Martin O’Neill wants to help bring an end to the flying tennis balls and the fan unrest at Celtic. It’s perfectly understandable. It unsettles the team, disrupts momentum, encourages the opposition.
He’s going the wrong way about it, though, if he thinks that parrotting the same kind of rubbish about wider ambitions in Europe that saw Ross Desmond help get the AGM shut down earlier in the season is going to win friends and influence people.
Back in November, in that shambles with the shareholders in the Kerrydale Suite at Parkhead, Desmond, son of major shareholder Dermot, hit the headlines thanks to taking a flamethrower to elements of the support base and branding them ‘aggressive’, ‘irrational’ and ‘bullies’.
Less attention was given to his even more troubling remarks about where Celtic’s intentions in Europe ought to lie. ‘Those who talk about the club not having kicked on in Europe since 2003 ignore the enormous change in the financial landscape of football in that period,’ he said.
‘It has created a gap which keeps growing and challenges any club in a smaller league. Most supporters understand that. Of course, clubs can still punch above their financial weight and we should aspire to that, but, if you swing and miss, you risk the very stability of the club and that would be profoundly irresponsible.’
Martin O’Neill claims Celtic are being left behind by clubs who can spend £80m on a player
Celtic lost out on £40m of Champions League bounty by losing their play-off to Kairat Almaty
Hmmmm. If we’re talking about being profoundly irresponsible, selling Kyogo Furuhashi for £10million, Nicolas Kuhn for £17m and then losing a Champions League play-off to Kairat Almaty – potentially worth £40m-plus – without a proper replacement for either has got to be right up there too.
Coming just five years after dearest daddy had stated that ‘Europe is so important as a yardstick of our football progression’, Desmond jnr’s words felt like a waving of the white flag. Let’s not even get into what the bold Dermot stated in that now-infamous 2020 interview with The Athletic about Celtic, in five years’ time, being ‘better than any of the great teams that were led by Martin, Gordon, Brendan and Lenny’.
When O’Neill initially came back to Celtic to try and bail out this binfire of a season, with a Class of 2025 you wouldn’t trust to run lunch hour in the dinner hall, he spoke about Europe. He made it clear how important those big nights are. He spoke about how Celtic – and Rangers, for that matter – are built on competing in UEFA competition. It felt like he was encouraging greater ambition in that area.
It certainly doesn’t feel that way now. His reaction to Thursday night’s 4-1 schooling at home from VfB Stuttgart in the Europa League play-off round was depressing.
O’Neill’s reaction to Celtic’s heavy loss to Stuttgart was depressing for supporters to hear
If he isn’t careful, people are going to start looking upon him as an unfortunate mouthpiece for a board that everyone and their auntie can see is underperforming spectacularly when it comes to serving up the product on the park.
O’Neill said: ‘You’re talking about Premier League sides, Bundesliga sides, primarily Premier League teams paying £80million for players who don’t even get into the team. That’s what you’re competing against.’
He went on: ‘Players in the Premier League in the last couple of seasons have cost £75m or £80m and are transferred for £40m three months later. It is ridiculous and we have to try and compete with that at some stage or another. We are trying to get players in at low cost because there is no money.’
Over and above the fact Celtic have almost £70m in the bank, this stuff just feels deeply disingenuous. No supporter believes the Parkhead club should be fighting it out with Arsenal, Manchester City, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich for the Champions League. The big clubs from the big leagues exist on an entirely different financial plane.
O’Neill looks on as Celtic suffer in their 4-1 first leg Europa League defeat against Stuttgart
Celtic, in addition to that humungous rainy-day fund, run an overall wage bill of £75m, though. There has to be some kind of expectation, surely, to be competitive, particularly in the likes of the Europa League, on a relatively consistent basis.
This, however, is a club that hasn’t won a knockout tie in any competition proper since 2004. In the last 12 years, Celtic have been eliminated from Champions League qualifying by Maribor, Malmo, Cluj, AEK Athens, Ferencvaros, Midtjylland and Kairat. They’ve been taken apart in other matches by Molde, Sparta Prague reserves and Bodo/Glimt.
It’s an embarrassment that has absolutely nothing to do with English teams spending £80m on players who end up surplus to requirements. Celtic are incapable of competing with clubs spending infinitely less than that – and that’s what needs to be focused on first.
Celtic have spent big on players like midfielder Arne Engels, who arrived for £11m
Yes, Stuttgart invest far more on transfer fees, but they are nowhere near top-end Premier League levels. From their starting line-up at Parkhead, Deniz Undav cost £23m and Ermedin Demerovic cost £16m. Bilel El Khannouss, though, was a loan deal from Leicester. When looking at their bigger buys this season, Badredine Bouanani and Tiago Tomas top the list at £13m and £10.5m.
It is in looking at other sides who have floored Celtic in Europe this season, however, that greater alarm bells ring. Sporting Braga beat them in the Europa League group stage at Parkhead. They broke their transfer fee this term when signing Pau Victor from Barcelona for £10.5m – less than Arne Engels – but they are dealing in the same markets as Celtic and are safely in the last 16 thanks to finishing sixth in the standings.
Third in the standings were Midtyjlland. In addition to bowling Celtic out of Champions League qualifying in 2021, they tore them to pieces in Denmark in the Europa League in November.
Their big transfers for this term were Philip Billing from Bournemouth for £5m and Martin Erlic from Bologna for something broadly similar. Their wage bill is nothing close to Celtic’s. They also play in a 12,000-capacity stadium.
Bodo/Glimt players celebrate their 3-1 first leg success against Inter Milan
Bodo/Glimt’s tiny ground holds even less. Their top arrivals are around the £2m to £3m mark, the kind of cash Celtic throw around on project signing after project signing. Making steady progress since that evening in early 2022 in which they knocked the Scottish champions out of a third European competition in the same season, they beat Inter Milan 3-1 at home in the first leg of their Europa League play-off during the week.
Unless it’s gone under the radar, no one from Midtyjlland or Bodo/Glimt’s management and coaching staff have been out there telling punters that they really shouldn’t expect anything much from UEFA tournaments because Chelsea and Manchester United are out there wasting money on guys who can’t get into their starting Xis.
CEO Michael Nicholson (middle) claimed Celtic’s European results have been ‘satisfactory’
Celtic’s real attitude to Europe, you felt, slipped out in an ill-fated meeting with the Celtic Fans Collective last November. The minutes, agreed by the club, detailed that CEO Michael Nicholson believed ‘results in Europe were satisfactory’ considering they had achieved group football in 19 of 20 years.
That’s completely unacceptable given some of the humiliations dished out by low-grade opposition in that timeframe.
Beating RB Leipzig in the Champions League last season and going within an ace of beating Bayern Munich on their own ground and taking a play-off tie to extra-time provided a real platform for Celtic that they simply weren’t interested in trying to build and expand from.
The problem is not so much how other teams from England and Germany have been spending their money – and more about what Celtic have been doing with theirs while regressing as a football department in such an alarming way.
O’Neill really ought to bear that in mind in future attempts to placate the angry mob. Talking to punters like they’re mugs, after all, is what landed Celtic in this pickle in the first place.
