Custodian or Captor? How Dermot Desmond Keeps Celtic in Limbo
Once a romantic rescue, Desmond’s shareholding has become the biggest obstacle to Celtic’s ambition on and off the park.
As Celtic get ready to face VfB Stuttgart in the Europa League, just days after their interim financial results painted a bleak picture of the club’s failure to qualify for this season’s Champions League.
While all the focus will be on the pitch tonight, away from it Celtic look and feel like a club that is structurally ripe for a takeover. They are cash-rich, lacking ambition, badly led, and sitting on untapped sporting potential - but there is one immovable object in the middle of the road, Dermot Desmond!
The “not an investment” that became a very good investment
For twenty years, Desmond has sold the myth that his involvement in Celtic is about romance, not return, yet the hard numbers tell a very different story. From 1994 to 2005 he put a little over £30m into shares – ordinary stock plus a special tranche of cumulative convertible preference shares that pay him a fixed annual dividend.
Those preference shares alone, bought for around £3.08m, now throw off roughly £185k a year and have paid him close to £6m in dividends over three decades.
Across his whole position, Celtic have paid Desmond about £7.6m in dividends while the market value of his stake has swollen to just under £100m according to recent estimates in The Times.
For something he insists is “not about investment”, it has been one of the most lucrative, low‑maintenance deals of his career. That alone explains a huge part of why he will not sell: it is a cash‑generative, low‑risk asset with sentimental cover that lets him sidestep scrutiny every time he is challenged.
Control without responsibility
The other reason he clings on is power. Desmond is “owner in all but name” in the sense that he is the principal shareholder and nothing of consequence happens at Celtic without his blessing. He currently controls just under 35% of the ordinary shares and a bloc of preference stock that, combined with the compliant “Celtic families” and boardroom lifers, gives him decisive influence over strategy, appointments and tone. In most sectors, a 30‑odd per cent shareholder that dominant would either move to a full bid or be bought out by a bigger fish. At Celtic, he has engineered the sweet spot. He has enough equity to call the shots, but not enough to trigger mandatory takeover obligations or the kind of public, forensic scrutiny that would come with a full buy‑out.
That 2005 rights issue is instructive. Desmond underwrote £10m of a £15m share issue to fund Lennoxtown and reduce debt, but Celtic simultaneously sought a waiver from the Takeover Panel because, if others did not follow their rights, his holding would otherwise force him into a full bid. This is a man who wanted maximum leverage at a minimum of legal obligation – and has spent the two decades since sitting in that comfort zone. He gets the status of kingmaker and the yield of a bondholder without the day‑to‑day stress or accountability that comes with behaving like a modern football owner.
Sentimentality as a shield
Desmond’s supporters lean on the idea that his original Celtic purchase was driven by personal affection, unlike his purely financial play in Manchester United which he happily exited in 2005 to a significant profit when the Glazers arrived. There is some truth to that origin story – he stepped in when Celtic were close to administration in the mid‑90s, invested at a time of real need, and has sat there ever since. But sentimentality has become a shield as much as a motive.
By grounding his shareholding in “lifelong love”, he insulates himself against normal shareholder pressure: if he says it is not an investment, he cannot be challenged like a normal investor; if he insists he is a custodian, he can dismiss critics as ungrateful or hysterical.
That is how you get the tone of recent communications – or rather, pronunciations – from him and through him. The statement read out by his son Ross at the 2025 AGM, which effectively attacked the support in the middle of a governance crisis, is a case study in patrician contempt - fans treated as a rabble to be lectured, not stakeholders to be listened to.
The “I’m not in this for money” line then gets wheeled out as moral cover every time anyone points out that the club is strategically stuck and structurally under‑ambitious.
In reality, it is precisely because Celtic is not his primary business interest that he can afford to be stubborn. A billionaire can indulge a sentimental, ego‑soothing asset indefinitely, especially when that asset quietly pays out dividends and has quadrupled in value.
Why no takeover?
Celtic are, on paper, a textbook target for takeover. They have a large global fanbase, dominant domestic position most years, a stadium that could be redeveloped and increased in capacity & facilities, and a club that has consistently under‑leveraged its sporting potential.
The recent financials showed a club that is cash‑rich but risk‑averse, with Champions League money no longer guaranteed, a supporter base openly at war with the board, and a player‑trading model that looks smarter on PowerPoint than it has on the pitch in recent years.
