Lawwell threatens Celtic blog

I started the blog and gave up, it started with the guy trying to prove he's good at guessing what's going on with very little information as he passed a test on a government website. If everything in the blog was fact then he would stand by what he's written and left it up. If Lawwell threatened legal action then he must have been off with the guesses he was passing off as fact.

The Free Rogic International on X claimed the blogger James Forrest pestered her in her DMs for days and called him a deviant, do we just pass that off as fact now?

The James Forrest blogs are pure Celtic Da fuel, always negative nonsense with very little insight.

I wish Lawwell never came back as there was no need to bring him back and he also takes the heat off the rest of the board who should be held to account for the things they are responsible for.

There's a weird infatuation with Lawwell in our support, everything that doesn't work out, Lawwells fault, everything that goes well was lucky in spite of Lawwell, it's madness.

 

There's nothing weird about it.

I think everyone understands that the club is in a good place off the pitch, financially, and much of that is down to Lawwell and others who are clearly good when it comes to making money.

But most of us don't think it's a coincidence that in his reign at the club, since 2003, we have continually downsized and regressed to the point of not having won a single European knockout match in that time. Constantly failing to kick on from positions of strength. Giving the manager's job to Neil Lennon post-Rodgers when we were on for one of the finest achievements in our history, which Lennon then went on to completely * up.

And then in those two years when Lawwell was away, we manage to unearth a gem of a manager and actually move our * much quicker in the transfer window and sign some real quality. Hatate, Kyogo, MOR, Carter-Vickers, Jota and Maeda were all brought to the club within the space of 6 months.

Lawwell comes back in an important role again, and wouldn't you know we're back to dragging our heels in the market and/or signing dross.

You think those are all just coincidences or that maybe Lawwell has a huge say on our transfer dealings and his involvement is killing us?

 

Have you read his work at any point Iver the years? He's an absolute moon howler. One of these * that fancy themselves as a spokesman for the whole support. He's like one of they mad Rabin hun bloggers you picture sitting in their wee room in their parents' house, 40-odd year old trying to come across as an intellectual on the Internet.

Slabbering weirdo that just so happened to learn how to type in paragraphs. If he's slandered someone at the club I hope he gers the book thrown at him. *.

 

Genuinely the first one I have read which is why I asked. Fair enough!If i was in the boards shoes I don't know whether I would be that arsed about a blog but each to their own. I wouldn't bother going on any forum or social media if I was them then if that's the case

 

Here's the blog








Celtic’s Transfer Downsizing Is Obvious Looking At The Timeline. So Who Is To Blame?





There is some discussion, some of it heated, amongst our fans right now over who is to blame for this atrocious transfer window. One of the themes that some folk keep on returning to is the role, or the lack of a role, of Peter Lawwell in the stuff we’re witnessing at the moment. I find much of this discussion a little unusual, and I’ll tell you why.

A half dozen years ago, when I was doing a bit of research for a fictional project I was working on, I found myself on the M15 website, and I was amused to note they were advertising heavily for people to apply to join. I thought it would be amusing to check the careers section. After pottering about for a bit, I thought that, just for a laugh, I’d download a job application for one of their analyst roles. I wanted to see what that would look like.

To my surprise, before you’re even considered for an analyst position, before you can even download the form, they make you do an online “aptitude test.” And because I like to solve puzzles, and because I like to play games, I did the test.

Basically, they give you a scenario involving a suspected wrongdoer. They provide you with certain materials; newspaper cuttings, audio clips, “reports”, they provide you a historical background and they present you with several options for what to do next.

They’re testing your ability to analyse and interpret a series of events, to contextualise them, and to make a recommendation, based on what it is that you think you see, about whether this suspect is worthy of closer attention, and what his intentions might be.

I started the test with wry amusement, but I actually found it pretty involving, and so I put some time and effort into it. I read every piece of info, listened to the clips, read the background material and made a recommendation. And I passed, whatever that means. I didn’t bother to download the form, but I’ve always been pretty pleased with myself for that.

That’s basically what I do here, every day. I pull on threads. I try to understand what’s happening, sometimes based on very little information. But the reason that M15 online test gives you a historical background is so you can compare what’s happened before with what you see now, and to decide whether any piece of information fits a historical pattern.

