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 Rangers and 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.
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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 League squad 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.
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The individual 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 individuals 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.