Institutional money is circling European football, American groups are hoovering up clubs with less upside than Celtic. The Times’ valuation of Desmond’s stake at close to £99m – off an initial £30m outlay – explicitly frames Celtic as exactly the kind of asset a new investor would chase.
So why has no takeover happened?
First of all, any credible buyer must go through Desmond. With a shareholding circa 35% and a hardline stance that he has “no interest” in selling, he can kill any deal before it starts. Secondly, reports have suggested he would reject even wildly inflated offers, with figures up to £200m mentioned. And finally, the club’s listing structure and dispersed remaining share base mean acquiring everyone else still does not deliver full control if the principal shareholder digs in.
You can, in theory, build a stake around him, but the optics of a new investor trying to modernise and grow a club while the entrenched patriarch sits on a blocking share and a loyal board are toxic.
Most serious groups will not waste time negotiating with a man who has already shown, over three decades, that he neither needs the money nor particularly cares about fan unrest. In other words, Celtic are ripe for a takeover in every way that matters – except the only one that actually counts, the willingness of the key man to get out of the way for the betterment of Celtic Football Club.
Nepotism and the family project
The final piece of the puzzle is ego and legacy. Desmond does not just hold shares; he has slowly woven his family into the fabric of the club’s governance and public messaging. Ross Desmond’s prominent role – including being handed the microphone to deliver that incendiary statement to shareholders and supporters – is not an accident.
If this were a cold, arms‑length investment, you would expect professional spokespeople, independent directors and external succession planning. Instead you have a board already stacked with long‑standing “Celtic families” and Desmond loyalists. Along with the principal shareholder parachuting his son into high‑visibility moments and, by all accounts, into behind‑the‑scenes influence he has not earned on merit.
For a billionaire who has spent a career building and flipping assets, there is clearly something different about Celtic. It is not simply a line on a balance sheet; it is a legacy project: a platform where the Desmond name is embedded in the story of the club - just like the Kellys and the Whites.
Selling would mean surrendering that mythology. Keeping the shares, keeping the board loyal, and sliding the next generation into position means the Desmond imprint endures long after the man himself walks away from the club.
From the fans’ perspective, this is the textbook definition of nepotism: a private fiefdom run for the pride and projection of one family rather than the sporting ambition of the club. From Desmond’s perspective, it is the culmination of three decades of slow, patient accumulation - money made, power entrenched, reputation burnished.
And that is the heart of the problem. Celtic are not blocked from a takeover because the numbers don’t add up. They are blocked because one billionaire is perfectly happy with a club that makes him richer, affirms his self‑image, gives his family a stage – and does all of that without ever forcing him to share control or answer meaningfully to the people who fill the stadium every week.
In the end, this is what grates most. Celtic is not being held back by market forces, UEFA regulations or some cruel twist of fate. It is being held back by a billionaire who treats the club like an heirloom and the support like an inconvenience to be managed.
Dermot Desmond does not seek a legacy of trophies, transformation or risk‑taking ambition at Celtic. His legacy play is far smaller and far uglier - a compliant board stuffed with loyalists, a club run on his terms from hundres or thousands miles away, and a son ushered onto the stage as if Parkhead were just another family business to be inherited rather than an institution that belongs to its people.
Ross Desmond reading that poisonous AGM statement was not a one‑off misstep; it was the purest expression yet of how the Desmond family sees the rest of us. They do not see a support that has bankrolled every stand, every balance sheet and every “record” set of results. They see noise to be silenced, customers to be scolded, dissenters to be outlasted. The message was crystal clear from the AGM: this is our club, not yours.
That is the true cost of their so‑called custodianship. Not just a timid transfer policy, not just a Champions League ceiling, but a deliberate attempt to turn Celtic from a community into a commodity that can be passed down the Desmond line. The nepotism is not a side‑issue; it is the whole point. It ensures that even when the current patriarch finally steps back, the mindset that has strangled Celtic’s ambition for a generation is primed to outlive him.
For all their talk of stewardship and heritage, the Desmonds are not protecting Celtic’s soul; they are strip‑mining it for status and security. A club as big as Celtic should never be reduced to a family project. Until that changes – until the Desmond era is brought to an end, root and branch – this will remain the bitter truth. The biggest thing stopping Celtic becoming the club it could be, is the family that keeps insisting it already is.