Mammon's evil eye

Over the past few days, particularly on the excellent Paul67 Celticquicknews site, the potential for Celtics involvement through a 'market driven' investment venture in a hiqh quality, high value league of the future, has been considered in some detail.

The simple aphorism that 'History repeats itself first in tragedy and then in farce' causes me major concerns.


To the world of the high stakes gambler, the bawling traders and sharp-suited finance backers and those with an entrepreneurs gambling spirit, who see little beauty in the world unless it involves balance sheets, debit and credit accounts, and profits and losses, the potential fruition of the myriad of investment vehicles, marketing opportunities, media coups, share-price booms, tax breaks and revenue returns driven by Mammon’s boiler room must seem like the chance of another drink to an expectant alcoholic.

Let’s be totally honest here. The club, the tradition, the history, or even the throat sticking concept of ‘brand’ matters nothing to these creatures of the preferential share issue, dividend, and option trading unless it comes with a price and a margin attached.

They are interested in one thing and that is money, because that money gives them standing and power, and while that may be engine of a capitalist society of which we are all willingly or otherwise an integral part, it can never be a solid foundation for the aesthetic and non-material impulses which give life and sustenance to the concept of a locally based, nationally organised, universally recognised team based sport such as Association Football.

And it can definitely never be the motivation or beating heart of Celtic FC.

Hell-mend them! This club is not their plaything, this club is not a tax avoidance scheme or souped-up ‘cash converter’ which will fund another suit, another holiday, another Ferrari, or another school term of over-priced fees to the already financially bloated on the back of a deception which will lead to the corrupt mutation of the life-sustaining plasma of dedicated supporters’ emotional investment and dreams, into a sad utilitarian and soulless financial derivative.

I say these things, not because I don’t want investment!

I crave investment more than the smoker in denial craves the longed-for contented drag of a B&H.

But like that Smoker-in-denial, (2 years, 8 months and 27days since my last one), the stimulus I crave must not be one that lies about its apparent rejuvenating effect and contented afterglow; it must not be one that on that first rush of pleasure pushes me in a headlong rush to the nearest tobacconists and the probable loss of my independence and relative health to an ever increasing need for more and more.

My fear is that the possible outcome that Paul has suggested, unless harnessed by a vision agreed by all parties of where we want to get to and what we want to be, holds dangers that may undermine everything that we hold as important.

If I truly believed that the potential map for the Johnny-come-lately football oligarchs could be walked with no taint or compromise to the history or future of the ideals at the centre of Celtic FC, then I would happily let them wend their weary way through the back-room deals and funny hand-shakes with only a passing thought for their limited grasp on what really makes our club what it truly is.

But, at least for the moment this happy outcome is simply not the case, because there is no single agreed outcome which will satisfy the financial and emotional needs of everyone involved.

We seem to be imagining a future which fits each of our own desires by working back from an end point and adjusting the motives of the financial gurus to manufacture a path which will lead us to that objective.

But even that objective needs to be viewed with a supersized barrowload of suspicion.

Potentially Celtic (and for want of a better word – Rangers) will be beamed to a new world of top class clubs, paying top-class money, to top-class players, while providing the top-class football that we would currently give my missus’s eye teeth for.

Hold yer horses there! Do we really believe that once this never-never land is achieved and all our clubs are up to the eyes in debt, that these financial sugar-daddies are going to sit back the and say?

‘well that’s us happy, cause we’ve made the fan’s happy and we’ve got a nice little cartel going here – no need for any more change’.

I apologise to those of a sensitive nature but ‘Utter Bollocks!’

Not least of all relegation is always a nasty monster lurking just beyond the horizon! And as we know from what has happened south of the river Tweed, the pressures and stresses and strains have led to a complete change in the culture of football and the consequences of having a bad season.

Even without this, what we are talking about is swimming with eternally underfed sharks.

When are they wealthy enough, when are they satisfied, when are they powerful enough?

They are driven by a motivation that few can comprehend!

They constantly need more and more and that can only happen through destroying the status quo and destroying stability. Whether that is by changing rules, changing names, or changing locations, it will happen.

We are sitting here around our this cyber table, debating so eloquently the rationale, the causes, the drivers, and the results of what may or may not be happening but we have not attempted to determine what ‘end’ is that we so desperately crave.

And this end must not only the best one for Celtic but also the best one for football, for uniquely in the business world, our football teams are not and can never be individual autonomous businesses competing with each other for financial dominance.

We need each other to survive, we need the Albion Rovers, the Hartlepools, The Wrexhams. We used to need the Accrington Stanley’s, the Third Lanarks, The Bradford Park Avenues, but we allowed the game to change and we set in motion a bandwagon when we allowed football to lose site of its essential mantra so eloquently espoused by Martin O’Neil.

‘This game is about those who play, and those who pay!’

I don’t know what the answer is to all our ambitions and hopes, but what I do know is that being driven down one path on the pack of the blinkered motivations of one small but financially powerful group is a recipe for schism and split and ultimate decay of the foundations upon which we all exist through our team.

We will only progress and thrive in a way that meets the needs of everyone by making sure that each of our objectives are compatible and the route-map that is planned is acceptable to all.

‘….those who play, and those who pay’

We’ll always have football because we’ll always have those who play.

We’ll only have professional football if we have ‘those who pay’

That’s us by the way!

And if you don’t think there is anything we can do about where this game goes I suggest you think on this.

Without football Sky Television, for all Murdoch’s money and ostensible power, would have died. We let that monster loose and untamed it has spawned so many ill-begotten offspring.

Less than twenty years on the rate of change has been so great fuelled by the blood-money from competing television organisations and soaked up by ever more power hungry clubs to pay ever more money crazed players that the game, the clubs, the players and in some cases the fans are unrecognisable.

If unthinkingly we simply acquiesce and allow another mammon driven coup, then in another twenty years I hate to think what we will be in for.

We are more powerful as fans than you could imagine.

As a first step, tomorrow I am going to join the Celtic Trust

I leave us all with this simple caution.

Be wary about what we wish for, it may be granted!

Bon Voyage

Estadio