In 2018, the chairman of Rangers was Dave King. A man who could bandy words with the Dalai Lama, King was adept at lobbing verbal grenades towards the east end of Glasgow. These days he prefers to throw them at the people running his old club.
Six years have passed since King predicted that Celtic would fold like a pack of cards if Rangers won a league title. When they finally did it in 2021, those words blew up in his face like a stick of dynamite in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
While King spent this week firing out media barbs at the Ibrox investors he once led — challenging the lot of them to a square go — Celtic put the finishing touches to a set of financial figures showing a profit of £13.4million, an annual revenue of £124.6m and cash reserves of £77.2m. If that’s the cards tumbling down, you’d hate to see them with a winning hand.
The first Scottish outfit in history to spend £30m and finish a transfer window in profit, the Parkhead club are raking in more cash than Sue Gray and their conspicuous wealth creates a problem Rangers would kill for. How do they spend their £100m?
In the excitement of a 5-1 rout over Slovan Bratislava, barely anyone noticed that Celtic had just banked another £1.8m to add to the £40m already coming their way. For Rangers to earn another £1.8m in the Europa League, they’d need to win five of their eight fixtures. Hearts would need to win all six of their games in the Europa Conference League.
Champions League football and player trading means Celtic are now in a financial league of their own. How they use the cash will dictate how long they keep Rangers in a state of internal turmoil. Or how long they prevent a Hearts and Tony Bloom player-data tie-up from disrupting the status quo.
Arne Engels’ performance against Slovan Bratislava showed why he cost Celtic a record fee .
Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers urged the club to be more courageous in the transfer market.
Dave King predicted that Celtic would fold like a pack of cards if Rangers won the league title.
Football’s obsession with financial sustainability doesn’t help. UEFA will restrict player and coach wages, transfers and agents fees this season to 80 per cent of a club’s annual revenue plus their average player trading profit from the last three years. Next season, the figure drops to 70 per cent.
Even then, 70 per cent of what Celtic earn will be significantly more than 70 per cent of what Rangers rake in. Especially when the sales of Calvin Bassey, Joe Aribo and Nathan Patterson drop off the three-year radar.
To exploit their financial advantage, the Parkhead club will now take fewer punts on £2m projects.
There isn’t much wrong with a strategy of signing players aged between 19 and 24 with international recognition and affordable wages. Poor execution was always the issue, Brendan Rodgers urging the club to push the boat out and show a bit more courage.
Capitalism in its purest form, the Champions League is a billionaires’ playground where you get what you pay for.
And the performance of £11m record signing Arne Engels against Slovan Bratislava reinforced a conviction that Celtic should now be spending a bigger chunk of their budget on the Odsonne Edouards and Jeremie Frimpongs of this world and less on players like Alexandro Bernabei and Gustaf Lagerbielke.
If Scotland’s automatic slot in the Champions League goes the same way as Marco Tilio, a few more Arne Engels around the place would provide insurance for a rainy day.
To call themselves a Champions League club, Celtic don’t just need to recruit like one. Sooner or later, they’ll need to build like one as well.
First impressions count. And, once they’ve spent that £20m on modernising their Barrowfield training ground, the board will need to come up with some kind of plan to replace a crumbling main stand built for heroes from a bygone age.
When Europe’s finest players leave their bus on Champions League nights they approach a 1980s facade and pass through a set of flimsy glass doors locked on windy days to stop them flying off the hinges.
They pass some faux leather sofas in a modest reception area while foreign journalists climb the stairs to nibble on packs of Walker’s shortbread in a cramped media room past its sell-by date.
And every time they do, Celtic’s claims to be a Champions League club feel as flimsy as the glorified wedding marquee erected in the car park for post-match interviews.
A feasibility study into the cost of a new main stand was carried out in 2022 and found that a new structure would cost £100m. Significantly more now.
Chief executive Michael Nicholson blamed ‘limited financial capital’ for the failure to start building back then.
Yet, by the time the Matt O’Riley and Champions League cash comes in, Celtic will find themselves starring in their own sequel to the Richard Pryor movie, Brewster’s Millions. Pots and pots of money and no obvious plan to spend it.
If the SPFL aren’t taking the League Cup seriously, why should anyone else?
The League Cup has become the old vase on an ageing auntie’s mantelpiece that no one wants to throw in the local skip.
It barely matters whether it’s sponsored by Viaplay, Premier Sports, Carabao or Viagra.
The lead is missing from the pencil and there’s no way of putting it back.
Big clubs devalue the product by playing fringe players. There’s no European place up for grabs at the end. Outwith a day of glory for St Mirren or Kilmarnock once in a blue moon, its only value derives from a domestic Treble for Celtic or Rangers.
If the SPFL insist on ploughing on, using the competition to bring in buttons from obscure broadcasters, the very least they could do is ensure a fair playing field.
When it comes to the use of VAR in the Premier Sports Cup, there should be no middle ground. Either they use it in all games or none at all. Allowing Premiership clubs like Motherwell and Aberdeen to opt out of utilising it in a quarter-final to save themselves £15k is an affront to sporting integrity.
While SPFL rules allow two of this weekend’s four quarter-finals to go ahead with no VAR, the English Football League places a higher value on sporting fairness.
In last season’s Carabao Cup, VAR wasn’t used in the semi-finals because Championship Middlesbrough had no video technology equipment in place at the Riverside Stadium.
While Liverpool had the full shooting match in place at Anfield, both last-four matches went without because England recognises that you can’t have justice for some and no justice for others.
The country which takes VAR — and integrity — seriously ensures that every game in the same competition is refereed to the highest possible standard.
Anything else is a flawed, half-baked two-tier system of officialdom.
If the SPFL want everyone else to treat the League Cup as a serious competition, they could always lead by example.