But of course, that can be misleading, and I have to consider that. Because I once read a book about intelligence operations in Afghanistan (Soviet invasion Afghanistan) where a CIA operative said that some people think they’re trained not to believe in coincidences, but in fact coincidences, even wildly improbable ones, happen all the time and that the first principle of analysis is to recognise that and take it into consideration.

And so, every single day I sit here and try to discern patterns and sift through information and piece together what might just be random facts and odd coincidences, and I try to remember that and I try to remember something else too; the risks of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a big one, and it’s a bad one. That’s when you go looking for information, either consciously or not, to support your pre-existing view.

When it comes to Peter Lawwell we know the history. We know he was perhaps the most hands-on CEO in British football. People who have dealt with him have said publicly, and privately, that he was a control freak. We know that whilst Rodgers was here the first time that players were signed without his approval and even without his knowing who they were. We know that targets he identified were not signed in a timely fashion, if at all.

We know that Lawwell took the decisions when it came to negotiations, and it didn’t matter if his negotiating style entailed risks. As long as we had a chance to save a few bucks, then the risk was worth it, regardless of whether it paid off, regardless of whether the manager felt put out or disenfranchised, regardless of how stupid it made us look.

The John McGinn saga was a fiasco, and a case in point. Celtic’s position on that was that they’d made Hibs an offer, they wouldn’t be upping it and that McGinn would join for free the following year. That the manager wanted him in that window didn’t bother the club one bit. That McGinn wasn’t prepared to wait appeared to come as a shock to them.

Two years later, Celtic tried the same tactic with Alfie Doughty, who last season played 37 games for Luton in the EPL. We were first linked with him in the summer of 2020 and made one bid that Charlton booted out. We opted to wait until January and sign him on a pre-contract. We offered him one. He turned it down after Charlton accepted a £600,000 bid from Stoke, and he went there instead. £600,000. I think we bid somewhere in the region of £250,000 in the summer. So about £350,000. That’s what we lost him for. Football club small change.

But this is what the club prioritised when Lawwell was CEO. Everything was about the bottom line. Everything was about saving whatever small amounts we could. The club got a reputation for it, and not a good reputation for it.

To me, there are two transfer periods which sum up what life was like when he was the CEO. The first was, of course, the John McGinn window. The second involved Neil Lennon, in his first tenure at the club, when a season after beating Barcelona, he saw one key player from that team sold prior to every round we played in the Champions League. That’s how the club rewarded Lennon for that sterling accomplishment, but dismantling his team one step at a time, weakening in it even as he was trying to put another qualification, and thus more money, in the bag.

I still cannot process that. What they gained in selling those players they could just as easily have lost in failing to qualify for the Groups. Perhaps their faith in Lennon wasn’t solid. Perhaps they preferred to have the insurance of the guaranteed cash in the bank, and figured that if Lennon did work the miracle that it was a double win.

Lennon did it. But a savagely weakened team struggled in that year’s tournament, winning 1 game out of six and losing the other five. It was one of the worst records in the history of the Group Stages, and the worst by any side from Scotland until it was eclipsed just a couple of years ago by the one across the city. Lennon left at the end of the season, probably seeing the writing on the wall and further downsizing in his future and we appointed Ronny Deila.

He was the guy we had planned to bring in as Lennon’s assistant. Rather that go back to the drawing board and find a new boss Lawwell and the board thought, “Yeah, he’ll do.”

Look, that’s the history. That’s the background anyway. Nothing above is disputed. You’ll notice that when you ask people who dispute Lawwell’s current involvement if his past behaviour has been costly or even damaging at times and it is by no means an exhaustive picture of those sorts of choices and decisions. Others have their own anectodical stories about the man and know things I probably don’t, and can fill in more of the blanks.

Going even further back you can look at the Wilo Flood window — a title thrown away over a couple of hundred grand for Steven Fletcher — and on and on and on.

So, compare it with where we are. Do you see a pattern? More importantly, is there a period of time where Peter Lawwell did not have a senior executive role which we can compare and contrast this stuff to? Well, actually, yes there is. A painfully brief one, and it’s actually shorter than most people think that it was because of two things that happened during it.

