The board

BR is no master , but he is good enough to do very well for Celtic and has and is in context.

I Love worsip adore Celtic but I Detest Lawell & co, epitome to me of big business, cover your back while lining your pockets.

Detest Lawell & co, not just because of today , but because I can see he is an accountant FULL STOP and has been that for years including period of years where we should have buried the lowlife sevco beyond any comeback

Lawell despite his own buddy press releases is no master of finances, reality is any competent accountant in Lawells CEO (or whate ever self promote title he currently has) time period of clear advantages, could have & would have made our finances look very good.

Reality is Lawell has held Celtic back, not remotely ever acted ambitiously for Celtic, not often smart pro active in transfer market. We have done well almost inspite of him. Doing as well / better before his recent unnacountable certainly not democratic return.

This seasons Last Minute, very last minute VERY EXPENSIVE buys of Trusty and Idah (bench players at best) show just how average Lawell & his cronies are.

Even great teams can lose now & then to shyte & in context loss today title points wise an irrelevence.
but selling Kyogo for massive PROFIT but with zero credible plan to replace let alone improve make that reality inevitable.

BR for his faults, has in season context been let down & held down once again by Lawell

 

Latest article from McGowan


Celtic are spending like a club going through a bout of buyer’s remorse. The irritation and regret of the shopper who feels like they’ve paid too much for slightly faulty goods.

Last summer, Scotland’s champions came under pressure to smash the piggy bank with a hammer.

Criticised for a lack of signings in the January window, chairman Peter Lawwell acknowledged the ‘inherent inefficiencies’ of hoarding £67.3million in savings. It made more sense to spend the money on players than it did to hand a chunk over to HMRC in corporation tax.

To that end the Parkhead board started throwing money at players. They broke their transfer record once to sign Adam Idah from Norwich for a fee close to £9m. They repeated the trick when they took an £11m punt on Belgian midfielder Arne Engels.

By the time they’d added American defender Auston Trusty for £5.5m, Brendan Rodgers looked like a man who’d rolled the dice and won a fiscal power struggle with the people who think the club should stick to buying cheap, selling big and stockpiling punts like Gustaf Lagerbielke and Yang Hyun-jun in the hope of peeling away the wrapper one day and finding a Matt O’Riley underneath.

How different it all looks now. Despite a respectable tally of 21 goals, Idah is no one’s idea of a first-choice starting striker. Given a full pre-season Engels may yet deliver a decent return on the sizeable investment in his services, but has still to scale the heights. If an English club offered Celtic their money back on Trusty, you suspect they’d snap their hand off.

If Dermot Desmond has made up his mind that Celtic are simply no good at spending large sums of money then the solution shouldn’t be a return to the days of raking around the bargain bin for players of £3million or less.

In a market turbo-charged by middle eastern oil money that doesn’t buy you much, and it makes more sense to fine-tune the recruitment process until they master the art of spending their Champions League windfalls wisely.

It’s not as if they’re running out of cash. Celtic could feasibly became the first Scottish club to store up bank reserves of £100m in the near future. And, while UEFA’s financial sustainability rules will limit spending on player wages, transfer fees and agent fees to 70 per cent of a club’s revenue, the champions are in no danger of landing an expensive slap on the wrists from Europe’s governing body. They’re too cautious for that.

The spending hasn’t dried up, they could still bring in another left-back with reports in Belgium linking Flavio Nazinho of Cercle Brugge.

Do all that for less than the £17m they’ve raked in for Kühn and fiscal caution will start to look like a high-risk gamble.

In the summer of 2014, Celtic lost a Champions League qualifier to Maribor of Slovenia and 200 angry supporters gathered in the car park.

Frustrated by a perceived lack of spending on players, Lawwell was forced to address the frustration by making a commitment. In a question-and-answer session, the current chairman pledged that every penny Celtic earned would be reinvested.

“In terms of investment our policy, our commitment, is that every penny that comes into the club will be reinvested, it will go back into the club,’ said the then CEO. “I do not think we can be clearer than that. There is no pile of cash sitting there that we can look at, watch, feel and touch. It doesn’t exist.”

Fast-forward 11 years and Celtic’s rainy day fund could insulate them from the impact of a tsunami. While cash in the bank dropped to £65.4m at December 31 last year, they’ve since raked in tens of millions from the Champions League. They’ve sold their top striker Kyogo Furuhashi to Rennes for £10m, Kühn to Como, and cashed in a hefty £5m sell-on clause from Jeremie Frimpong’s move to Liverpool.

That’s a lot of money to reinvest in the club. If keeping the manager is the name of the game, they really should get cracking.

 

Told ye all this is how they tory * are thinking they got spooked spending what they did last year.

 

I made a post about this last transfer window or shortly after it closed. It was so important that we got the 'big' spending right last Summer for this reason. From minute one I wasn't convinced.

Spending that amount of money on those three was lunacy, it was always going to come back to haunt us in some way.

 

I agree with all of that. Also worth puting a failed signing (say a 2-3m loss) in the context of one win in the champions league group stage. Or even not far off the revenue we make from one extra champions league qualfiier. Its pennies in the context of the level we are supposed to be operating in

 

Being fair that is really an opinion piece from McGowan who doesn’t seem to have the links he once did to the club.

I do think there is evidence that this will be the case as we have often done things like this.

I have said it before I don’t actually care how much we pay for players but what I would like us to do is properly scout players then not take agent recommendations.

Kuhn and O’Riley being prime examples they were both statistical outliers for the leagues they were playing in for performance, Abada was another.

Kuhn had some of the best creative stats of 23 and under players outside the top 5 leagues when we picked him up. Abada similarly in terms of attacking output for under 21 year old wingers. O’Riley was levels above what he was playing at.

