Patience with the Celtic board is at an all-time low.
Fans are staging stadium protests in response to the club’s communication following a transfer window in which Brendan Rodgers wasn’t adequately backed.
From a business perspective, Celtic are a sustainably-run, money-making machine with a huge customer-base. But football clubs are not simply judged as businesses, and therein lies the problem.
Despite enormous cash reserves, the club has repeatedly been hamstrung by a lack of decisiveness in the transfer market. Managers have publicly voiced frustrations at this.
And for one former executive, who knows exactly what it’s like to oversee the day-to-day running of a football club, the hierarchy’s actions have been less than impressive.
Charlie Methven slates the Celtic board
Celtic’s annual accounts were released this month, and they were coupled with a statement in which the club accepted responsibility for losing to Kairat Almaty in the Champions League play-off.
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And Charlie Methven, who was Executive Director at Sunderland during the initial filming of the Sunderland Til I Die series on Netflix, did not hold back when discussing this on the Where’s The Money Gone podcast.
He said: “Celtic have been dominant for an awfully long time, and what they’ve done – much to their fans’ dismay and disgust – is instead of using that domestic dominance to push on and try to become an international force and be competitive in Europe, they basically just put the money in the bank.
“They’ve got an extraordinary amount of cash in the bank. I think it’s like £100 million or something like that, they just keep in the bank. Because they don’t need it to win in Scotland. They don’t need it to qualify for Europe. So why take the risk?
“I read a letter from the supporters and then a responding letter from the board to the supporters, and if you unpacked all the boring corporate language that was written in a pretty un-charming way,I have to say I didn’t rate it as a piece of communications at all.
“Basically, what it said was, ‘We are running this club in a sustainable way because we have no reason not to do so. We don’t need to put our chips on the table.
“‘We sell out every week, we qualify for Europe every year, we win the league more or less every year, so why wouldn’t we.’ So there’s a huge amount of discontent going on there.”
Will Celtic fan discontent continue?
Celtic fans have expressed unhappiness at the board before, but this feels different.
The Celtic Fans Collective have been clear that they will not stop taking action until serious changes are made in several areas by the club’s higher-ups.
One of the most telling takeaways from this saga will be whether Rodgers stays. If he doesn’t, fans are unlikely to show much mercy to the board.
Rodgers has said that he is open to staying, but only under the right conditions. It isn’t exactly a secret what most of those conditions are.
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