All I’m going to do here is state facts, that’s it. Nothing else. The best way to do this is to put together a timeline. You’ve got the background, so here are the current facts.

As the Ibrox club was hurtling towards the COVID title, and with Lennon still clinging to his job by his fingernails although that had long since ceased to be a rational course of action for either him or the club, Lawwell announced his intention to leave the CEO job on 29 January 2021.

He could not possibly have survived that campaign when his own strategic decision making had played such an obvious role in that outcome, everything from his failure to campaign for the SFA regulations which would have shut King out at Ibrox and limited their ability to fund their spending from directors’ loans to the decisions which drove Rodgers out our door and led to the subsequent re-hiring of Neil Lennon, a decision made worse by the appalling, cynical and grossly unprofessional way in which that decision was finalised and then announced.

Lawwell would stay until he formally gave up the post at the end of June 2021, to be replaced by the former head of the SRU, Dominic McKay, who actually started working with the club, although not full-time in the role, in April of that year. Fans were delighted. That seemed like an exciting change, and most of us were very optimistic about it.

In between times, Lennon was dismissed, Eddie Howe was approached to take the job, we dithered for a summer waiting on an answer from him and then he said no. Lawwell was at the club for every step of the way of that shambolic final calamity.

In a moment of pure panic in the aftermath of that decision we plucked Ange Postecoglou’s name out of the City Group contacts book and appointed him boss. He was announced on 10 June. That at least gave us a fresh shot a new start. That didn’t last long.

Dominic McKay “quit” Celtic on 11 September 2021.

In the handful of months for which he had full operational responsibility, and with the manager and the CEO working in almost perfect harmony, they completed the following signings; Liel Abada (£3,500,000.) Kyogo Furuhashi (£4,500,000.) Bosun Lawal (£120,000.) Carl Starfelt (£4,000,000.) Joe Hart (£1,000,000.) James McCarthy (Free.) Josip Juranovic (£2,500,000.) Liam Scales (£500,000.) Giorgis Giakoumakis (£2,500,000.) Jota (Loan with an option to buy) and finally Cameron Carter Vickers (Loan with an option to buy.)

The window was a nearly flawless, masterclass, in team-building, the sort that happens when the manager and the people working alongside him are in perfect synchronicity, with the manager presenting his list of requirements and others getting the job done. Ten days after the summer window shut, with people still toasting it, McKay was gone.

No explanation for why that happened has ever been provided to us.

Michael Nicholson stepped in as “temporary” CEO pending the kind of global search for the right candidate that only Celtic can undertake. How fortunate for us that it ended with the realisation that in all the world of football the right guy was the guy we already had in the building, the guy who had been Peter Lawwell’s number two man.

He was confirmed in that position on 23 December, to the widespread scorn of much of the Celtic online community. Those who think that in aiming at Lawwell we miss the role he has played in these events aren’t paying attention. Rodgers named him personally when speaking about the transfer talks back in the States, and that’s not for nothing and none us failed to see the significance of it.

But initially, there was reason for optimism. Following the summer’s spectacular success story, we went into January with a real chance of winning the title, and added four more first team players, three of them personally identified by the boss; Ideguchi, Hatate and Maeda.

A brief slip when our first-choice midfielder Riley McGree opted not to sign — another player Ange knew well — saw the neatest pivot to a secondary target you could hope for, and before we knew it Matt O’Riley was at the club and Ange’s first two windows had not only rebuilt the team but added bankable assets to it and that was enough to get us to the double.

Two things happened in the interim, one immediately and clearly awful (to those of us who weren’t completely conned by a transparently fictious narrative) and the other more pleasing, although troubling for its own reasons.

First was the announcement on 02 May 2022, that Mark Lawwell would be joining the club as the Head Of First Team Scouting & Recruitment.

For two transfer windows we had gotten nearly every major decision right. We had added strength and value to the team. We had brought in big, big players. We had made giant strides. Something had changed, and it had worked. It had worked superbly.

