Celtic Diary Tuesday June 9: A Club Like Every Other

Celtic released information on what fans will get for their season book money when they renew, and to be perfectly frank, they don;t seem to have thought the problems through enough.

Taking the form of a Q and A , aimed at reducing the need to explain themselves publicly or over the phone to “customers “, it read;

What they want is for everyone to renew, and hope that they’ll get into see a game at some point, which isn’t likely until at least Christmas.

In the meantime, your money gets you access to a live tv screening of home games, which doesn;t sound like value for money to even the most die hard of fans.

In fact, die hards often come from households with more than one book, and thats an awful lot of money to watch a game that will be on a stream somewhere or on the radio, which both serve as poor substitutes for the real thing, but beat watching the pages roll round on ceefax for uptdates.

Of course, that was years ago, and no doubt someone , somewhere has already decided to climb onto the stadium roof and set up a live You Tube feed, or some other ingenious way of getting to see the action, but what the club seems to have forgotten is that money for many is tight right now, and when the deferred rents/mortgages/other bills kick in again, it’s going to get even tighter.

Money for the football is going to be pretty way down the list for many, and the club seems to have put keeping themselves in their current financial position ahead of anything else, and that could be a major mistake.

Celtic fans are not as gullible as others, and will not fall for the line about keeping our club solvent when there’s a billionaire on the end of the phone who could transfer a few quid to keep things going.

It’s not like he wouldn’t get it back, with interest.

Celtic rely mainly on three sources of income to survive. sponsorship, player sales and season book money, television money is negligible, and there is a feeling that the tv company are taking advantage of the situation, using it to tie Scottish clubs into another piss poor deal for many years ahead.

It’s all a short term way of trying to deal with a long term problem, when a more sensible approach would be to work towards dealing with a worse case scenario, as opposed to hoping for the best .

There are no easy answers to all of this, but if the club are forced to sell assets , such as players, to make ends meet, then that has to be a better way of doing things than supporters having to sell their assets, such as houses.

It’s what businesses do when the cash isn’t coming in , and adjustments have to be made. What other businesses don’t do is ask customers to pay anyway, and then send them a video of their products to enjoy at their leisure.

The biggest fear for the board is that fans might not come back to football after all of this is done, when they realise what else they can get for their money as football takes a back seat, because lets face it, thirty quid or more for an hour and a halfs entertainment in the freezing cold isn’t going to seem so attractive when you’ve got out of the habit…

The board have taken what could be called a calculated gamble with supporter loyalty and passion. They have unashamedly played on the ten in a row campaign to shift books, and the problem is that although ten in a row , even behind closed doors, is ten in a row, but if no one is there to see it , did it really happen ?

Lawwell is asking us to insulate the club that has been a constant, the only constant, in our lives from hardship and possibly even meltdown, and many of us will.

Yet he, and the rest of his crew, have stood idly by when we were cheated during the last years of the Reich over at Ibrox.

Frankly, if he doesn’t give a toss about the clubs shareholders and supporters, why should we give a toss about him ?

What will be , will be, and we are heading into different and strange days.

The virus is still around, and infection rates are back on the increase. That means another, more serious lockdown is ahead of us.

Short term planning for long term problems doesn’t work, especially if the worst case scenario isn’t used as the basis for those plans.

Any business , especially one with a considerable financial cushion , that asks its customers to pay for a product they don’t receive is doomed to failure, and we may well have seen Lawwell’s Ratner moment….