Michael Nicholson

What a job this guy done this summer, the amount of business done - incoming and outgoing - is outrageous. * the haters Mikey bhoy.

 

Don't you dare say that about the big dog

 

Just cos you want to give him the bone…

 

I'm saying nothing

 

Putting my optimism hat on here.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt at the minute. I've long argued Lawwell's shadow looms large at Celtic. I'm not saying that as a dig at Lawwell or that he's running things from the shadows, but it's impossible to deny Lawwell delivered result for the Company in terms of money, so it's very difficult for a new CEO coming in to move away from that.

If we can improve in Europe and it leads to more financial success I think Nicholson will gain enough clout to continue changing things. I do think he has a willingness to move forward but he knows one bad financial season will see him questioned by the shareholders.

Next season is the big test we need to pass.

 

We have £72M in the bank, rising to well over £100M imminently

Are you saying this is a negative? Looks like a well run club to me that will allow us to do what we need in the transfer market in the coming windows and mitigate the need to downsize if we missed out on the champions league for one season. Very strong position to be in.

We very nearly / should have lost the league and an additional £40M UCL to a team who have literally nothing in the bank and rely on soft loans to survive

We never nearly lost the league and we shouldn't have, our final points total was comparable to previous strong season and the gap to second was the biggest it had been for 5 years. We also beat that team your talking about 3 times with one draw.

We are an embarrassment in Europe versus comparably resourced clubs - indeed our so called poor relations have been to 2 euro finals since we did in 2003 and consistently out perform us - the main reason we have direct UCL entry and the roughly £100M over 3 years is their contribution to the coefficient, not ours.

They haven't outperformed us in each of the last 2 seasons, we have gradual progress in the Champions league in each of the last 2 seasons which has got us to the strong position we are in now and will hopefully make the playoffs and beyond. This will be the 3rd season in a row we have outperformed them in Europe. They have contributed more to the coefficient by playing in a smaller competition, if we played Europa League instead of the Champions League I'm sure we would have contributed more, not sure why you would want that.

Our recruitment has seen us gradually decline in terms of quality of players on the pitch - excepting a brief blip under Ange when he did the recruitment himself thanks to no other infrastructure at our club.

Where to even start with that one, I believe our squad is the strongest it's been in years. If you think Ange identified and recruited the likes of Jota and O'Riley when he was here and not our recruitment department then that's on you.

Our poor European performance means that in future we will have to qualify for UCL, risking losing £40M per season revenue.

The coefficient is a combination of all clubs and we have built a squad that doesn't rely on the coefficient to qualify, we should easily qualify through the champions route next season which would mitigate our need for the other club in Glasgow doing well in europe which has always been our goal to be self sufficient.

Our strategy is clear, back the manager, buy quality players increasing the fees spent and increasing the fees received while improving the squad and trying to go further in Europe and aim for domestic trebles. Ange laid it out when he talked about an aggressive transfer strategy which we have implemented. He also talked about incremental improvement in the Champions League starting with getting there every season which we are doing consistently, then performing better which we have done each of the last 3 seasons. We failed to qualify 3 years ago, we qualified 2 years ago and managed 2 draws getting 2 points and last season a win and a draw getting 4 points and this season should hopefully continue the upwards trajectory if we can get more than one win which I am confident of.

 

He was on holidays the whole summer, just came back a week before the transfer window closed, didn't you know?

 

Accounts will likely be out next week so will be interesting to see how much money was there at the end of last season.

The one thing that makes me wonder if there may not be as much as people think is the Barrowfield project. In the last set of accounts there is mention that some of the cash is earmarked for that but there was only £4-5m accounted for on fixed non current assets so there will be at least another £15-16m for that to come off at some point. Where it is unlikely it all came off last 6 months of last year and I don’t know if some of it may have featured in the previous year.

There was provisions of nearly £7m in the interim accounts so they could have been to pay some of those costs due on the project; with the rest to come out this year.

I know he wouldn’t as he doesn’t do things like this but if there was one way Desmond could invest in the club or help the club out this would have been an opportunity. He could have had one of his companies or creating a special purpose vehicle to buy the old Barrowfield and do the construction project, pay it and complete it then enter a long term lease to buy with the club, where they paid it off over a long period of time or a proportion of it and then take back ownership for a nominal sum. Something like that would be perfectly legal and wouldn’t break any football rules but would help the club spread the cost without finance payments. £20m or so of which his business would get most of, if not all of back over time wouldn’t be a miss to them. That way the cash at the club could have been better focussed on the team on the park and any aids that could improve performance of the academy, scouting and broader performance analytics.

