The board

I have a two part question for anyone with an accounting brain.

How much corporation tax would we be due to pay on our current cash reserves?

Is that amount more than what we’ve currently spent on footballers this year?

 

Think we paid 7m or so for last tax year.

The tax will be on the yearly profit rather than the cash reserve.

 

You pay tax on taxable profit not cash reserves. There is a link between taxable profit and cash but not directly related.

If we make 20m in taxable profit we would pay 5m in corporation tax. So estimating that’s our taxable profit then yes in that example we would pay more in CT than we have done so far on players.

There aren’t many businesses who can reduce their corporation tax bill while also creating value on the balance sheet like a football club can.

If Joe bloggs has 1m in estimated taxable profit and wants to invest 1m to save himself from 250k CT he may do that by hiring more people meaning higher wages, he may invest in IT leading to capital allowances. All of that does add value but there comes a point you don’t need anymore staff you don’t need anymore equipment and it’s just sunk costs.

Buying quality players as a football club gives you an intangible sellable asset in the future, an asset that can appreciate in value and quite significantly too. The added bonus is saving some money on a tax bill.

 

Unless your a tax expert it is difficult to say for sure other than looking back at the previous years as you also have things like capital allowances where if you invest so much in certain things like infrastructure, R&D that you can build up allowances against.

However we have just started a new tax year. I believe we signed Nygren last year so we would have spent a lot more on players than we did tax last year. If you include Nygren we spent about £40m on players but also brought in about £52m and that was before the Frimpong money so realistically over £57m brought in.

Although the level of profit is determined by Amortisation of player transfer fees rather than fees spent and profit on transfers not sales values.

We would also likely have a pretty sizeable OPEX profit.

This year until we know our European fate it’s impossible to say. If we get CL we likely make a decent OPEX profit again. In Europa we likely make an OPEX loss, although I do believe as our income is linked to European participation so too are our wages in terms of bonuses etc.

If we make a loss we won’t be paying tax and Lawells tales of the money is there to protect us from no CL so we don’t need to sell players will be put to the test. That to a degree is a nonsense anyway as a player trading club we have sold big players every season we were in the CL anyway as it’s our model. Juranovic, Giakoumakis, Jota, O’Riley, Starfelt, Abada, Kuhn and Kyogo have all been sold during CL seasons. I know there are varying circumstances around some of those sales but that again just proves the point there will always be sales.

 

Spot on

 

Had totally forgotten this until quoted by @The Crow
Can someone please read this back to Lawell at next AGM or fans forum?

“In terms of investment our policy, our commitment, is that every penny that comes into the club will be reinvested, it will go back into the club,’ said the then CEO. “I do not think we can be clearer than that. There is no pile of cash sitting there that we can look at, watch, feel and touch. It doesn’t exist.”

 

Defo

 

Totally agree

 

Yup

 

You wonder what they're hoarding that cash for. Building a new main stand. Major ground redevelopment. Can't see any of that happening in the next 10/15 years. Barrowfield is done. They've pretty much maxed out the current strategy regarding players.

What is this rainy day they're saving for? Not making champions league? Cause if thats it, then they're the biggest culprits of that with they're tight * routine.

52 goal contributions lost last season on Kyogo and Kuhn going. £27m banked on that. Whats the replacements, Osmand and Shin so far.

But I'm/we're the entitled fan for wanting more. More professionalism, proper investment. Proper footballing strategy.

So outdated its unreal.

 

I'd love for each one of them to wake up in the morning, have their breakfast, head out the door - and be confronted by thousands of silent Celtic fans, bristling with anger. Just follow the * about everywhere they went. Relentless. Force them to cower in the boardroom and then back in their houses, only for it to start again the next day and the next and the next.

Until they got their * fat fingers out their fat arses and got on with the job of properly preparing a first team worthy of Celtic and the Champions League with the vast financial wodge they are currently and inexplicably sitting on.

 

Overactive imaginations on the Internet, who'd have thought it

 

The people running the club are far too comfortable. They have been in positions of power for years and have overseen a remarkable period of success without really doing much.

They have a mentality of it's not broke don't fix it and as far as they are concerned everything in the garden is rosy.

There's no ambition to push on and be a stronger force in Europe because the financial gains for doing so are not worth the spend.

They are happy to win the league, a cup or 2 and get into champions League 3 out of every 5 years.

They refuse to redevelop the stadium because they are happy to have a 10,000 person waiting list bcoz it creates a culture of no matter how * off you are with things you will renew your season ticket out of fear of losing it. So again they do nothing and reap in the money.

As long as cash continues to roll in they won't see any need to do anything differently.

We've been incredibly lucky that our nearest rivals have been a continuous laughing stock for the past 15 years but eventually this resting on our laurels will come back to bite us.

They have neglected the 1st team squad, the ambition of managers and supporters, the scouting department, the youth academy and by recent reports the woman's team as well. Yet every year their bonuses get bigger.

 

My guess is their model for running the club was based on treating Champions League entry as a bonus rather than a likelihood.