So why, then, did Celtic decide that what we really needed to do, as a club, was to ditch what was so very clearly paying big dividends just to embark on a transformation of recruitment which put it back in the hands of someone with Lawwell’s second name?

Daddy had nothing to do with that, right?

This is what we are always being told. Peter Lawwell was a non-executive director, with no influence at all on the club. But his successor left Celtic after a couple of months in the job having delivered a nearly perfect transfer window, and he replaced by the guy who had been Lawwell’s number two and then in the summer the following year Lawwell’s son just happened to get the most important job in relation to the transfer policy.

But he had no involvement in any of that, right?

Yet from that moment on, everything we do as a club starts to fall in to a very familiar pattern, except in one critical respect, which I’ll get to in due course.

We’re now in May 2022. Lawwell Jnr gets the recruitment gig in time for the summer, where Ange has been talking about a transfer strategy that involves buying a player, developing that player, selling that player for a profit sufficient that we can move up the ladder to the next tier of player, and on and on. A strategy which every one of us was excited by it because it was exactly what we’d wanted to hear from the club for years.

Furthermore, we then had a piece of what ought to have been exceptional news; Ian Bankier was to stand down as chairman. He was loathed by a big section of the Celtic support for being a contemptuous, arrogant clown who was prone to statements of bone-headed stupidity. The rest of the support barely remembered his name. It was not for nothing that this blog once referred to him by quoting from William Hugh Mearns’ famous poem, Antigonish, the one that goes “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there …”

That announcement came on 29 July 2022, and nobody shed a single tear.

He would not formally leave the club until the end of the year, and if the news wasn’t greeted with fireworks, it was only because there was a shortage after the double celebrations … and because some people harboured a dark suspicion.

Still, we were into the summer transfer window by then, and everyone was hoping for a repeat of the previous season’s stunning success.

We were to be massively underwhelmed by the results, and let me present them in their full context. From the January window of 2022, when we signed three players who immediately and without question enhanced the first team and became high value commodities, one signing — just one — has been a clear and obvious upgrade to the side.

We are on our fifth consecutive window where, with one exception, there has not been a signing which makes the first team materially stronger than the one which ended Ange’s first campaign. The fifth one, and I defy anyone to make a counter argument. The handful of success stories, of which the most obvious is Alastair Johnston, were brought in not as enhancements, but as replacements for Ange Postecoglou signings which our club sold in the space of that time.

That summer’s transfer business saw us enact one deal we were contractually obligated to complete and we signed two players we’d had on loan with options to buy, so we’re going to exclude Carter Vickers, Jota and Maeda from this list, as they were not part of Mark Lawwell’s story as our new transfer guru. No, the signings we had expected to elevate the team to even greater heights were as follows; Benjamin Seigrist (Free.) Alexsandro Bernabei (£3,750,000.) Mortiz Jenz (Loan.) Saed Haksabanovic (£1,700,000.) Olivier Abilgaard (Loan.)

There was one other, the only success story, the solitary player in those five windows who came in and immediately enhanced the team, and that player was Aaron Mooy, and that was almost certainly down to his relationship with Ange Postecoglou.

It is worth pointing out that in that summer window we lost Bitton and Rogic who left for free, and we sold Christopher Jullien and got him off the wage bill. A slew of others went out on free transfers or long-term loans, and we were able to boast that we had a “net spend.” But in terms of being significantly stronger for it, in relation to where we were when the previous campaign ended, that was hard to argue with a straight.

That team made no progress in Europe whatsoever. None. We finished without a win in six games in a group with Shakhtar Donetsk, Real Madrid and RB Leipzig. There were opportunities in that group, but we had taken no obvious step forward and we paid for it.

On 2 December, Celtic announced, to the horror of much of the support but to the surprise of exactly nobody, that Peter Lawwell had been appointed “non-executive chairman.” He would formally take over on 1 January 2023. He did so at a time when we were as strong on the pitch as we’d been in well over a decade and although disappointed by Europe there was the feeling that one underwhelming window might not be a bad portent, although with two Lawwell’s in the building some of us definitely were harbouring thinking worst case scenario thoughts.

I wish what I was about to say was untrue. But it isn’t.

