Pete Seeger, the great American poet/singer, once said: ‘The point of protest is not protest. The point of protest is change.’
There is a section of the Celtic support which adores that genre of Seeger and the American protest song, and is actively pursuing just such change at their club.
But it is coming at a price. The ‘noise’ around Celtic, as Brendan Rodgers has admitted, is a distraction.
Fan protest, revolt or even contempt for their club has immediate, short-term consequences.
The mood around Celtic is not good, at a time when Rodgers is pleading with the support to get behind his team and help restore their flowing football. On the pitch Celtic are currently a shadow of their former selves.
Rodgers and his team are at Dens Park on Sunday and a noisy throng will be there to follow them. But there will be revolt in the air, as well as the threat – Celtic dread this – of a further defiant display of pyrotechnics.
Brendan Rodgers has called for unity between supporters and the club board
Fans have protested against the club’s board for a perceived lack of ambition
The diehards among the Celtic support – some call them zealots – are giving a defiant ‘Up You!’ to the club and its custodians. They want strategic change at their club and they want it now.
A key League Cup semi-final at Hampden with Rangers is looming, and fan-resentment – and banishment – will be a factor there as well. It is the last thing Celtic need as Rodgers attempts to sign-off with a domestic treble.
Yet, in the midst of it all, Rodgers is a canny manager who knows his audience and also knows his enemies.
So he has rightly pitched his pleas to those fans who were dismayed by the recent ghastly August transfer window, thus sowing further dissent, before also turning peace-maker and pleading with everyone to come together in the cause of Celtic FC.
In warfare, Rodgers is the man who holds a rifle one week and is preaching pacifism the next. He is a shrewd media operator who, in truth, knows how to both have his cake and eat it.
‘The fans are the very heart of Celtic,’ Rodgers said, echoing the great Jock Stein all these decades ago. One thing the current Celtic manager is sure of: after the events of February 2019 and his abrupt departure back to England, and the ugly banners that followed, you keep the fans on your side. You have their back.
Rodgers managed to insert into his most recent press conference the dramas and hardships amid which he is working. ‘We are trying to find our performance level while we’re playing,’ he said. ‘We are trying to find a better level. And, hopefully, we can find harmony throughout the club. We want synergy throughout the whole club.’
Celtic supporters have a strong history of protest for change – and a history of success with it – but this current ferment is different.
This time there is no Fergus McCann being touted with a swag of money and ideas to be brought in. Instead, supporters are almost but not quite quoting the New Testament in saying to their club: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’
The fans aren’t agitating for a messiah in the wings – with dough – to be brought in. They merely want the club’s current directors to shape up and sharpen their ambition.
The fans don’t appear to be demanding the departure of Dermot Desmond, the club’s highly influential major shareholder, despite the many grumblings and misgivings about the Irish financier among some supporters.
Celtic chairman Peter Lawwell and major shareholder Dermot Desmond have been criticised
So this is no Bolshevik Revolution being touted in Glasgow’s east end. Supporters just want more transparency, better dialogue and, above all, a better team on the pitch.
Football fans do have muscle, and the Celtic Fans Collective knows it. So they have now launched their Not Another Penny campaign, continuing to support the team but urging fans to cease giving the club money via food, drink, stadium tours, merchandise and more.
Will the massed ranks of the Celtic support sign up? Certainly, many will, but many more will not.
At every club there are generational attitudes and Celtic might be a classic case of it: younger supporters filled with passion and ambition, older fans in their so-called middle years who have had their fill of all the noise and just want the football.
But a fire at Celtic is burning. Peter Lawwell, the club chairman, is entitled to look on it all with a degree of bemusement. In the 20-plus years that he has been a key figure at the club – first as CEO and then as chairman – Celtic have enjoyed astonishing domestic success, to the point in recent years where even some Celtic fans have found their dominance a tad boring.
Lawwell has governed a period in the club’s history in which Celtic, while winning trophies, have also been business-savvy and delivered vast profits.
As recently as last summer, Lawwell ordered a splurge of money to be spent on new players – players that Rodgers wanted – and just nine months ago Celtic’s prowess was growing in Europe with brilliant Champions League performances in Bergamo and Munich.
The club was on the march. There wasn’t a hint, this short while back, of bad feeling in the air.
Celtic lost their Champions League qualifier to Kazakh minnows Kairat Almaty
Celtic supporters have called for chief executive Michael Nicholson to resign
But August changed everything. The transfer window was a crushing disappointment to everyone at Celtic, not helped by a trust issue between Rodgers and the Celtic boardroom. Michael Nicholson, the Celtic CEO, absolutely took it in the neck, and his cool, bloodless response to it all in the weeks that followed only aggravated fans even more. It leaves a disillusioned fanbase agitating for better practice.
‘Munich just eight short months ago showed us where we could be as a club,’ one Celtic fan wrote last week. ‘It showed the potential and ambition we could all feel around Celtic. But now look at us.’
Celtic have a notable run of games coming: seven in 21 days, including European clashes with Sturm Graz and Midtjylland and the cup semi with Rangers. Beyond that, the appetising away clash with Feyenoord in Rotterdam also looms.
This last fixture resonates with historic charm – Celtic’s opponent in the 1970 European Cup final – and reminds fans and everyone else at the club of the prestige that the club once stood for.
The weeks ahead are going to be a testing period which will either sow further dissent or – if Rodgers and his players can find their way on the pitch – might actually draw the sting out of this Celtic heat.
What is long-forgotten: if Rodgers had managed to overcome a modest Kairat team his players would now be in the Champions League playground and Celtic would be coining it in afresh.
Rodgers might find a way to make his team tick smoothly again. He will, almost certainly, find a way to keep the fans on his side. He is an impressive Celtic manager who has also learned the trick of populism.
Whatever happens in the weeks and months head, Rodgers is unlikely to be the fall-guy. He now knows Celtic, inside and out, too well for that.
