Brian Wilson’s Great Irony - The Man Who Rages at Holyrood While Presiding Over Celtic’s Own Decline
The irony of Wilson’s words is almost poetic, a Celtic chairman lecturing Scotland on governance and accountability.
Celtic Chairman Brian Wilson’s latest piece in The Scotsman is the kind of self-righteous polemic that might earn a knowing nod from those disenchanted with the current Scottish Government. The sixth session of the Scottish Parliament is, as he puts it, limping toward irrelevance after two decades of one-party dominance. Vision is absent, ministers escape accountability, and everything is wrapped in a rhetorical fog of excuses.
But as Wilson unleashes his ire on Holyrood, one cannot help but stare at the irony. Here is a man railing against complacency, cronyism, and the absence of vision all while serving as interim chairman of Celtic Football Club, a club suffering precisely those afflictions, and in a far more visible, visceral way. If Wilson genuinely believes what he’s written, his first act of accountability should be holding a mirror up to himself and the boardroom he occupies - before taking a long walk off a short pier.
For years, Celtic fans have accused the club’s leadership of presiding over stagnation, arrogance, and wilful ignorance of the supporters’ concerns. They see a hierarchy that wraps itself in the banners of prudence and sustainability while treating ambition as a liability. The same small circle of directors have kept a vice-like grip on the club’s direction for over two decades, recycling the same faces, the same failures, the same excuses, exactly what Wilson accuses the SNP of doing to Scotland.
When he writes of a Parliament “devoid of vision; churning out Acts that change nothing,” Celtic supporters could be forgiven for thinking he’s speaking about the club’s transfer policy. They endure summers of bargain-bin shopping, hollow PR about “prudence and value,” and a squad regularly left underpowered for European campaigns that end in familiar humiliation - all of which has came to a head this season as Celtic sit third. The contrast between rhetoric and reality, between promised progress and predictable mediocrity, could not be starker. Wilson condemns the SNP for doing the same thing as he and the Celtic board are doing - mistaking noise for achievement, surviving rather than inspiring. If he can see that so clearly in government, why is he blind to it in his own house?
In his column, Wilson laments the absence of accountability in Scottish politics: “No Minister or civil servant has ever lost their job as a result,” he writes, referring to the ferry fiasco that has become symbolic of governmental mismanagement. The line reads like satire when penned by the chairman of Celtic. This is a club where failed executives aren’t shown the door - they’re rewarded, or quietly blended into the background until the storm passes. The fanbase has long since stopped counting the number of unaccountable decisions that have gone unpunished.
When Celtic failed spectacularly in Europe under Peter Lawwell’s transfer penny-pinching - years before his “retirement” - supporters begged for fresh leadership. Instead, the board engineered his son’s appointment into the recruitment structure. That single move crystallised everything fans now despise about the club’s governance - nepotism, arrogance, and utter contempt for optics or accountability. There’s no accountability at Celtic Park either, Brian - only self-preservation.
Wilson, in his column, scolds Sturgeon and Yousaf for “measuring success by avoidance of accountability.” Yet the Celtic hierarchy do precisely that, year after year. Every crisis, from embarrassing European failures to domestic stumbles to public relations disasters, is treated as the fans’ fault for not understanding the board’s “complex realities.” Transparency is avoided, criticism dismissed, fans labelled anti-establishment and troublemakers, and the party line rigidly maintained: steady as she goes, the balance sheet looks fine.
Wilson warns that Scotland needs “fresh thinking and new faces.” Yes, it does - and so does Celtic. The board’s obsession with continuity over creativity has become its defining flaw. There has been no revolutionary football strategy, no embrace of data or innovation, and no real engagement with a fanbase that actually knows the game. Just as Wilson accuses Scottish politics of running on scavenged rhetoric, Celtic’s board have been coasting on borrowed glory from past managers and players who achieved success despite corporate negligence, not because of it.
When Wilson writes that Holyrood has been turned into “a chamber characterised by low quality debate and an executive which measures success by avoidance of accountability,” you could lift that sentence and stick it straight into a Celtic AGM transcript. Every year, ticket prices rise, fan groups organise campaigns, supporters question transfer inactivity, and the board responds like an aloof government being pestered by the public. The tone is condescending, the answers evasive. The message is always the same - “Trust us; you wouldn’t understand.”
