Loan Deals & Zero Spend: The Final Nail in the Coffin of this Celtic Board

Years of downsizing, lacking ambition, treating fans like criminals, and running the club as a bank rather than a football business has left fans disillusioned, angry, and restless over an inept board

It is rolled out every season that doing business in the January transfer window is tough going, you either pay over the odds for a player or you struggle to sign anyone unless it’s on loan until the end of the season. For Celtic, the January window was crucial to giving their chances of retaining the Scottish Premiership title a boost, following on from a horrific summer transfer window and a first half of the season that was nothing short of calamitous.

As the clock struck 11pm on Monday night, Celtic once again wrapped up a Deadline Day where fans were less than impressed with the club’s efforts - despite adding three new faces to the squad with the arrivals of striker Junior Adamu, centre-back Benjamin Arthur and winger Joel Mvuka all on loan until the end of the season.

Surprisingly that the hierarchy rejected up to £25m from Nottingham Forest for midfielder Arne Engels, it would have clearly sickened Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay and Dermot Desmond to reject that amount of money, but with Celtic a complete mess behind the scenes when it comes to player scouting and recruitment - there was clearly no way they could sanction Engels’ sale at a time when they were already struggling to strengthen the team for the second half of the season. I suspect Martin O’Neill may have played a part in forcing the club’s hand also.

With Celtic bringing in Julian Araujo and Tomas Cvancara earlier in the season - on loan from Bournemouth and Borussia Monchengladbach respectively - it was evident that any transfer dealings Celtic conducted would be limited due to the interim status of the current management team. You could question whether Celtic were going to spend any money on players this window because we currently have an interim manager in charge - but that hasn’t stopped the club from recruiting players prior to appointing a new manager. They’ve done it before. Yet fans would have hoped to have seen some permanent moves rather than stop gap loan deals to plug holes in the squad - starting all over again in the summer.

While Araujo and Cvancara have hit the ground running, the new additions are certainly not exciting the fans and there are renewed calls for Nicholson and McKay to quit the club over their incompetence - all the while Dermot Desmond twirls the ends of his moustache, like a Dick Dastardly character, trying to make a putt on the 18th hole after buying another VIP round of golf with Rory.

Questions will continue to be asked over what the club will be doing behind the scenes from now until the end of the season. Will they be recruiting a new Head of Scouting? A new Head of Football Operations? Will they implement a proper analytics system? Will they compile a dossier of players for each position that they could potentially sign during the summer and beyond based on scouting reports and data analysis? Do they actually have a long term policy?

Anyone in business will tell you that they would forecast the next few years from a financial point of view, what their KPIs [key performance indicators] are, and what goals they are trying to achieve in the next five years? For a football club, the commercial side of the business is hugely important nowadays we all know this, but equally important are what happens on the pitch as well as what happens on the terracing. This is where this Celtic board are lacking in my opinion, not one of them has grown a customer facing business. They have invested money, they’ve bought businesses, they’ve traded stock, they’ve read law - but not one has actually grown a proper business that relies on customers and keeping them happy with products and/or services - let alone a football club and their fans. For Celtic to grow on and off the pitch, for them to challenge on the continent once again, for Celtic to win over the fans and entertain us the Celtic way - the club needs the bankers, the lawyers, the financiers, the investment firms to hand the controls to a football person with eyes on the pitch as well as on the fans and on commercial interests of the business that is Celtic Football Club.

But as fans turn their attention to matters on the pitch again as Martin O’Neill and Shaun Maloney try to pull off one of the biggest title wins in years, the biggest question that may or may not be on the lips of Celtic fans is what is going to happen in the summer? Ignoring the search for a new manager for a second - the biggest issue is a squad that needs significant rebuilding.

We have six loan deals all terminating in the summer Adamu, Araujo, Cvancara, Mvuka, Saracchi, and Arthur - with only three options to buy. We then have three players - Schmeichel, Forrest, and Iheanacho - out of contract. You can estimate a further three players at least want away - Hatate, Maeda, and Engels. Seven players who are simply not good enough or surplus to requirements - Holm, Yamada, Inamura, Montgomery, Palma, Welsh, and Kenny. And two that clearly shouldn’t be playing for the club at all - Ralston and Balikwisha. In total, that is around 17 players that would need replacing in some form or another. A complete and utter shambles from Celtic’s hierarchy putting the club and the future Celtic manager in such a position. Clearly showing that under this current leadership, the club has never had any long term policy other than how much money we can generate on an annual basis - further proving my comments that the Celtic board runs our club like a bank which just happens to have a football club.

I’m not going to dissect any of the new loan signings, I could give you the basic run of the mill goals to games ratios, when they last played for their parent club, their injury issues etc. but the proof will be in the pudding. If they don’t do the business on the pitch they’ll be found out soon enough. Celtic cannot afford to slip up now. But I can honestly say that none of them really get my blood pumping, even the thought of signing Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain does nothing to excite me. But I will be the first to hold my hands up and say I got it wrong.

One thing is clear however, if Celtic do win the title this season the fallout and the tears from Rangers and Hearts fans will be epic. It will be our biggest win in years and the most soul crushing for them.

A title won in the face of clear board incompetence, an egotistical one trick pony of a manager in it only for himself and his gucci belt, a duffer of a manager given the job for a month who never experienced the real demands of managing a football club, a self-titled football doctor who was nothing more than a snake oil salesman, a Rangers side that is teetering on the brink of breaking financial fair play rules trying to buy the league title, a Hearts side whose early season confidence has now turned into an arrogant window licking belief, and the clear incompetence and bias of match officials - David Dickinson, John Beaton, and Andrew Dallas to name but a few more on that later! - and finally fans being treated like criminals and banned by the club for daring to call them out and protest against them.