The cynicism of Celtic plc

How did it come to this, some are asking. Celtic's collapse against Maribor was “unfathomable”, says one highly-lauded Celtic commentator, whose reputation is rapidly heading in the direction of Sir Fred-the-Shred's.

What exactly are we seeing?

The chickens coming home to roost and the vindication of the fools.

GoD is dead – beware false profits, this meagre blog once warned, enraged, frustrated and exasporated by a “new reality” peddled by those who advocated the abridging of our ambitions; the downsizing of our dreams.

This was not because of some reckless obsession with the idea that Celtic could once again conquer Europe in the foreseeable future. Nor has the lexicon of hubris often been exercised in the articulation of Celtic fans' dreams.

 But if Celtic must be a club so grounded as to doggedly follow the the plough in the soil, who would deny its believers the idle respite of looking at the stars?

The answer is those who deigned themselves fit to recalibrate the parameters within which “hopelessly unrealistic” fans thought their club belonged.

 If Fergus McCann saved Celtic – and he assuredly did – he also, presumably unwittingly, trumpeted a perspective that would be exploited by lavishly-funded venture capitalists, claiming his legacy, and asserting a view that, just as Andy Walker & Co. wouldn't be allowed to throw premium stock away, the highest aspiration was the rude health of the bottom line.

Enter Dermot Desmond – he of the Coolmore Mafia fame – a man whose wealth was sourced from the most ethically-challenging of business practices and whose name has echoed around Dublin's courts in relation to allegations of corruption at the highest levels of government – fully legally exonerated. Desmond, who Charlie Haughey once lauded for his contribution to the much-envied Celtic Tiger economy, created a new Celtic in his own graven image.

The man who once bought London City Airport for £23.5m and sold it 11 years later for £750m may have wealth “off the radar” but he is no “sugar daddy”, as a Scottish sports journalist once misdescribed him.

He is an arch-deal-maker whose pursuit of profit has, so far, never yet shown signs of being moderated by dewey-eyed sentiment, such as might be hoped of by fans of a club whose Irish heritage recalls ballads of resistance, defiance and a belief that its day will come.

 Desmond, with crop in hand, has ruthlessly whipped Celtic into a fat-free corporate entity, defined by turnover, margins and growth potential.

This model is not based on avoiding the self-destructive hedonism that destroyed a club down Govan way, nor yet readying itself for that sunny day when UEFA rocks the football world by enforcing its much-vaunted ideals of Financial Fair Play.

No, rather this is a Celtic whose name would be interchangeable with that of any plc atop a balance sheet within a portfolio of Desmond investments.

His plan? To ready Celtic for sale at the pull of a hair trigger. Should a “bigger league” somehow accommodate Celtic – with the English Premier League the Holy Grail – he will jettison Celtic like London airport, crowing to orgasm about the exponential growth of his initial investment.

 If that prospect is ever proven to be out of reach within ten or twenty years, he will be poised to offload an efficient business.

Such is the new realism that has promised Celtic halcyon days, though not now, not yet – if we just wait long enough.

 This cannot be achieved alone and if this piece has been predominantly about Dermot Desmond, that is not to protect his chief engineer, Peter Lawwell.

How much would someone have to pay you to implement the dismantling of a club and the discrediting of and ethos and an identity? £1m-a-year?

And how much to brazenly, shamelessly, spin every move by Celtic plc as being the only – “on-plan” way for the, ever-elusive, divine future happiness of the club. GoD is dead – beware false profits? And Dermot Desmond … and Peter Lawwell … and Paul Brennan … and Celtic Quick News ...

--

The unpalatable truth? We, the Celtic fans, are to blame

The fans – once dubbed “the lifeblood of the club”, TGFIW (“the greatest fans in the world”, as if you didn't know that, already) stand accused.

Yes, we, who in our tens and hundreds of thousands have given our all to Celtic, for Celtic, even “Because” Celtic have no hiding place today. We, who have been immersed in the traditions of the club – or who have chosen Celtic more recently (all have their right to call themselves Celtic fans) stand accused.

That statement may seem unfair and it may even outrage some who stumble across this sad missive on a day of high emotion and low morale. But it is true.

And why? Because we let it happen.

We did not actively participate in the destruction of our club but we were eye-witnesses who did too little to help. Some of us complained a bit – but not enough – and a few protested. But, the truth is, we largely, en masse, listened to false prophets telling us how great this new, “pragmatic” approach would be.

As an inveterate socialist, I find myself paralleling Celtic to that other organisation that once was the vehicle of my dreams – the Labour Party.

I remember the transformation of Labour at a time when I was becoming, on a very small scale, politically active. It was the time of the “Dem Left”, the “New Realists” who would eventually be victorious in the battle for Labour minds (if not hearts) and reshape that party, forming it into something I could neither identify with nor care for, in pursuit of pragmatism.

Their side – the side of Kinnock and eventually Blair – won and my side, that hopelessly idealistic crew who thought that a Labour party that veered from its essential values was no Labour party at all, lost being consigned to a history in which Ned Ludd was the gatekeeper.

It won great success by the standards that those in power set for it. But I fell out of love with it, coming to resent it bitterly for taking something beautiful and idealistic and turning it into an entity without values, without soul, and justifying its metamorphosis in terms of Key Performance Indicators that had nothing to do with the Labour party I knew and in which I felt I belonged.

That whole New Labour experience was both a demoralising wake-up call warning -- that those things you wish to believe are less strong than the Machiavellian will of those unconstrained by the very notion of beliefs -- and a training exercise for compromising ideals and a commonly-understood set of values, even a code, when what seems the solidity of a century of mutual identity and understanding becomes disparaged as archaic, belonging in the past.

When New Celtic was born, many of us felt disquiet. But the spin was good – Mandelson and Campbell would have envied their mainstream and “independent” media manipulation – and their constituents were often too desperate to believe in a new dawn and too ready to believe the new informed, even intellectual, Celtic commentators who outlined the inevitable victory of the plan in such confident terms that those who had their doubts were routinely mocked and sidelined.

When we were clearly in decline, we did not all join in with the “happy clapper” brigade, scoffing at the plebs while snouts were in the troughs.

But the fans that once allowed themselves to be mocked for their “car park protests” adhered to the New Celtic spin that so many so wanted to believe in such numbers that we, collectively, left our club to the mercies of hard-bitten businessmen who think that everything that identifies a club can be expressed in terms of malleable brand values.

That if it cannot be recorded on the balance sheet, it has no worth.

What we have today, with an inexperienced manager working with a parlous squad, which has declined season-by-season, is our responsibility.

Because, “when they came for Celtic”, we did nothing. --