So, think about patterns again.

Think about where we were at that time. Because from that moment, in terms of the strengths of the squad we had on 31 December 2022, we have been, as Bill Paxton so memorably put in, “on an express elevator to *, going down.”

Lawwell is due in the door 1 January.

In the runup we sign Alastair Johnston, in early December, during a transfer window dramatically changed to accommodate the World Cup. But we sign him knowing full well it’s to replace Josip Juranovic who the drums are beating about. We at least do it right, bringing in the replacement before we let the main guy go. The news that we’re prepared to sell Giakoumakis is, on the other hand, genuinely shocking. Again, we bring in Oh, his replacement, first and from the off it is clear that we are downgrading, trading a proven scorer for a project.

We also bring in Tomaki Iwata and let go of Ideguchi. It doesn’t stand out a mile that we’re on the downslope; the loss of Juranovic is offset by the excellence of Johnston, and although Iwata doesn’t immediately impress we’re one in and one out for midfield and Ideguchi had failed to make his mark anyway so that hardly seems like a disaster. But the slide has begun.

We go out of the January window and into the second half of the season, where we secure a treble. In the latter stages of the campaign, the fans, the blogs and just about everyone in the media who cares about the club are all screaming at the board to tie down Ange Postecoglou, still on a rolling contract, to a long-term deal.

This board fails to do that and he leaves for Spurs. We negotiate a pay-off but it’s nothing like we would have been able to secure if we’d had a cast iron agreement with years still to run.

Whenever I’m accused of having an anti-board agenda, pursuing that to all possible ends and with every available means, I smile in remembrance of those days, when it would have been easy to point to the start of the downsizing and the presence of Lawwell and Lawwell at the club and allege that Ange left because he’d been over-ruled and the power taken out of his hands … those charges would have been easy to make and almost impossible to refute.

But I won’t do that, not then, not now, not ever. I’ll play with a straight bat and I’ll never accuse of them of something which I know to be entirely false.

Ange Postecoglou saw Celtic as a stepping stone and he was never going to commit to a long term stay here, not under any circumstances, and whilst I think he should have given us the protection of that long-term deal I also understand that it might have limited his options and that Spurs themselves might have looked elsewhere if the alternative was paying Celtic a huge amount of money for his services.

He left, and stories swept the media about his likely successor.

It was rumoured that some of the board favoured Enzo Maresca, now at Chelsea, who at the time was looking for his first managerial gig. Had we hired him we’d have spent the whole of this summer waiting for the offer from England which would have taken him south … he went to Leicester, got them promoted and left after one campaign.

Brendan Rodgers, whatever promises were made to him, whatever he thought the deal was, came back to Celtic and immediately sat in front of the fan media and committed himself to the club for the duration of his three-year deal, short of being fired, and maybe, in hindsight, even he now considers that a mistake, because he gave up part of his leverage.

We know what happened last summer and it was so calamitous and so counter to our needs and his wishes that Mark Lawwell is no longer at the club.

Since first Mark Lawwell was hired by Celtic, followed in short order by Peter Lawwell’s appointment as chairman, our transfer policy has seen us lose Juranovic, Giakoumakis, Mooy, Starfelt, Jota, Abada and Hart from the team which was at its peak when it closed out the summer window of 2022. We await the sale of O’Riley. We fear the sale of Hatate as a follow-up. If an eight figure bid comes in for Kyogo, only the fact we’ve not yet signed a striker secures us from what would otherwise be a very real fear that he, too, will be sold in furtherance of the policy.

Other than Tomaki Iwata, Mooy and Alastair Johnston, no player from the transfer intake since has yet gone on to establish himself as a key player in this squad, and none was an obvious Day 1 upgrade on what we had before.

As I write this, the month’s long “pursuit” of a player we had a right-to-buy option on us has come to an end with the signing of Paolo Bernardo, who I wish nothing but the best at this club, but whose signing does not represent in any way an upgrade on last season’s team … he was here, along with Idah, when the campaign ended, so we’ve made no real forward progress at all.

He is the first outfield signing since the transfer window opened more than 50 days ago.