This is why the current fan revolt isn’t just about the football. It’s about the tone, the arrogance, and the hypocrisy. When Brian Wilson attacks the SNP for clinging to power and dismissing dissent as noise, he could just as easily be describing the behaviour of Celtic executives faced with fan criticism.
Wilson’s nostalgia for a better Scotland, one led by visionaries rather than careerists, is steeped in Labour romanticism - the faith in good governance, community, and conscience. But for those same ideals, many Celtic fans would argue the board has systematically betrayed the club’s founding ethos. A club that once prided itself on its connection to the people, born out of charity and social consciousness, now feels like the plaything of insulated men in suits who sneer at “the mob” while profiting from their loyalty.
Celtic was founded to serve the poor. Its current custodians serve themselves.
Wilson’s political tone, that genteel Scottish establishment cadence, suggests he sees himself as a man of reason among zealots. He writes as though the country (and by extension, football supporters) simply needs a firmer grip of rational leadership. But the Celtic support has grown weary of being patronised by exactly that tone. They’ve watched for years as their passion, protests, and questions have been met with dismissive smugness.
When Wilson accuses the SNP of “dividing Scotland” and losing focus on the real issues, the hypocrisy stings for Celtic supporters who’ve seen their own club hierarchy divide the fanbase - banning sections of support, weaponising media briefings, creating enemies out of lifelong supporters. It’s not about behaviour, as the club likes to claim. It’s about control. The board cannot stand organised dissent, whether it comes from fan media or from a section of the terraces.
The irony is layered thick - the former Labour politician wagging a finger at nationalist excess, now at the heart of another institution accused of elite detachment, secrecy, and suppressing dissent. If nothing else, Wilson’s picture of Scotland and Celtic share an identical malaise - a leadership out of ideas, clinging to the myth that continuity equals competence while the ground shifts beneath them.
In his column, Wilson declares: “It is a long time since there was any vision of how the powers of Holyrood could be joined up to change the fundamentals.” That sentence could equally describe Celtic’s lack of a footballing identity beyond financial consolidation. There’s no strategic vision linking youth development, recruitment, and European competitiveness only fragmented decision-making, compromised by self-interest and caution. When failures occur, scapegoats are easy to find: the manager, the players, even the supporters. Anyone but the board.
Wilson writes of ministers “blowing their chance to move Scotland forward while promoting divisive minority agendas nobody had voted for.” Replace “ministers” with “Celtic executives,” and the point still stands. The board has blown countless chances to advance, content instead to indulge in a defensive, siege-like corporate posture that no supporter ever voted for either.
The selling of stars without reinvestment, the disconnection from community projects, the silence on supporter concerns - all of it unfolds under the banner of a supposedly well-managed club. Just as he claims that Holyrood’s failings are masked by rhetoric about stability, Celtic’s stagnation is excused by balance sheets and league titles in a two-horse race. It’s success without progress, domination without direction.
Wilson ends his Scotsman piece with a warning about the “metaphor for Scotland” contained within the ferry crisis - “No Minister or civil servant has ever lost their job as a result. Accountability does not exist so long as they stick together.” That final phrase should chill every Celtic supporter reading it. Because that’s the Celtic boardroom in a nutshell.
The men who’ve run Celtic for decades have stuck together through failure, fan revolt, and reputational rot. Nobody falls. Nobody resigns. No one, it seems, ever learns. The result is a culture of immunity, a belief that the institution is too sacred to challenge, too commercially secure to collapse, and too embedded in Scottish football’s fabric to fear its own fanbase. That is exactly the kind of decay Brian Wilson claims to decry in politics yet he is part of it, he sustains it, stone-faced, in football.
In one sense, Wilson’s critique of the SNP is not wrong. He’s right to demand accountability, renewal, and vision in Scotland’s political class. But the comedic irony is that his own position invalidates his argument. The chairman of Celtic FC lecturing the nation on accountability is like the captain of the Titanic publishing an essay on how to avoid Icebergs while the ship sinks.
And maybe that’s the final truth here, Brian Wilson can see Scotland’s failures with perfect clarity, but only at a distance. Bring those same principles near, into the realm of the club he represents and the lens fogs instantly. The complacency he condemns is precisely the culture he and Dermot Desmond enables.
If Wilson truly believes Scotland needs “fresh thinking and new faces,” perhaps he should first apply that logic at Celtic Park. The Celtic fans have been calling for it long enough. Because right now, as Scotland’s government drifts and Celtic’s leadership stagnates, both are defined not by the people they serve but by the small groups who refuse to let go of the wheel.