However years of direct access to Champions League has generated a big cash surplus that they arent quite sure what to do with. The obvious place to spend it is on the team, but I think they have crunched they numbers in terms of what a financially sustainable wage budget and transfer expenditure looks like and dont want to increase that lest the flow of Champions League money dries up.

They never budgeted for the surplus really, so there been no forward planning on what to do with it.

 

There could be an element of truth in that, but I am leaning towards the theory that the Celtic Board consider they got their fingers burned in the £26M splash on Engels, Trusty and Idah. Subject to that, they could also be holding fire, to see if they can rake in some more serious dosh, from one or more of our more prized stars, before committing to any more significant transfer outlays, hence why I suggested before, that there could be some sort of transfer power struggle going on between Rodgers and the Board. Speculation I know, but the longer this drags on, the more credeence is getting added to that theory.

 

A few years back a dog-s**t sevco side came within penalty kicks of winning the Europa league. Last season the same competition was won by a, at best, mediocre Spurs team in what was widely considered one of the poorest European finals of all time. Should we find ourselves in the Europa league this year then we SHOULD be able to put ourselves in a position to go far in the tournament. Should is the key word though. We won't be doing anything the way things are going. The lack of desire and proactivity from the board to push the club to it's maximum potential really grates with me. They seem to think we should be content to just keep winning the 2 horse(sometimes 1 horse) race that is SPL. It's not even about spending massive transfer fees for me either. It's no guarantee of success. It's more about seeing a clear and decisive approach to identifying the first 11 and squad weaknesses and addressing them ASAP. A little more flexibility wouldn't hurt either, for example signing an older player who won't have much sell-on value but who will for 2-3 years make a real improvement to the side. The board need to decide for once and all who is going to be making signings for the club. If it's a DOF then no expense should be spared to get the best we can afford because it's going to be one of the 3 most important roles at the club. The current approach feels like a mish-mash. We're not gonna win every league from now until the end of time, and when we don't the Champions will almost certainly be sevco, but at least make them work for it instead of gradually regressing until we reach their level.

 

I dont think we great value for money from last Summers transfer window. But at the same time, we won the league easily and had our best showing in Europe in many years and have more money in the bank than ever. It doesnt seem a good reason to not spend.

I do think we will end up getting at least 10 players in this window. A lot of the fan base have imposed the start of the season as the cut off to conclude our transfer business but in reality the window doesnt close for at least another 7 weeks.

 

Celtic underground Substack article


Everyone reading this will be all too familiar with inflation. Yesterday was inflation figures day and the news has been full of the ‘shock’ rise to 3.6%. This gradual rise in prices over time impacts all our everyday spending. But in football, inflation operates at a different speed, and in a completely different stratosphere. While filling your car or shopping basked may have gone up 20% over the past five years, football transfer fees have risen hundreds, even thousands of percent in certain cases. This phenomenon, football inflation, is not merely a quirk of a booming sport. It’s a fundamental force reshaping how clubs like Celtic must operate in the global market.

While the UK’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) has averaged around 2–3% per year over the past few decades, the cost of footballers has grown at an astonishing rate. According to research from the CIES Football Observatory, average transfer fees in the top five European leagues have more than quadrupled since 2010. Even when clubs aren't paying stratospheric fees like the €222 million for Neymar, the mid-tier players now cost what elite players did just a few years ago.

For a club like Celtic, rooted in Scottish football’s much more modest financial ecosystem, this presents a unique dilemma. Domestically, transfer values haven’t exploded. Within the SPFL, the financial arms race has been less dramatic - partially due to lower broadcasting revenues, fanbase size, and commercial income. But Celtic don’t operate in a vacuum. The players they want, the scouts they hire, and the systems they need to implement all exist in a global market.

For players, Celtic shop internationally and that means we’re exposed to the same football inflation as clubs in England, Germany, and beyond.

To understand the scale of football inflation, consider a few examples from Celtic’s past.

• Tosh McKinlay, signed in 1994 for around £350,000. Adjusted for standard inflation, that would be around £750,000 today. But in football inflation terms, looking at equivalent full-backs with international experience, a player like McKinlay today might cost upwards of £5 million. At his standard, age and ability, we would now be looking at that level of player as a back-up to KT.
  
  
• Teemu Pukki, signed in 2013 for just over £2 million. Even ignoring the irony that Norwich eventually got a Premier League goal-machine for free, a similar forward today, with top-level experience but not quite proven at the elite level would likely cost £7–8 million if not more.
  
  
• Chris Sutton was signed in 2000 for £6 million (then a record for the club). Using football inflation metrics, this would be the equivalent of £35–40 million today, possibly more, given the striker’s pedigree.
  
  
• Neil Lennon, signed for around £6 million in 2000. That fee would also translate to around £30–35 million today, reflecting the premium on experienced midfielders who can lead a team.
  

