Michael Nicholson

This was the video I was talking about @T.Rogne25


Few minutes into the video

 

From the outside looking in you would assume we couldn’t be run any better but I think we are run superbly as a business and so so badly as a football club.
I would love to hear his definition of world class.

 

Got more chance of winning the lottery

 

Either that specky * or Desmond better be in front of a camera soon and explain * has happened this Summer or explain the project.

 

Not a chance man

 

dom mckay did more in 2 months get to * nicholson

 

And then got chased out the door. There’s a few conspiracies as to why that happened, but I think it points to him not toeing the line with the current regime.

 

I gave him the benefit of the doubt in January but I was wrong.

(if I’m remembering correctly) then you were right, @Peej

 

Bet he was one of they wee guys at school that used to turn his eyelids inside out.

 

We’re never going to breach any rules on financial transfer spend lets be * real here..

 

I mean, we pretty much know that for sure. Bankier’s comment at the time Nicholson replaced McKay was that Nicholson, ‘is a team player’. We know what that means…

 

The only way it happens is relentless media and fan pressure. Look out the sharks.

 

There absolutely should be protests.

 

I don’t think we are run superbly as a business at all. Our business is football and that seems to have been long forgotten by those running the club.

From a footballing perspective:

- We have an underperforming youth set up
- we have an unbalanced playing squad
- we have a dysfunctional football and recruitment department

From business money generating perspective.
- we perform at the bottom of our comparable European peer group for player trading
- We have failed to qualify for the CL when asked to play qualifiers now 6 of 8 times being beaten each time by a time with the fraction of resources we have missing out on at least £20m a time, that’s £120m of fairly easy money lost.
- we often approach each of those qualifiers with massive holes in our first team.
- in sponsorship revenue this has not increased over the last decade by anymore than inflation.
- we have sizeable cash reserves which are not doing anything for us and have been deployed poorly to projects that we have little interest in backing up with operational expenditure e.g youth academy and woman’s team at Barrowfield.

From a business governance perspective:

- We have Board members at the club for more than 20 years with no fresh ideas.
- We have a minority shareholder effectively controlling the club to the detriment of operational efficiencies.
- we appointed an ex-CEO as chairman, a major no go in corporate governance.

Significant Tail Winds helping:

- our largest competitor domestically went bust and has never really recovered bar 2 or 3 seasons of which one of those we lost the league to them.
- we have a significant revenue advantage over all our competitors domestically
- our main competitor performed well in Europes second competition for a number of years helping boost our coefficient to get automatic CL football. A massive tailwind as we can’t qualify against even poor opposition 3/4s of the time as evidenced above.
- the emergence of the Saudi League saw one of our good players picked up for £25m when he wasn’t worth that.

Untapped markets remain untapped:
- there is a sizeable interest in season tickets beyond what we currently sell but there has been no efforts made despite having no debt and significant cash reserves to put these to good use and look to further stretch our financial advantage.
- there has been no effective efforts at improving our transfer process to trade up in our player trading approach.
- the club largely fail to capture the vast Celtic affiliated market out there through ties to Ireland Globally.

So when Peter Lawwell became CEO there was a need to cut costs as we were living beyond our means. However, once that was achieved it was time for a new CEO with a different skill set aimed at growing the club.

With Rangers out the league there was a real chance to turbo charge a player trading model including a highly functioning youth team and academy set up. What did we do? Essentially changed nothing other than continued to cost cut and downsize to the point we came back to the rest of the league to be competitive and those in posts such as youth academy etc remained in situ despite not producing players for years.

To me the financial performance of this club is mainly explained by the tailwinds above, combined with the shear luck we stumbled on one Ange Postecoglu at the right time to take back the league when guaranteed CL money was at stake. If nothing else changes we badly need another Postecoglu-esq manager to come through the door when Rodgers inevitably goes as our squad will be a bin fire and hopefully we will have won the league so only have one CL qualifier again next year.