The board

More influence than what is publicly disclosed. Straight from the horses mouth.

 

Yeah I agree with being target not being acceptable. But he has a lot more influence in the club that is disclosed to public, irrespective of his salary now. That's 100%. He said more to my mate who took his statement. But will not go into details, but what's been said here before aint a million miles off, that's all I will say.

 

He 100% is still pulling strings and that salary posted won't be his only reimbursement from the club I am sure.

Folk need to ask why we wanted rid of Bankier so badly, if the position is just symbolic and doesn't have any influence? Lawwell has taken that same role that we all wanted Bankier removed from.

 

A former chairman of Partick Thistle, Duncan Smillie, feels no need to park his footballing loyalties these days.


Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, there were never any posters of Alan Rough and Tony Higgins adorning his bedroom wall. The idols of choice were Danny McGrain, Charlie Nicholas and Paul McStay, and even now, at the age of 54, he can think of just two ever presents in his life. One is his parents, the other is Celtic.

“I’ve had people come and go,’ he tells Herald Sport. “Jobs come and go, friends come and go, I’ve had a wife come and go.

“The only constant is Celtic, and as a middle-aged man, it doesn’t feel great to wake up in the morning and find myself in a bad mood within ten seconds because of a game of football in Kazakhstan the night before.”

After an inexcusable Champions League defeat to Kairat Almaty, his mood mirrored the slate grey skies as another Glasgow summer drew to a close.

He should be used to it by now. Over the last 14 years, the Parkhead club have mastered the art of * up Champions League qualifiers. They’ve tried on nine occasions to reach the group stages via the qualifying rounds and lost seven times to clubs who can only dream of placing a replica of the European Cup in the club trophy cabinet.

In 2014, they suffered defeats to Maribor of Slovenia and then Malmo of Sweden under Ronny Deila. In 2018, they lost to AEK Athens as Brendan Rodgersprepared to bring his first spell to a hasty end. Neil Lennon was back for an exit to Cluj of Romania in 2019 and Ferencvaros a year later, while Ange Postecoglou crashed out to a mediocre Midtjylland team at the first attempt. Almaty was just the latest in a series of excruciating outcomes delivered by a club dominant in Scotland and dismal at qualifying for the biggest stage.






The only surprising aspect of Tuesday’s defeat in the former Soviet outpost was the absence of Nir Bitton from central defence. Over the years, fans have watched the club fail to strengthen key areas of the team before their most lucrative games of the season, time and again and the feeling of impotence is growing.

Chants of ‘sack the board’ appear to have little impact on Dermot Desmond, the Dublin-based controlling shareholder who holds 34 per cent of the shares, 100 per cent of the control and only engages with fans once a year from the 18th green of the Dunhill Cup at St Andrews.

Beyond that, Celtic’s communication with fans is limited to comments from a manager frustrated by the transfer parameters he is forced to work with. Despite bank reserves of £65million in the last accounts – the figure could be higher now – Celtic’s spending on players was in the region of £3.5million before Almaty. Raking in five times that amount by selling Nicholas Kuhn to Como, the failure to replace the German winger and Japanese striker Kyogo Furuhashi before the games against Kairat only added to supporter angst.

While some now speak of boycotting Europa League ticket packages, Smillie plans to spearhead another mode of protest by standing for election as a trustee of the Celtic Trust with business partners David Low and Peter McGowan on September 2. The former co-owners of the Glasgow Rocks basketball team want to offer fans a 21st-century version of Celts for Change or Save Our Celts, the groups mobilised to help Fergus McCann seize control of the club from the old family dynasties in 1994.

“This is about creating a soapbox. I think the Celtic Trust can be that virtual soapbox. If we can get everybody, be it the young ultras, the middle-aged fans like me or the people overseas who don’t see every game under one banner, then the day might come where we are ready to be an agent of change and force influence and change on the club when it comes.

“People could pay a small subscription, and we can help them trace those shares sitting with grannies and grandads and aunties and uncles and people who have passed away. We can try to reunite them with those shares, either to get them back or for the trust to buy them.

“We think there is as much as 20 per cent of the club out there in those shares. By anybody’s measurement, it’s at least 10 per cent, and as soon as you get to that point, you can start calling EGMs.