You might say that these signings were so long ago that comparsions start to be too difficult so let’s look at recent buys and apply football inflation:

• Cameron Carter-Vickers, signed for £6 million in 2022, is now looking like a bargain. A similar level of defender – young, experienced, international pedigree – would likely cost closer to £15–20 million in the 2025 market.
  
  
• Alistair Johnston, a £3 million signing in late 2022, has seen his value skyrocket through European performances. Today, players with a similar profile are routinely changing hands for £10 million+ in the English Championship alone.
  
  
• Reo Hatate offered value at a purchase price of just £1.6m which, in the short period of time only rises to £2.4m
  
  
• Christopher Jullien, another centre half with challenges over pace and phsyicality, but still a quality player whose career was massively impacted by that goalpost collission was acquired for £7m. a player with his profile would command a fee of upwards of £25m today.
  
  
• Odsonne Édouard, our most expensive buy in Brendan’s last tenure and may be kicking around for free 8 years later but we sold at quite a profit. The challenge is that a £9m price in 2018 equates to circa £36m today.
  

So why does this matter?


Because Celtic, despite being dominant domestically, are still trying to punch above their weight in Europe. And to do that, we need to shop in the same markets as clubs with five or ten times our spending power.

UEFA’s financial regulations, including new squad cost control measures, do add some guardrails to the wildest spending. But they don’t level the playing field entirely. Clubs in England are still receiving over £100 million per season in TV revenue. Celtic, by contrast, get less than £3 million from the SPFL deal.

This mismatch means that unless Celtic are continually upgrading how we spend, both in absolute terms and in how smart that spending is, we risk stagnation or even regression.

Shopping in the same price bracket year after year might seem prudent, but in football terms, it’s akin to shopping at Poundland in 1999 and still shopping there now expecting to find the same quality. The world has moved on. So must we.

The board at Celtic face a difficult balancing act. We cannot overspend. Due in part to the Murray fueled arms race of the turn of the century and consequences 12 years later, financial prudence is deemed as crucial by our board (Dermot), particularly with limited domestic income. But being too cautious is equally dangerous. If we insist on only shopping in the £2–3 million bracket, the quality of players we can attract will decrease each year, not because of a lack of scouting, but because the footballing equivalent of £3 million in 2025 is worth far less than it was in 2015.

There are solutions.

Investing in data and analytics, upgrading our academy, and expanding our global scouting network are all ways to “buy smarter”, to spot undervalued talent before the market inflates their value. But even these areas require investment. The very tools needed to find value are themselves rising in cost.

Football inflation is not just a numbers game, it’s a strategic challenge that defines the future of player trading clubs like Celtic. We can’t change the financial might of the English Premier League, nor can we halt global market trends. But we can choose to acknowledge the reality we face, adapt our strategy, and invest accordingly.

If we don’t, we risk falling behind. Not because we stopped trying, but because we refused to accept that yesterday’s money doesn’t buy tomorrow’s success.

 

The figures in that article are complete nonsense. There are still plenty of bargains out there if you look hard enough, Nygren being a case in point.

Last year we went shopping in England and Germany. We should have been looking elsewhere for better value.

 

A lot of good contributions here. There is a fair section of our support who are staunch defenders of the board. They will not hear criticism of them and will actually get quite abusive when you back up that criticism. That's my experience in that past. I think its vital that supporters are informed and knowledgeable on this as the board like to deflect blame constantly for failings.

Some clubs like to benchmark us against Rangers, a basket case of a club as comparison we are well run, we are not. Celtic and Rangers are both at polar opposite ends of the spectrum in how they are ran, Rangers wrecklessly spend money they don't have whereas Celtic hoard cash without any strategy to put it to use.

First off I'm a qualified accountant, I work as a Financial Controller so every annual report that comes out I immediately sniff the rubbish spouted by the board. I'm sure there are other people here with similar qualifications, it doesn't mean I'm 100% right in everything I say but I do the know the fundamentals and so much of the way Celtic run screams of gross incompetence by our board.

I will say this with absolute certainty, no club in world football, no listed company has the levels of cash reserves relative to its financial position Celtic have. In our last annual statement we had £77m cash reserves, we have no debt to service. Our annual operating costs are little over £100m. Our cash reserves to op ex is approximately 73%, absolutely unheard of.

Some people labour under the misapprehension that being cash rich is a sign of a well run efficient club. That exposes a blatant lack of commercial nous. If you have vast amount of cash reserves and you're not putting it to work it shows you are either paralysed with fear or have no strategic vision. It's not a good strategy which why no club in World Football have anywhere close to the level of unutilized cash reserves we have.

For starters we are carrying about £40m too much in cash reserves, the whole premise that we hold the money for sustainability in terms of lack of CL revenue doesn't stack up. £30m holds us stable in that regard. The real issue that our board hold that cash is they lack vision and are paralysed by fear. It's what has brought us from being ranked as the 22nd best club in Europe in 2005 to the 59th in 2025 - this is including the fact that every year Celtic have European football.

There is no defence of this board and I'm afraid to say if you feel like you're going to be coming to their defence is because you don't really understand what you're talking about.