You become majority shareholder

Congratulations you invested £5k in bitcoin in 2010 and demoted DD to be second largest shareholder because of you and your big balls.

What things do you change at the club?

We all know we'd change our transfer policy and become a bit more speculative in the market.

But what else would you change?

Fan experience?
Become more environmentally friendly?
Youth development?
Community and charity?
Transparency with governance?

 

Bring back the attitude era.

Free beer. * out in the terraces. Trash talk in media interviews. Midgets walking around the boardroom with trays of coke balanced on their heads. The good stuff.

 

Bring back drinking


A better atmosphere with the new ultras section


Remove the Free tickets for famous people like Rod Stewart and his kids

 

Rainbow kit

 

Nothing. What do I know about how best to run a football club? I'd spend the money on social housing, trade schools and subsidised training places with local firms for the region's working class.

 

Sounds like a lot for nothing.

 

What do you mean?

 

1. Complete the bowl
2. Remove the pillars
3. 100x as many disco lights

 

Try and get away from current league format of playing teams four times a season. Push for at least a sixteen team league(albeit power to do this is non existent in this capacity but I'd at least voice some input)

Scrap youth set up. Absploute waste of time

 

Also forgot to add this


Bin the * songs for Irish Rebel songs and republican banners around the ground

 

Absolutely my man

 

2 and 4 are great ideas. Totally with you on both of those. I don't know why we aren't doing 2 already TBH.

3 is easier said than done; but I suppose you could use your majority share to bulldoze it through in the face of the resistance you would face. Even then, you'd need to make sure you get the first appointment (presumably the head of footballing operations) spot on as everything downstream would flow from that. Doable, but not easy.

But 1, 5 and 6 are good examples of what I mean about not knowing how to run a club. I'm broadly in favour of all of them, but how exactly do you do that?

Take 1 for example. I love the idea of a large standing section behind the goal; but what about all the people who don't want to give up their seats and don't want to stand? I'm not saying it's impossible to reach an agreement with them, but it's certainly not a given that you would succeed.
With 5, how would you maintain standards on the park in the face of reduced revenue this would cause?
With 6, not only do we face all the same difficulties as with 3, which would be difficult enough, but we also have the problem of English clubs swooping in to poach them just when they're on the point of breaking through (as has happened a few times recently). I don't know how we can solve that one.

 

Rail seating across the whole lower Lisbon Lions stand and possibly the Jock Stein too to improve the atmosphere. Vary the pre-match songs to mix it up a bit. Improve the stadium exterior to modernise where possible. Plough as much resource into scouting and recruitment as possible.

 

Honestly don’t think I’d change too much, spending more money isn’t going to win us the champions league unless we invest a billion plus and even then, look at Chelsea.

I’d focus on recruitment and youth. Ensure the infrastructure is elite and hire the best youth coaches, build our own la masia if we need to.

I’d also spend big on the recruitment department, hire all the best people, get the best data and so on. That would be more valuable than a new signing. And id only hire head coaches, where the team style doesn’t change when the manager does.

 

Explore every avenue to leave Scottish football

 

• Invest more ambitiously to fulfil our sporting potential - without being reckless. UCL last 32 or better every season. Europa League final every 5 years.
• Remove the crusty old blazers and nepotism
• Hire the people behind the footballing structure/recruitment from Brighton or Brentford - or even better, Benfica
• Invest heavily in young player development and give more young players opportunities, via feeder club and 1st team.
• Be more transparent in what we do and how we do it - engage more with the fans
• Complete the bowl, 70,000 capacity

 

Love what they do at Munich and the allianz (still called that?) arena with the light wall wrapped around the stadium, also loved when we went to Gladbach and saw how well they done the green light inside the stadium (we eventually tried to copy it on a typical Scottish budget level experience). I'd be investing in those two styles of lighting, along with the disco lights. Upgrades to the stadium infrastructure for sure to bring it up to 2025 levels (not saying it needs to be Spurs level modern, but bring ours up to scratch at least with new builds across the continent).
Obviously look towards fixing whatever it is that needs done to the south stand to finish the "bowl" and bring up facilities to a standard that allows us to host European finals and start bidding for them.