“We are not trying to make trouble for the club; it’s not about that. We just want to get to a position where people stand behind us and help us to become an influential player. In the 1990s, with Save Our Celts or Celts For Change, it was quite hard to mobilise people. I think it’s a lot easier now with the way people communicate.

“I think it’s important for disaffected fans to get under one banner.”










Amongst fans, there’s resignation. A feeling that Celtic’s fiscal policy is unlikely to change until the club is in the hands of new owners. At the AGM in November 2023, Desmond’s son Ross declared that ownership of the club would never change in his lifetime, and while supporters of other clubs would kill for the kind of problems Celtic have, Smillie regards the current unrest as a natural reaction to the feeling that no one is listening.

In Dermot Desmond, you have a man who has created a situation where he is a minority shareholder with majority control,’ he points out.“That is just wrong. That simply should not be the case.

“It would be nice if the club would listen to supporters. And our aim is to create a vehicle where they have to listen to supporters because the Celtic Trust has x per cent of shares and they are legally obliged to do so.

“The situation is different now from the 1990s, when you could smoke out the old board. You could starve them of cash, and boycotts worked. If crowds dropped below 10,000, the bank could call in the overdraft. It needs to be different this time. Not buying merchandise and not buying pies will make no difference whatsoever.

“I think a boycott is damaging, and I also don’t think it will happen. Half the people who say they will boycott Europa League tickets will blink when it gets to the deadline, and if there are some available, the people on the waiting list will snap them up. It doesn’t have a material impact on the club financially. That’s not the way to get yourself heard.

“It is a broken relationship yet, ironically, all sides want the same thing. The board, the fans, and shareholders all want the best for the club. How to get there is the issue."

In the aftermath of a toothless, penalty shoot-out loss in Almaty, some redirected the finger of blame away from the boardroom towards manager Rodgers. Lose to Rangers at Ibrox on Sunday and the manager shares some of the heat felt by his under-fire opposite number, Russell Martin. This time last year, Celtic would have crossed the city in a buoyant, confident mood.

“For me, Brendan and the players have blood on their hands after that tie,” Smillie acknowledges. "To play 210 minutes and not score a goal and then miss three penalties against that team is on the manager and on the players.

“But the manager should have been given more ammo. He should have been sitting there with a better striker, with better options on the wing to bring off the bench.”

As co-owner of the old Glasgow Rocks, Smillie made a presentation to Peter Lawwell, Chris McKay and former commercial director Adrian Filby.

While a proposal to take the basketball team under the Celtic umbrella came to nothing, he knows and respects members of the Parkhead board but views the club spending £4.5million on winger Michel Ange Baliwisha and signing left back Marcelo Saracchi as a classic case of ‘closing the door after the horse has bolted.”

“If the board’s strategy is to sit and say, ‘we have a rainy day fund because we are in for two or three years of rain, ’ and that’s why they have been amassing this cash, then that’s bad business. It simply isn’t good business.

“But we don’t know because they don’t tell us. No one is holding their feet to the fire on this. We have a board that has been there too long, overseen by the largest shareholder who, in my opinion, dictates what happens on that board.

“He is like an emperor trying to create a dynasty, and I think the club paid £9million of tax on the cash they have in the bank last year. I think that’s negligent and, as a club, they really should be explaining what they intend to do with that £70million or £80million. Instead, the CEO is a ghost, we don’t see him, we don’t hear from him.

“The only person in the club who communicates is the manager, and that’s just not good business practice.”

A year has passed since Celtic launched their biggest-ever fan survey, with the help of the University of Strathclyde’s Business School. Billed as a chance for supporters to have a say in shaping the future of the club, the results have yet to be communicated to those who took the time and trouble to respond.

“They must have a plan,’ says Smillie of the Parkhead board and their cash haul. “If so, why would they not share that plan with their fans, their customers, their investors and those who have Celtic’s best interests at heart? By failing to do so, what’s happening now is not just arrogant - it’s wrong.”

 

Is there a worse run club in world football ?

Folk will go on about the money in the bank, but what use is money in the bank to a football club that doesn't spend it ?

Folk will go on about trophies, but when you have as massive an advantage as we do, in terms of money generated by merchandise sales, ticket sales and the free runs we've had at CL money due to our nearest rivals being an utter * show .. is it really that impressive ?

Every transfer takes weeks, sometimes even months to complete. We seem to start every single season weaker on the park than we ended the season before.

