Celtic’s interim chairman Brian Wilson is clearly playing the nice cop to Ross Desmond’s nasty cop in saying all the right things about bringing unity back to the champions and brokering a peace deal with mutinous fans.
The 77-year-old has already lined up meetings with supporter groups. His long history as a Labour politician, of course, makes him ideally suited to peddling any old mince to the public to get them back onside.
There is only one problem. Wilson has been on the Parkhead board for two decades. He’s been in situ all the way through this ludicrous period of transfer failings, laughable club statements and managerial catastrophes which has seen a broad church of supporters finally conclude that enough is enough.
What’s he been doing up to now, exactly? Sitting back and just letting it all carry on regardless by the looks of things.
‘Many of them (the fans) feel the same frustrations about communications, about having an input to the club, knowing what is going on in the club,’ said Wilson to the club’s in-house telly channel during the week.
‘The thing that comes up repeatedly is that they want to know what is going on. That’s the channel I really want to develop over the next few weeks.’
Celtic chairman Brian Wilson has been on the board for two decades but has rarely spoken
Chief executive Michael Nicholson’s staggering salary is enough to make the mind boggle
Celtic’s fortunate Scottish Cup triumph over Dundee was played out in front of a sparse crowd
Wilson says that these demands for info and transparency and greater collaboration from the punters are being made ‘totally reasonably’. Here’s a couple of questions for him, then.
Why has the CEO Michael Nicholson, supposedly the guy at the crux of all the decision making, been permitted to live in the shadows with the kind of public profile you’d expect of someone in a witness protection programme?
Nicholson has made a handful of appearances on Celtic TV for the soft-soap treatment during his four years at the helm after stepping up from his position as the club’s director of legal and football affairs. He has no other dealings with wider media. He’s the Invisible Man.
It is completely unheard of for a guy in that position and, particularly, on those wages.
In the last set of accounts, he hauled in just short of £840,000 per annum for his efforts when all bonuses and benefits were taken into consideration.
For what? To stand aside and let Dermot Desmond hire and fire managers and send out his boy Ross to get the AGM shut down — one opportunity that did exist to get answers face-to-face from the powerbase — by launching into an attack on supporters and telling them, more or less, not to harbour high hopes about competing in Europe any longer.
Major shareholder Dermot Desmond should be demanding more from his Celtic chief executive
Listen, Nicholson shouldn’t be in that job in the first place. If Daddy Desmond, the minority shareholder who seems to make so many of the big calls, is going to let him keep it, though, he really should be front and centre when it comes to a lot of the club’s messaging.
Why isn’t he the one to try to bring peace in our time rather than a soon-to-be octogenarian in Wilson, who isn’t likely to be in the chairman’s role long enough to see through any new plans he may cook up with punters in these upcoming pow-wows?
Likewise, a bit of clarity on the nonsense of Paul Tisdale’s time as head of football operations would be welcome too. Not to mention what on earth comes next in a set-up that doesn’t appear to possess any long-term structure at all.
For long enough, no one outside the tent had the faintest idea what this Tisdale character — a failed Stevenage manager best known for wearing silly hats, calling himself a ‘football doctor’ and appearing to nod off in the stand during a top-of-the-table meeting with Hearts — was actually doing.
No one coughed. No one offered any detail. Certainly not Tisdale himself, who didn’t conduct one single interview with club TV or anyone else during his entire 15 months or so as a permanent staff member before getting the boot at the same time as the calamitous Wilfried Nancy.
Nancy, of course, was paraded at Lennoxtown on his tod after agreeing to become manager. No one from the board was willing to be questioned on why the club had gone so leftfield, how the appointment fitted into any kind of wider footballing strategy (assuming there is one) or what it was within the guy’s CV that made him a compelling choice.
Celtic’s former head of football operations Paul Tisdale achieved nothing of note in his role
As the Frenchman then started digging himself a bigger hole by the week with his stupid press conferences, no one from the higher echelons of the club showed any inclination to help him out, press the reset button, take control of the narrative. The guy was just left hanging out there, making a clown of himself.
Since Martin O’Neill came back in, he’s pretty much been out there on his own too — answering endless questions about why Celtic weren’t buying anyone in the transfer market and, for that matter, didn’t seem to have any kind of functional recruitment set-up following man of mystery Tisdale’s overdue departure.
From the anecdotal evidence provided, it felt like the closing weeks of the January window centred around O’Neill and his assistant Shaun Maloney desperately trying to get folk on the phone and cobble some stuff together.
Even then, a collection of loan signings with patchy backstories and a 32-year-old Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who hasn’t played in nine months, feels like thin gruel.
It all just makes you wonder about those thunderous messages on the official website about how everything was working just fine. The 1,030 words of tone-deaf rubbish punted out at 9pm on a Saturday night in September — with no name attached — that blamed yet another shambolic transfer window on UEFA sustainability rules and punters and journalists having the temerity to talk about potential signings on social media.
Or the night Desmond snr hijacked the official website to take out the Gatling gun on former manager Brendan Rodgers’ reputation. Back then, he stated ‘what has failed recently was not due to our structure or model, but to one individual’s desire for self-preservation at the expense of others’.
It says it all about Celtic that even Nancy’s failed tenure isn’t the biggest problem at the club
Why, then, are Celtic back asking a 73-year-old O’Neill to get the club out of the soup for a second time this season? What does that say about the structure and the model?
What does it say, too, about the person or people penning these webpage howitzers? Even the statement announcing Peter Lawwell was leaving as chairman at the end of last year descended into little more than an attack on elements of the support.
At least Wilson is trying, not before time, to extend some sort of olive branch. It’s just that he’s part of the problem. He’s a central part of a board of directors that has been looking old, tired and out of gas for some time.
Celtic need fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh thoughts, someone new in charge with the capability to execute fresh strategies.
There is one bloke doing a good job at the Scottish Exhibition Centre just along the River Clyde. Just recently, a report stated how the venue, home of the Hydro, had drawn more than two million visitors from across the globe in 2025, generating £557million in economic value for the city of Glasgow.
The CEO’s a good Celtic man as well, by all accounts. Dominic McKay’s the name. Just saying.