Finally get to work on the whole museum/restaurant/hotel experience we got promised about 8 years ago but has died a horrible death (honestly chalk that * up there with the moonbeam floating pitch and casino chat). Make that whole Celtic Way area an experience on a par with the big boys across Europe. Make it a place that visiting fans/tourists/ourselves can make a full day out of it, food, museum, shop to rival anyone in the UK if not Europe. get ball deep in it.

In line with all of the above, it only works for us if we then start to engage better with fans. Build the Celtic TV and social media platforms so we actually present as a modern club offering insights and discussions with the club. Give daily training videos (limited of course do not give away secrets), more interviews, get the B team games on the site and make it an experience to get involved in. Sign up (not saying paid, or not) and make it feel like it is the place we all want to visit daily to get some Celtic content and fix. Make it so that foreign fans can use it to experience the club from afar.

After all of that, let's talk restructuring the football department. Top to bottom. From the youth of youth levels right through to the first team.
Obvious DoF, hire the best in class that we can actually attract and none of the job for the boys nonsense.
Get the scouting department back on track. At one stage we had tens, even up to 50 employed/consultant scouts across various countries we could tap in to. Think it was Peter Houston who came in around Lennons first stint and was very impressed with how in depth it all was. Kudos to John Park I believe it was at the time for getting it all going.
But even that was half what I want us to be. I don't want to rely on so many "consultants" I want a team of 20 actual scouts full time employed by the club covering as much of the globe as possible. A head of recruitment oversees it and answers to the DoF, but under the HoR I want to see 2 or 3 "managers" in there ensuring someone is leading the UK region, European region and a Global region. Assigning scouts to certain leagues/countries that we look to tap in to. Having so many actual scouts emplyed as well, we can then stop this "monitoring" nonsense from afar and actually assign a few of them to specific players for a few games, do some deep background research to the players playing history etc and present them up the chain.
All meaning, if we have a DoF that dictates the style/philosophy of play, then we can be scouting the correct sort of player that gets passed up the chain and when it reaches the manager/head coach, they can actively agree to the signing (or a selection of truly acceptable players and not a "well your top target isnt in budget, so here is willo flood"). It also means the signings are truly both the clubs and signed off by the manager/head coach and there shouldn't be any disagreements.
The DoF also takes a very heavy role in the appointment of the manager/head coach, as they need to ensure the next guy fits the clubs footballing structure.

Then we go in to coaching, an area just as badly understaffed and underqualified as the scouting department. We need to get back to a structure and responsibility for key areas and stop expecting guys like Gavin Strachan and John Kennedy to both be in charge of coaching defense, midfield, attackers, set pieces, transitions etc. And get mini teams for each and every aspect. Defensive coaches, lets get 3 or 4 in that can help each other and get to a level of even 1 coach for 2 defenders to get some real quality time involed with them. Same elsewhere and for all other areas of coaching. Lets get away from about 4-5 coaches overall and to 4-5 teams with 3-4 in each team.

Once we sort out all that (plus a whole bunch else I am sure needs worked on) we can then actively start promoting from within and giving jobs "for the boys". Absolutely no harm in giving Darren O'Dea of McManus, kennedy etc a job when they retire, if they are part of a team so much bigger than we are - meaning they have other coaches to lean on and learn from, but also our players are not reliant on coaches with little to no experience and the club being so inwards.

Get all that sorted and we can start producing and developing true coaching talent and perhaps keep promoting confidently. The players also then all benefit and perhaps we can go from 7 (which include Welsh and Ralston, along with KT and Cal Mac) players of note in over 17 years of an "academy" and maybe more like seing 2 or 3 every couple seasons and get that number over a 17 year period up to 20-30 players coming through the academy that can be of note and worth something to the club, be it playing for the first team, or at least being coached and developed enough to be sold for a reasonable fee.