite!

bhoy81, Jan 31, 2024

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Utter contempt for the fans from this lizard as per usual

Ipswichbhoy67, Jan 31, 2024

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Foley1888

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Celtic_Daft1888 said: ↑

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.
Click to expand...

This hits the nail on the head and is an excellent articulation of what’s happening to us.

It is so obvious we are run by a risk averse operation headed up by a Lawyer now and an accountant previously. Two professions renounced for their risk adverse nature. It is also so evident that we have no one in a senior role that understands football from a performance or sporting perspective.

Just thinking about the CL this season and we were probably the only club or one of less than a handful of clubs in the competition proper that does not have a sporting director or Director of Football. All those clubs we claim to hope to emulate have one. All the largest clubs in world football have one and the ones that are doing well tend to have a good one and ones underperforming a not so good one that doesn’t come from a sport background.

But we know better Desmond when he can be bothered and our execs can just roll their sleeves up to it. It generally seems like we take a view of how hard can it be?
Foley1888, Jan 31, 2024

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JML67 likes this.
henriks tongue

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Ryanm1984 said: ↑

The guy is absolutely spot on. We are in desperate need of an experience director of football to oversee all footballing aspects of the club.
Click to expand...

Serious question, can we get this guy or similar others who really understand business, a spot at future AGM and collectively ask the REALLY important questions on behalf of all supporters, as one voice.
Would be much more effective than much of the often irrelevant crap (sorry) that can be asked about refs/green brigade/conspiracies/pies/toilets etc etc that is so easy for Lawell et al to swat away.
Let's give them a proper but well constructed grilling.
A fans representative (partly funded by fans?) on the board would be even better.

Last edited: Jan 31, 2024

henriks tongue, Jan 31, 2024

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Foley1888 said: ↑

This hits the nail on the head and is an excellent articulation of what’s happening to us.

It is so obvious we are run by a risk averse operation headed up by a Lawyer now and an accountant previously. Two professions renounced for their risk adverse nature. It is also so evident that we have no one in a senior role that understands football from a performance or sporting perspective.

Just thinking about the CL this season and we were probably the only club or one of less than a handful of clubs in the competition proper that does not have a sporting director or Director of Football. All those clubs we claim to hope to emulate have one. All the largest clubs in world football have one and the ones that are doing well tend to have a good one and ones underperforming a not so good one that doesn’t come from a sport background.

But we know better Desmond when he can be bothered and our execs can just roll their sleeves up to it. It generally seems like we take a view of how hard can it be?
Click to expand...

Aye but you’ll get some people telling you that those clubs with sporting directors don’t win quadruple trebles and few of them will win their league as regular as us. Thats what you’re up against and It wouldn’t surprise me if thats the sort of thinking in our boardroom.

AdamRS, Jan 31, 2024

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Get him and the rest of them all to *.

totti-88, Jan 31, 2024

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Morcombe likes this.
JML67 Gold Member Gold Member

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Foley1888 said: ↑

This hits the nail on the head and is an excellent articulation of what’s happening to us.

It is so obvious we are run by a risk averse operation headed up by a Lawyer now and an accountant previously. Two professions renounced for their risk adverse nature. It is also so evident that we have no one in a senior role that understands football from a performance or sporting perspective.

Just thinking about the CL this season and we were probably the only club or one of less than a handful of clubs in the competition proper that does not have a sporting director or Director of Football. All those clubs we claim to hope to emulate have one. All the largest clubs in world football have one and the ones that are doing well tend to have a good one and ones underperforming a not so good one that doesn’t come from a sport background.

But we know better Desmond when he can be bothered and our execs can just roll their sleeves up to it. It generally seems like we take a view of how hard can it be?
Click to expand...

we've ran out of Lawwells, Strachans and Desmonds to hire into the DoF role though... best carry on without for now no other candidates need apply

JML67, Jan 31, 2024

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JML67 said: ↑

we've ran out of Lawwells, Strachans and Desmonds to hire into the DoF role though... best carry on without for now no other candidates need apply
Click to expand...

There's only one option. Neil Lennon as the new Sporting Director.

Celtic_Daft1888, Jan 31, 2024

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Foley1888

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JML67 said: ↑

we've ran out of Lawwells, Strachans and Desmonds to hire into the DoF role though... best carry on without for now no other candidates need apply
Click to expand...

It wouldn’t surprise me if we brought in Gordon Strachan as a progressive appointment.

Foley1888, Jan 31, 2024

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Foley1888 said: ↑

It wouldn’t surprise me if we brought in Gordon Strachan as a progressive appointment.
Click to expand...

Isn't he actually employed by us right now as a 'consultant'? He was at one point recently ... dunno if he still is ... is listed on transfermarkt

McKagan, Jan 31, 2024

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Foley1888

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McKagan said: ↑

Isn't he actually employed by us right now as a 'consultant'? He was at one point recently ... dunno if he still is ... is listed on transfermarkt
Click to expand...

I think that was a couple of seasons ago not sure if he is or isn’t because he was employed by Dundee at the time as a Director of Football or the likes.

He was meant to be looking at pathways from academy to first team. Clear to see that went well. Not a dig at him as I have no idea what his recommendations as a consultant were but nothing has changed.

Foley1888, Jan 31, 2024

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He’s the non executive chairman but.

Clearly has no influence over the footballing operation.

Fat *’s stench is all over it.

FrankMcCallum, Jan 31, 2024

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theweeman Gold Member Gold Member

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FrankMcCallum said: ↑

He’s the non executive chairman but.

Clearly has no influence over the footballing operation.

Fat *’s stench is all over it.
Click to expand...

'non executive'

theweeman, Jan 31, 2024

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He's all over this. Canny go him at all.

Guchi Gucci, Jan 31, 2024

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Get them out. Time for a change and get this club moving in the right direction. Where it should be, these * have been dragging us back for years.
No doubt the green brigade will be in for another ban soon, bit of deflection and division within our own support to keep them out the firing line

Boruc17, Jan 31, 2024

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Feels like the Kelly's and whites again. The club is for the fans not the Lawwells or the Desmonds they show no ambition or drive for our club, they should just go.

limezer, Jan 31, 2024

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They will never bring in a proper director of football. They would do it in name only. They would never be allowed to run the operation properly.

Celtic are run for profit in a very specific way. Nicholson / Lawwell need full control for that.

They all need to go.

JamesM09, Feb 1, 2024

#4700

Sgt Neppers*, Wee Baldy and Lewis Kerr like this.

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