 

I take a different view: one excellent window (this summer), one poor window (January) and one horrific window (last summer was the worst window I can ever remember). All 3 under his watch.

I think the jury is still out.

 

That's not a different view, I explicitly praised the work he done this summer, I never mentioned any previous windows.

He must have worked his balls off this summer, I'm no the type to ignore the good work he or the club do so I can stay all outraged like some on here.

 

Yeah, you're right. OK, let me rephrase it:

I think he deserves praise for this summer; but I think we have to look at the whole picture. Imagine someone on here said, "What a horrific performance this guy put in last summer. I can't think of a worse one." I'm pretty sure you would consider that a bit unbalanced and want to point out what an outstanding job he did this summer.

Because it's both, isn't it? He really does deserve a lot of credit for this summer; but he still deserves a lot of criticism for the previous one. Basically, he did an amazing job to get us out of a hole that he himself had dug. OK, so now he's back at zero; but for me, he'll need to repeat the feat to actually put positive credit in the bank. I really hope he does so.

 

He gets enough criticism off every * else mate, that side of things is covered plenty. I choose to highlight the positives incase they get lost in all the outrage, and will continue to do so

 

I suppose I can get that.

I know I was very reluctant to criticise Lenny in his final season for that reason. He did deserve criticism; but some of that criticism was so over the top or even nasty and in some posts, all his genuine past achievements were being blithely dismissed or explained away. I found myself really struggling to say anything negative about him at all, even though his performance that season deserved criticism.

 

This is exactly where I'm coming from mate, you've nailed it there. The amount of aggression I read on here by certain posters towards the club in general is * disgraceful at times, I take it as my duty to try and offer a different thought process with it all.

There's plenty of things we could and should be doing better, but a certain group of angry * try to whip things up to a frenzy at any given opportunity and try to palm it off as 'just wanting the club to be better'. It's total bullshit.

Nicholson and the club have played a blinder this summer so that's what I wanted to highlight, am sure there'll be someone along shortly to call me a board apologist and remind us all that we're run like a bowling club full of tories

 

It turned out to be a decent window with us strengthening in most of the areas needed, but it was close, I don’t want to believe that Nicholson was waiting to punt MOR before sanctioning the final successful bids but it certainly looks that way and I was reading that Celtic first contacted Augsburg 6 weeks before the end of the window. For whatever reason, it taking 6 weeks, right to the last week of the window for us to spend that much on a position is precarious, we really need professionals in our transfers roles, a DOF is essential, finding players to fit into the system brendan uses and literally having lists of such players with their contract situation, this DOF should also have a list of managers that play Brendan’s/Ange’s style (whichever is decided on) of football, so instead of Nicholson doing everything a DOF would provide lists of players and managers that fit into the Celtic way of playing fitba so that in future windows if target number 1 isn’t happening for whichever reason then the club can swiftly move onto target number 2 and so on, this way we should be able to have our business done reasonably early and essentially give our manager time before the season starts to get new players bedded in and integrated into our team.
Celtic can add more targeted professionalism to a transfer system that is already helping to swell our bank account AND hopefully funding successful campaigns in Europe. Aye, campaigns plural.

 

Tbf he was at the helm in the Jan 2022 window, where we brought in O'Riley, Hatate and Maeda..

 

Hatate and Maeda clearly pushed for by Ange and done before the window even opened.
Credit to O'Rielly though, missing out on McGree meant we had to switch attention, it would on paper look like a great club signing, rather than a manager demanded player (such as Kyogo etc).

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Aye, still.. we can't discount that window just because Ange had identified some of the players.. he got them in quickly and gave us an incredible lift.. the fact they were done before the window was even open, is to Nicholson's credit, no?

We need change in our recruitment strategy as stated all the time with almost everyone, including BR but fair is fair.

We just hope this is top of Nicholson's agenda.

 

I'd agree, the speed can attributed to both. But we've not done that since Ange, if anything it's all going slower again.

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Aye, but @Random Review was looking at Nicholson's record in transfer windows but didn't mention what was an incredible January window really.. if we're going criticise some incredibly poor windows it's only fair he gets credit where it's due..

As fans we tend to focus on the negatives when it comes to our board, including Lawwell btw.. but it's need to be fair.. it could and should be better but at the same time we're living in an era where we're totally dominant.. but Europe has been a disgrace..