IF your politics lean towards the left you’re required to park them miles away if you also choose to follow Celtic. To an extent, this may also be true for other football clubs around the world but I think this conflicted conscience is sharpest when you make an emotional investment in Celtic. Few other clubs can trace their origins to the political and economic struggle for survival by a marginalised and oppressed ethnic minority.
Many Celtic families who live in west-central Scotland are still menaced by the inequalities that trapped their Irish forbears more than a century ago. They might not be living in the eight-to-a-room squalor that reduced the life expectancy of their great-grandparents but many of them still reside in neighbourhoods that dominate the wrong end of Scotland’s multiple deprivation index.
As such, their support for Celtic retains the same spiritual and emotional intensity of their kin who arrived on these shores fleeing the generational consequences of the Great Famine in 1845. The crowds which stood outside St Mary’s in the Calton last Sunday to witness the unveiling of the long-awaited memorial to An Gorta Mor bore poignant testimony to this.
It’s why I always scorn those who insist that politics should never be permitted to disfigure the purity of honest, sporting endeavour on a level playing field. Celtic were forged in the furnace of profound societal injustice as a means of providing some economic relief. Every success on the pitch thereafter became a source of community pride. It allowed them to walk tall for a day or so when, in all other sectors of their lives, they were excluded or banished to the back of the bus. Without politics in its widest sense, Celtic wouldn’t exist. This is not intended to diminish those whose support for their local club is derived purely from a sense of community pride. Nor is it meant to devalue the support of those whose love for Celtic is not rooted in the struggles of the past. Just that for many Celtic fans there’s something deeper. This is why many of us feel it’s entirely natural to show solidarity with other people experiencing oppression and why expressions of support for Palestine are absolutely appropriate.
You can’t simply leave your politics behind at the turnstile when the club you’re about to watch sprang from them. The Green Brigade’s extravagant and loud displays of support for Palestine are, like their regular collections for food banks, rooted in the foundations of this club. Yet, the tribal, all-consuming thirst for success, especially when it reinforces your sense of cultural pride, also turns us into 90-minute reactionaries. We are happy to avert our gaze when the instincts and by-products of Big Capital come to characterise our club. In times of trouble, like the present, we routinely subject our least able players to sustained and implacable rounds of abuse, even when we know their confidence is already low.
Neil Lennon knows all about this. As player and manager he was integral to Celtic’s two decades of dominance in Scotland and to their finest European memories in that period. For much of this time he was routinely abused across Scotland because of his Irish ethnicity and his Catholic faith. No one in Government and the Scottish press seemed to think this was especially troubling. Yet, all it took was one bad season for many Celtic supporters to turn on him and to subject him to quite extraordinary levels of abuse on social media. This man had, quite literally, bled for our club. That he had to operate last season in the shadow of a pandemic and in front of a board who cowered behind him in the shadows didn’t seem to matter. He’d delivered trebles as a manager and player and was the only boss in the recent nine-in-a-row era who led us to a title against a full-strength Rangers.
We love to think that Celtic is a club like no other. That while competitive success is important we are beholden to higher things and that this makes our discipleship a bit nobler. There’s a reason why the Celtic board of directors have lately begun to use this slogan as a marketing tool. More than just a club. I have my doubts.
For many years Celtic refused to ensure that its lowest-paid employees were paid a real Living Wage. When they did finally agree to do this these millionaires and billionaires on the Celtic board simply withdrew their employees’ annual bonuses.
You might have assumed that Celtic, who proclaim their righteousness at every opportunity, would grant their employees the right to join a trade union. But you’d be wrong. When this was raised with the board at an AGM a few years ago you’d have thought they were being asked to pay for their own flights abroad. The Chairman Ian Bankier, a whisky tycoon, seemed especially troubled by the very idea. As this was all happening Celtic was paying its Chief Executive several million pounds in bonuses, making him the highest-paid employee in the entire history of the club.
The man who wields most influence at Celtic, Dermot Desmond, doesn’t even own the club. He’s simply the largest shareholder. Yet nothing moves or has its being without his absolute authority. There is not the merest shred of accountability at Celtic. It resembles the court of a medieval monarch where patronage, or a wee invite to the boardroom on match-day, is dispensed to oil the necessary wheels.
Yet absolute power still rests with the supporters. It’s just that we choose not to use it. What ultimately brought the old board to the negotiating table in 1993 after years of contempt for the supporters was a mere few games deprived of the revenue of paying customers. Whether or not the 2021 generation would be willing to deploy the nuclear option of withdrawing the funding that legitimises the Celtic board remains to be seen.
Tonight in the Czech Republic Celtic are trying to avoid the ignominy of failing to register a win in their first four competitive matches. We’ve already begun with our worst competitive start in 75 years. In desperation Celtic have bought two players in their 30s; both low on confidence after their careers had stuttered. Joe Hart and James McCarthy both have the ability and experience to do well here but their signings do not indicate that there’s a sustainable plan for recovery.
Ange Postecoglu has plenty of time to turn things around. After all, unlike in just about every other European league, Celtic have only one domestic rival competing for success. The long-term prospects of European competitiveness – even at a reduced level – remain gloomy. The model of ownership is broken and only the supporters’ purchasing power can help fix it.
We’re also enslaved though, by the emotional investment of generations of our families. And that we must always be there for the team. Football club directors know this too. They also know that while players and managers come and go according to their levels of performance the boardroom remains virtually untouchable. And that really, we’re just a club like all others: a capitalist enterprise and a means of wielding soft power in the community.
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