As I write this, we have one actual striker. One left back. We still need at least one central defender. Some of us argue that we need an iron-man midfielder, because this is still last season’s midfield and it wasn’t good enough for Europe either then or now. Nor were our wide players, where many us think we need another signing.

So, piece together the fragments.

Examine the information, look for the patterns, and then ask yourself if you genuinely believe that the influence of Peter Lawwell is not felt at Celtic Park every single day, in every aspect of the operation, whether directly or through placemen and allies, and as you do so, remember that we have an absentee landlord here who has no interest in the day to day running of Celtic and leaves it to the people who are currently here, on the ground floor.

And whilst you consider that, consider what you know about them, about these men who allowed Lawwell to interfere in team matters, who allowed the undermining of Rodgers the first time, the hiring of Lennon in spite of what must have been grave reservations, in a Hampden shower, the people who have, for years, allowed this minority shareholder based in Ireland to impose his will on the policies and direction of the club … and tell me; who here, in Scotland, is going to stand up and say no to a man who has been here Parkhead for 20 years, and spent the first eighteen of them doing anything he damned well liked?

Which of them can you count on to contradict his opinions? To offer an alternative strategy, even if it’s a good one, even if it’s a winner … you know, as Dominic McKay once did?

And where’s he? And who’s in his job?

No, we haven’t forgotten Michael Nicholson, Michael Nicholson is very much part of our focus, Michael Nicholson, who the manager personally named as one of the two men most directly responsible for delivery here, with Chris McKay the other. We’ve not overlooked those guys, but Nicholson in particular … not by a long way.

But the idea that Peter Lawwell has no day-to-day influence at Celtic — this man who the Scottish media used to say operated all of the institutions of Scottish football by remote control — that idea is so absurd that I cannot even type that with a straight face.

So put on your analyst heads guys, and examine all the scattered pieces which lie before you. Does it add up to something, or it a whole lot of nothing? Are we looking at a pattern, or a series of odd coincidences which don’t amount to a damned thing?

I would suggest that you don’t need to be a trained spook to come with the answer here

 

Not reading all that. Lawwell's a fat * though

 

That blog is absolutely spot on, and I defy anyone to disagree with a word.

Won't be long until someone comes to Lawwell's defence though.

 

We knew that without a blog anyway

 

Call me crazy, but rather than suing random fan bloggers would the best way to make that point redundant not be to actually buy good quality players …

Priorities are all over the shop.

 

It’s hard to disagree with any of that IMO.

 

He's a cancerous toad. Has far more important things to be doing than worrying about crap like this. Does he not know we all think he's a * already?

 

Article can be found if you want it to be found out there.

James did say on the podcast as well, the numbers of views on the link he posted (which now is a place holder stating it's been taken down), rocketed after word got out about it all.
One of those times Lawwell has attempted to squash it, but now folk are talking more about it.

Sent from my M2012K11AG using Tapatalk

 

You are so far wrong here.
You can find the article if you want to read it, you can listen to the podcast as well if you wish - he basically says everything in the podcast that was said in the article.
Absolutely no threatening territory was ever touched.

But we all know your stance on the club and it's custodians, you keep clapping away.

Sent from my M2012K11AG using Tapatalk

 

Lawwell funnily enough years ago said that He never paid attention to bloggers and trolls and that they don't have a clue what goes on at the Club, funny now that He is paying attention to bloggers.

 

I still can't work out why he was on a website about a motorway that was never built though...

 

Hey, at least it's good publicity for yees

 

Yet you are jumping to conclusions saying he has probably went into threatening territory…..without actually reading the article.

 

It was an opinion piece that was laid out as a timeline naturally people will agree and disagree with it. I didn't see anything remotely worthy of the reaction from the club. Most of the stuff within the article will have been discussed on here over the years as well as pubs and supporters buses all over the place

 

Just bully boy tactics to threaten anyone who doesn't walk the line. Threaten a long, costly (ultimately pointless) litigation process, which Lawell will know he can run and that the Blog won't be able to sustain, down.

It's clearly hit a nerve and he's looking to suppress the truth.

Parasite.

 

He might be a pennypinching * but i HIGHLY doubt he cares what a little blog thinks lol