If it was DD that had stepped in to save us instead of Fergus McCann, I can only imagine how different the whole club would be. No chance he would spent the money on a 60,000 seater stadium.

Wouldn't surprise me if we end the window with an even smaller, weaker squad with rumours if Idah, Yang and Inamura going. Teetering on the brink of a disastrous spell that could set us back years.

 

Not discounting the rest of your post cause majority of it I agree with but there's plenty of worse run clubs, one of them in Govan as you alluded to. There are many, many better ran ones though, most of them far smaller and less potential than ourselves.

We're a fantastically well run business if you're an accountant. Sadly, the business we're in is sport and we seem to do the absolute bare minimum by the same methods we always have done. There's no progression or evolution and the rest of football is moving forward while we sit still.

The board has gone stale and needs fresh blood, particularly people with a strong background or passion for football. The guys like Benham and Bloom at Brentford/Brighton are great examples of businessmen first and foremost, but recruiting people that can assist them in building up the clubs and utilising their resources effectively, as well as thinking outside the box and doing things different to the status quo.

Meanwhile we don't even have a director of football and a non-existant scouting department (I could be wrong on that, but we have no communication from the club to keep fans in the loop).

We're all so frustrated because we have so much potential and always seem to * it up when seemingly on the cusp of being able to break the glass ceiling. It's the fact we seem restricted by the people with the power to do it, who seem to ignore all the outside noise and double down on their position, that's the major issue.

 

I agree on the face of things, there look to be clubs that are worse than ourselves but circumstances are different for every club.

If you look at results only, the huns look a far worse run club but I guarantee that within a few seasons with these new owners that they end up ahead of us if we keep going in the same direction. I just think they made the wrong managerial choice but I doubt he was first pick. They at least go out and back whoever is in charge on a constant basis. We seem to back a manager for a season if he's lucky then revert to type.

We don't seem to have moved any further forward since DD and PL got their snouts in the door.

 

Of course that statement is hyperbole l but for a club our size, we can't be far off.

 

Definitely guilty of being the biggest underachievers in Europe.

 

Meanwhile at Hibs owners are putting tens of thousands of pounds towards fans having a bevvy. Oor lot would be having heart attacks at the thought of helping oot the fans especially fae their own pocket.

 

Mind Desmond turned up to a pub in Amsterdam was it? Was like £200 he gave the staff or something the tight * hahahaha

 

Our board need a strong rangers
Remember them losing us 10iar anyone. * tge lot of them.HH

 

What you don't have 5B lying around tucked under your mattress Come on now get your * together

 

Champions league draw about to begin and hope every board member is hanging their heads in shame we are in the best financial situation in years and the board sat on their hands and did nothing disgraceful.

 

Totally inept , 4 days to go and any selling club will have us over a barrel now as it’s so late ie £5 million Idah is now £9 million from last summer. What outstanding business sense all this was. People should be sacked for this.

 

Totally agree mate someone within the club cost the club over £40 million by gambling and not bringing players in and if this happened in any other company they be sacked and fans shouldn't buy the Europa package till we hear someone getting sacked for this but all we hear at the moment is silence from this incompetent board

 

Excellent. Very much agree with what he is saying there and the Celtic trust idea of trying to group together all the 10-20% of Celtic shares that are idle so to speak to give us a voice and try and force change at the board level sounds positive if he can be successful.

 

Peter away out for the champions league draw today

 

I don't know. I think this is bigger than Lawwell. If Lawwell gets thrown under the bus, I fear a lot of our fans would accept that. I don't think it would change much.

It's a mixture of Desmond and the systems we have in place (which are down to "Past Desmond"). Lawwell is next to irrelevant at this point: nothing will change if Desmond doesn't change.

I'm not calling for his head or anything (partly because it's hard to see how we could succeed in that and partly because he's been good for us in the past and deserves some credit for that); but he runs us like a mid-table EPL club from the late 1990s. He either needs to institute a modern system like the big Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese clubs have or sell to someone who will.

 

You're righ about Desmond being the issue, but Lawwell himself has entrenched deep within the system, and is sabotaging the manager who is very likely there because of Desmond. Getting rid of Lawwell would mean that whoever is the CEO probably works with and for the manager, and not as an extension of some "advisory" member of the board.

I'd gladly get shot of both Lawwell and Desmond, though.