Don’t get me wrong everything won’t work out, I would say Holm was probably well scouted but it seems to be his application and fitness have led to that not working out.

Not signing guys like Palma and Lagerbielke off agent recommendations or panicking last minute.

Beyond that we done some great business with Juranovic and Giakoumakis, spotted two players in their peak years as late bloomers by comparison playing for smaller clubs and available for cheap prices. Nygren feels a bit like that all be it he is a few years younger than they were.

 

Im not convinced what we spent last season has much bearing on what we are prepared to spend this year overall.

It may impact what the board are prepared to spend on a single player. At a net level, Id be doubtful.

The change in the champions league format makes it a more lucrative proposition for us now. You get 8 games guaranteed with a further two knockout games minimum for finishing in the top 75%.

The cash prize for winning and drawing games is also higher.

I think the money has been made available to spend. Its just a question of securing targets.

 

You would think the income we made from performing well in the CL would drum home the importance of investing properly in the squad … There’s still time left in the window obviously, but if there’s not significant investment in the squad this summer it shows we’ve taken a step backwards in ambition at board level.


Even though I think Yamada looks good, the notion of going in to the season with Idah leading the line, a guy who struggled with form last year in the J league, and a promising youth player as our striking options just isn’t good enough.

 

That doesn't really stack up when the money spent in last summer's window was covered by the sale of O'Riley which was almost entirely profit. Not saying that isn't how the money men see it, but it seems illogical to me.

 

I think the difference is the board trying to do a lot more due diligence when spending bigger money. Like Idah and Eddy both £9M were easier because we had them on loan and Engles had a high stock being in the Belgian team and still young so plenty time improve.

Where as with the cheap punts we are happy to spend it and take the risk. What needs to change is the idea of 3 punts being better odds than 1 big buy, it’s not an easy change from the model so I understand we could easily blow through our cash pile and end up in negative for transfers.

 

Think the money men haven't seen value in the big spends (Idah and Engels) , when we got far better players for far less in the previous model (Kyogo, Maeda, MOR etc) which we seem to be reverting back to.

 

Completely agree with you.

 

Soul destroying that our whole reason for being seems to be profit and the 'model', not about putting best team on the pitch.

The board are artificially limiting our (huge) potential.

This is the most important window in recent history - domestic, European success and retaining an elite manager all at stake here.

 

Stay a point ahead of the scum and the board are happy. Really wanted the Bayern tie to be a springboard for us in Europe and hoped with us being so close that tie that it would mean we would have a proper go at it with the cheque book but it looks like the board are happy for that to be our ceiling meaning they don't have to properly upgrade the squad.

 

I hope McGowan isn't as clued up on the club as he used to be because that article is worrying. Very very worrying.

I've spent the weekend debating with guys on here, with respect from all posters about our differing opinions and reasoning for our different positions, all for an article to come out like that which certainly wouldn't back up my beliefs on the window I think we may go onto have.

If we look at the 2 main summer windows under Rodgers, the board are beyond mental if they believe the first window, where we spent £20m on 8 players is any better than the second window where we spent £27m on 3 players.

If we sold Engles, Idah and Trusty right now, I suspect we would make profit on them. I think Engels would likely go for £18m. I definitely think we would get £6m back for Idah, given he still scored 20 goals for us and is still young enough to progress and has excellent attributes. I also think we would get close to our money back for Trusty, if not our money back, we would maybe lose £1m.

So Engels say £18m, Idah £6m and Trusty £4.5m. That's a slight profit on all 3.

The 8 players we spent £20m on in the summer of 2023 we would lose money. Nawrocki cost £4.5m, Palma cost £4m, Lagerbielke cost £3m, Yang cost £2.5m, Holm cost £2.5m, Tillio cost £1.5m, Kwon cost £1m and Iwata who cost around £750k.

We essentially broke even on Iwata. We lost £500k on Lagerbielke, certainly up front. We are never making £4.5m back on Nawrocki, rumours are the buy out is £3m. That's a £1.5m loss. Palma isn't even training with us and is training back in Honduras. Be lucky to get half his fee back. So, that's a loss of £2m. We may make slight profit on Yang, maybe £500k, we will lose money on Holm, who's never fit and isn't doing anything in the MLS, Tillio has performed well in Australia but are they giving us our own money back? I doubt it. Kwon, I mean I don't even know if we will get a * fee. So, there's a very real possibility that if we were to sell all 8 players from summer 2023, we will lose £4m-£6m on all those players.

 

There’s way too much made about Engels and Idah and their fees imo.

You’d think both had absolutely flopped then spent the entire season out injured or something like that.

If anything, Idah and Engels have given me more confidence than ever that spending in that bracket is fairly safe. If these are ‘flops’ and they’re still returning goals, assists and MOTM performances for decent chunks of the season - and we could likely get most of our money back anyway - then seriously what’s the problem?

Obviously it would’ve been nice to see even more from these players - and that may well come - but if £10m flops still means a really decent season overall that’s surely better than 4 x £3m flops that don’t even kick a ball for us and end up on loans until their contract runs out.

 

The article is just saying what is plain to see. The board invested more than usual and got their fingers burnt. It's happened before - the Barkas and Ajeti window, for example. They've returned to form and are not willing to part with big money again - at least, not this window,

Obviously the solution is to fix recruitment - identify better targets and get deals done sooner rather than later. However, the board simply don't have the appetite to do this. They're happy being reasonably profitable doing what they do and are incredibly risk averse. They're also clearly opposed to structural change, preferring an environment where everyone's son gets a job and none of the boys ever get sacked.

McGowan doesn't need any inside knowledge to conclude any of this. Just observe how the board have behaved previously and you'll have a good idea as to how they'll behave in future.

 

The scouting needs to be accountable. So much * signed over the past few years.