Celtic Statement

Operating expenses were £105M the previous season but that will include other things, wages are probably around £70M now so aye still plenty money to spend. Plus cash in bank is technically revenue from previous seasons so could be used.

 

A disastrous statement... Whoever devised/approved it should be apologizing to all their peers on the board as they have just made things x10 times worse

Sent from my Pixel 8 Pro using Tapatalk

 

Stephen McGowan




In a statement so tone-deaf Prince Andrew could have written it from a Pizza Express in Woking, the men running Celtic have let it be known that an unsatisfactory transfer window really was nothing to do with them.

Misplaced anger is a consequence of supporters who simply don’t understand how difficult transfers can be.

Social media hysteria and the big bad mainstream media have a great deal to answer for. All those pesky clubs blabbing to journalists after knocking back those £1.5million offers for their £5million players need to have a long hard look in the mirror.

The UEFA financial sustainability rules faced by clubs all over Europe explain why they can’t be expected to start throwing money around before a Champions League play-off, the same as everyone else. Lob in the obligatory veiled dig at Rangersand the only thing missing was a marker pen and a Celtic bingo card.

Contrition was conspicuous by its absence. Self awareness? You’d find more of that from Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw.

History shows that this season was preceded by Scotland’s champions issuing no fewer than four new replica jerseys at an eye-watering cost to fans. Last year they announced a scheme to sell virtual, digital plots of the Parkhead pitch to punters for £29.99 a year




When a club pulls stunts like that you almost marvel at the brass neck of the faceless statement writer accusing the media of ‘commoditising the transfer window’. Further accusations of ‘inaccurate or misleading information’, meanwhile, ignore the fact that a Scottish football hack would find it easier to get the Dalai Lama on the phone than they would to obtain a transfer steer from anyone inside Celtic Park these days. Create an information vacuum and a football club can hardly take umbrage when journalists and bloggers fill it any way they can.

Hours after an off-the-record briefing to a newspaper accused manager Brendan Rodgers of engineering his own exit a condescending statement, slipped out at 9pm on Saturday night, tipped a can of paraffin over a blazing bin fire. Fans who thought things couldn’t get any worse were proven wrong twice in one day.

At the risk of adding to the inaccurate and misleading information Celtic’s annual accounts tend to be published in the middle of September. And, after a dysfunctional transfer window, directors need a record profit figure now like they need another trip to Kazakhstan.

While there’s no way of predicting these things with certainty last year’s figures showed revenue of £124million. An uplift in TV money created by the new Champions League cycle, more home fixtures and player sale profit makes it reasonable to expect a turnover close to £150million this time.

Twelve months ago the club held a whopping £77.2million in the bank and, even after they’ve paid Champions League bonuses, finished that Barrowfield revamp and handed millions of pounds in corporation tax over to HMRC, it would come as no surprise if that figure was now closer to £100million.

No club with the guts of £100m in the bank should spend transfer deadline day scrambling around asking free agents if they fancy a move to Scotland. Or blocking the exit of an unsettled Daizen Maeda because they can’t land a replacement.

Knocked out of the Champions League by Kairat Almaty, a toothless display against Rangers further highlighted the failure to replace Kyogo Furuhashi and Nicholas Kuhn with quality, oven ready attackers before the biggest games of the new season.

Underwhelmed by some of the ‘club signings’ foisted in his direction instead Brendan Rodgers left four of them out of his final Europa Leaguesquad and, regardless of whether Shin Yamada and Hayato Inamura are Celtic class or not, the Japanese duo really should be asking why they were shunted halfway half way round the world to play for a manager who clearly didn’t want them in the first place.






The senior figure who spoke to a newspaper on Friday believes Rodgers is trying to ‘engineer his exit’ while claiming that he ‘agreed to the club’s strategy’ when he returned for a second stint in charge. Disappointingly, the Deep Throat of Dalmarnock failed to explain the strategy behind the club hoarding tens of millions of pounds in a bank account while a weakened team crashed out of the Champions League to a team of Kazakhstani journeymen.

Returning to Glasgow in the belief that he could build a more competitive team in Europe Rodgers came to within a minute of taking Bayern Munich to extra-time in last 16 play-off last season. Far from being granted the backing to go again, he’s now the target of brutal briefings by senior figures inside his own club.

In hindsight he must wonder now if he should have thrown in the towel on Tuesday morning and convened a bells and whistles press conference to explain why he could no longer serve as manager of Celtic. He could have strolled off into the sunset with his legacy repaired.

