Michael Nicholson owes Celtic fans an explanation and here's the £11m reason they're right to demand one – Hugh Keevins
Last Tuesday morning, the bank accounts belonging to tens of thousands of Celtic supporters had £46 withdrawn from them.
The money was then made payable to Celtic Football Club to cover the cost of a seat to watch Brendan Rodgers’ side play Bayern Munich at home on Wednesday night. Absolutely no quibble with the price of the ticket, of course. It’s the Champions League knockout stage. Bayern are among European football’s aristocracy.
Then there’s the visit of Harry Kane, England’s all-time top scorer and the striker who has more goals for the Bundesliga club than he has appearances for Vincent Kompany’s free-scoring side. It’s a snip at the price. They estimate that every home game Celtic play in the Champions League brings in, give or take, £11million in revenue.
It’s the sort of money you might pay for a player of decent quality if you were looking for one after your top goalscorer had left for another country, for example.
Hours after Celtic’s season-ticket holders had paid up for the privilege of watching their team return to the biggest club competition of them all, Rodgers sat down inside the press room at Lennoxtown.
And he made public his belief that the squad at his disposal was, the day after the January transfer window had closed, “lighter” than it had been when trading began on New Year’s Day. Having spent a working lifetime observing the mannerisms of every Celtic manager since Jock Stein, Rodgers’ demeanour made him, to my way of thinking, an open book.
The Northern Irishman was seething on the inside and conciliatory on the outside so as not to create the kind of stir that would cause a distraction for his players. And that’s why Rodgers was the wrong man to be sitting in front of the assembled media discussing a transfer window that had left the manager a significant man short after the sale of Kyogo Furuhashi to Rennes.
The occupant of the chair should have been Celtic’s chief executive Michael Nicholson. It always strikes me that Nicholson is to public speaking what US president Donald Trump is to international diplomacy. He does not see it as his chosen, or specialised, field.
There was the one-liner about Rangers and dodgy penalties at an annual general meeting of shareholders a while ago. But, other than that, Michael doesn’t appear to feel the need to engage with the Celtic fans.
I think if you fork out £11m in gate money for one match that makes you more than just a customer. You are actually a wealth provider for a club with tens of millions of pounds in the bank – more than all of the clubs in the SPFL put together.
That makes you entitled to an explanation of what went wrong with regard to the January transfer window. Or is it just me?
The signing of Jota and the pre-contract agreement reached with Kieran Tierney were outstanding pieces of business on Celtic’s behalf. It would be churlish even to try and suggest otherwise.
But if the squad is “lighter” than it was before, it stands to reason that a malfunction has taken place – and it’s not the manager’s job to explain what happened in those final days of the window. When Philippe Clement realised he had been presented with a set of circumstances which were not in the brochure when he agreed to become Rangers’ manager, the Belgian tired of trying to answer questions that were not his department.
He made it clear finance came under the remit of the club’s new chief executive Patrick Stewart and a press briefing was duly arranged to offer as clear a picture of the club’s general state as was possible.
This began with Stewart’s response to the Rangers fans who wanted Clement to be relieved of his duties. On the other hand, Celtic need Rodgers more than he needs them.
The litany of domestic success needs no repetition and the guarantee of further distinction under the Irishman is undeniable. Quite simply, he shouldn’t be left “lighter” in the midst of a season when he has progressed the club in Europe and at home.
No one is realistically asking for the chief executive to lay out a spread sheet in front of the press at Lennoxtown and give it the full Dow Jones index. But, simply out of courtesy to the ticket-buying public, would an official insight into the world they never get to see have been completely out of the question?
Football without fans and all that.
