Celtic have been ranked as the 8th most financially stable club in Europe

This will make a section of our support absolutely furious.

 

And this is the base why we have been so successful in Scotland. However a little more risk would be welcome for most of us probably.

 

Stop talking rubbish


We are a well run organisation

 

And yet we are left to pick-up the scraps whilst badly-run and financially-doped teams hoover-up the cream of the footballing talent. Is Man Utd's new stadium not being funded(at least partly) by the tax-payer? Yet they've already shelled-out £60M this summer and if they get their way the total will end-up something approaching £175M. £175M that could help pay for their new ground instead of coming out of the public purse. Scandalous stuff.

 

Now can we be the 8th best team in Europe next season

 

If only it worked like that that would be smashing

 

Nothing wrong with living with pure green and white hope

That said I really do have a really good feeling about us in Europe this coming season and think we will finally win a knock out tie in the Champions League.

 

Napoli, spent more than they brought in for transfers in 6 of the last 10 season. Total spent is 953.57m euro, total received is 699.51m euro. meaning the spent more than they received by 254.06m euro. Spending 36.3% more than they bring in. All while winning their league two of the last 3 seasons, winning the cup and more often than not progressing to later stages of european competitions.


Meanwhile we spent more than we brought in in only 3 of the last 10 seasons. Total spent is 223.67m euro, total received is 253.97m euro. Which is bringing in 30.3m euro more than we spent, in percentage that is 11.9%

That sort of spending more than you bring in malark will never catch on.

In all seriousness though, the vast majority of our support just wish we would push that boat out a little more.
Often the fight back against spending is that we need to be well run, look what happened across the city sort of retort. But here is the supposed best run club financially and they are spending MORE than they bring in!

In short, my point is - we can do things differently and acutaly spend more money without fear of a disaster.

 

Are you illiterate or something? Thats what i said lol… just sometimes a little more risk, buy before we sell etc

 

I dont know what equity margin means in this table but our EBITDA margin simply reflects automatically getting into the champions league and not spending the money we make. I think same goes for ROA. It reflects the unique advantage celtic has had of being able to make champions league money without a challenge in the league and without having to qualify more than anything else. That isnt a measure of "sustainability".

On a seperate point the vast majority of clubs you have heard of have very very little risk of default. We celebrate not being liquidated as some achievement because of what happened across the road, but its hardly an achievement in itself.

 

Big Peter will be ecstatic as he looks to climb onto the top 5 next year.

Unfortunately, this is not a measure of success, as others have mentioned.
Would love to see us with a better balance of sporting ambition v spreadsheet success in Europe.

 

Think it was Valencia a decade or so ago was something silly like 800m euro in debt - this was before the silly season of money happened at the likes of City.
Barcelona, during/after covid season had a very well known financial dilema, shifted some money around, sold some crazy tv rights and sponsorships, now they are gearing up to challenge for the UCL again and some folk in the football world are still caught up on the financial issues to realise a club like Barca was never gonna struggle for long there.

As you say, most these clubs we know of arent really at any great risk -ourselves include. Obviously that isn't a total guarantee , but we can flex a little more than we have done in the last 23 years without fearing liquidation.

I am fairly sure even our own PL once upon a time said/alluded to it being beneficial for us to actually run at a small debt, as paying back the loans was cheaper for a club/business than paying the inevitable tax or whatever on the silly profits we would make.
Weird how that flipped around and now everyone is more chuffed to have tens, nearly hundred, million in the bank.

 

I agree with all of that. The rangers liquidation has allowed the celtic board to frame 'not going bust' as some measure of success. To put it into a football context, we finished a cup final we lost with guys like Taylor, Scales, McCowan, Schlupp, Yang and Kenny on the park, while sitting with 70 odd million in the bank. That clearly isnt an optimal way to run a football company, but it is the easiest approach for a board who set their own objectives.

 

I know football and transfers is not as easy as we sometimes make out, or as easy as I am gonna suggest here, but £70m in the bank, take our match day 18, you'd easily argue that we need/ed a new LB, LCB, RB , CM, RW, ST - 6 players screaming out for easily last season to improve the squad.
with £70m in the bank, you could have easily spent £7m on each of those 6 positions paying them all 89k a week and we would not be in debt.
(70m - 42m leaving 28m, works out at 538k a week for wages, which is 89k for each of the imaginary 6 players on this list)

Clearly, I am not that stupid to think we would spend that or anything near that. But when you think about it in that made up world, how much better would our squad be with 6 additions who cost around 5-10m range and on a wage of even 35-40k a week. Would still have money in the bank!



(Again, I do get transfers are not that simple, there are signing on fees, agent fees etc as well, but even 3 players at £5m and 25k a week would take us up a level and be within that bank balance we gloat about)

 

love that

 

I actually think all this well run piece, really comes into focus from this season onwards when we have to qualify for the CL group stages.

We basically got ourselves to a very strong financial position with a talented squad back in 2012/13 season. On the park last 16 CL, really shot ourselves in the foot in cup finals and semi finals for a treble but from a financial point of view had a lot of good players who had value such as

- Hooper
- Wanyama
- Brown
- Lesley
- Commons
- Matthews
- Lustig
- Izzy
- Kayal
- Forster
- Ki
- K Wilson
- Samaras

You could have probably sold all those players (not together) but for good money and certainly made a profit on them. They all cost about £19m between them to build a pretty strong side especially if you throw in Mulgrew on a free you have a strong starting 11 or even 14 including the 3 subs you were allowed back then.

We then basically for the next two years sold off the bulk of that team or let their contracts run down and failed to replace them with Van Dijk being our only real successful replacement.

It was clear Lennon wasn’t happy post the 2013/14 season that he wasn’t getting money to spend and then Delia arrived and we basically sold Forster and loaned in about 5 players. How we were going to run a player trading model of loan players I am not sure what genius came up with that one.

We then went a couple of years with no CL, then had it for 2 and lost it for 4 years mainly due to our inability to be ready for qualifiers particularly in the 2018/19, 19/20 and 21/22 seasons. COVID year was a mess but we basically got an open goal in a one legged home tie to Ferencvaros and bottled it.

So going into this year and a future of CL qualifiers again, the question is have we given our now superior financial position learned anything? Particularly given CL is our biggest cash cow are we going to give ourselves the best chance of being in that league phase draw by having some extra quality in and ready to go as part of our first team squad?

As without CL money the super operating profit disappears and player trading is the only thing we make profit on. If we don’t make the CL profit having £80m in the bank isn’t going to make anyone happy.

 

and we had yang and kenny coming on to try and win us the cup