Now into the final year of his contract he has three million reasons to stay put, of course, all of them featuring a portrait of the King on one side. If the relationship between the two sides is as fractured and broken as it looks, resignation would only give the board what they want and, in a bout of Russian Roulette, no one wants to be the one to twitch first.

In a stroke of luck for directors the international break has delayed Celtic’s next game until Kilmarnock at Rugby Park on Sunday. The next home game doesn’t fall until September 27, when they host Hibernian and, outwith some angry banners and Sack The Board chants, it’s difficult to see how supporters can do much to bring about change.

Since he joined the Celtic board as a non executive director Dermot Desmond has overseen an era of domestic dominance and established himself as the club’s controlling shareholder with 34.7% of the shares and 100% of the say. Where the old family dynasties of 1994 lacked the means to withstand a supporter boycott Desmond is a wealthy, powerful figure with more money than Croesus. Neither the owner nor the majority shareholder, he revels in a level of deference usually accorded to a constitutional monarch and shows no sign of relinquishing his grip on the club.

While supporters speak of boycotting Europa League ticket packages, Celtic’s mountain of cash offers an insurance policy against the ‘inherent volatility’ of football outlined in the club statement.

That volatility is most evident now in simmering fan anger and, even if a new supporters’ group springs up and hoovers up 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the shares, the money men have enough cash in the bank to withstand some heat in the kitchen. Boycotts could be futile.

A taste of what’s coming down the tracks arrived the other night when an image appeared online of supporters camped outside Celtic Park with a banner bearing the words ‘you can’t hide forever’.

If a thousand word statement is anything to go by a board of directors hopelessly disconnected from rank and file fans will interpret that as a challenge rather than a warning.

 

Canny spend the money in the bank cos “UEFA”

Still increase season ticket prices beyond inflation.

 

Any league is hard to win, but let's face it we have been the biggest, strongest team in Scotland for years and no disrespect if we had invested correctly at the right times we should have had a lot more champions league money through the door.
Desmond Nicholson and Lawwell all need to go, held our club back for the last 20 years.
Happy with winning spl and making the odd appearance in the CL.
They take advantage that we are Faithfull through and through, well let's see how well they would do at any other club.

 

Its a positive thing they've reacted with such a ridiculous and out of touch statement.

It will only galvanise the fanbase.

They could have played lip service and maybe sacked Nicholson or something but nothing would change, this way I can't see a way out for them

 

Absolutely laughable. If you admit openly the obvious issues with hoarding cash and while other similar size clubs do spend successfully then your 'model' is simply wrong.

Absolutely incapable of looking at themselves objectively.

*.

 

He's bang on, and usually one of the more optimistic and balanced guys when it comes to Celtic. When fans like this are at the end of their tether, you know it's really * up stuff from the club.

 

Their own arrogance has backed them right into a corner..there was lots of fans( happy clappers) not prepared see the woods for the trees..this statement will 100 percentage change their opinion bcoz they themselves know we've been short changes by the lack of transfers and the absolute scramble on the last day of the window..time to make life as difficult as possible for them and let them know they might sit in their ivory towers but the fans are the real lifeblood of Celtic.

 

Aye I heard John from the Celtic way saying near enough the same thing



Amazing how a clubs Press team can be so daft



then I remembered who this statement came from

 

That was saying a lot of saying nothing.

 

“ChatGPT, formulate a statement to the Celtic support providing full justification for our disastrous transfer window.”

“I’m sorry, A.I. has not reached a level of advancement that would make that possible.”

“Fine, just come up with 1000 words blaming every * other than ourselves then.”

“Okey dokey, can do”.

 

Spot on. Other than the board, I've not saw one person agree with this statement.

The day after, it's even worse reading. Rats need exterminating.

 

Peter Lawwel has all over this pish from the club

 

Thats what I'm getting. A defiant Lawell all the way. That wee shitebag weasel Nicholson is a patsy. The boards *. A rat all the same as he nods his head and goes along with it all.

This is Lawell. He hates Rodgers.

 

Well that's a lot of pure utter pish that statement and there's a few lies in that statement like we are ambitious for Celtic football club haha I will tell the * jokes and throwing money at transfers and contracts doesn't bring success well Dermot and Peter you better tell the last five clubs that won the champions League that then .
Also waiting nearly a week for some sort of message from the board is also unacceptable especially this * statement SACK THE BOARD.