Meet the new Rangers, same as the old Rangers.... but what Celtic will we see?

Brendan Rodgers' subtle broadside, boardroom disconnect, and the "Same Old" Rangers as the new Scottish Football season kicks off.

There’s a familiar tune ahead of every new season in Scottish Football, the increasing volume of Rangers fans, the contingent of laptop loyal pundits, and a media often eager to stroke the flaccid boaby of the latest Rangers manager. The refrain is always the same: this year, it's different. This year, Celtic will face a new Rangers. They've spent money, they've a new manager, they've a new tactical plan. This isn't the team from last season; this is a different animal altogether.

And yet, as the season kicks off, a different story emerges - one written not in the pages of fan forums or the columns by partisan hacks, but on the lush green pitches of the Scottish Premiership. The grand predictions and bold proclamations, once so full of bluster, fall flat on their face. The 'new Rangers' look remarkably similar to the old Rangers. The 'different animal' turns out to be the same beast from the year before. And through it all, Celtic will simply get on with the job, doing our talking on the pitch and marching relentlessly towards another league title, a testament to the old adage that actions speak louder than words.

Celtic take on St.Mirren late afternoon on Sunday, and as Paul McStay unfurls the league champions flag above the hallowed turf at Celtic Park - one must question why the Celtic board led by Peter Lawwell and Dermot Desmond insist on hanging the dead weight of Rangers 2012 around our necks dragging us down to their level - an anchor keeping us to the ‘just doing enough’ level - when we should be taking our game forward trying to improve both domestically and in Europe. Lawwell and Desmond have been the main players at Celtic for 20 years, and while there has been unbridled success - there have also been horror seasons none more so than when we were going for 10-in-a-row - and whenever we feel that the time is ripe to strengthen and take the next step, messers Lawwell, Desmond and their long standing supporters in the boardroom hauling us back down to the level they want to keep us at.

But rather than looking forward to seeing new experienced recruits that will take our game to that next stage, we have seen an influx of project players on the back of Kieran Tierney returning to Celtic. We are weaker than last season and no one can deny that - unless you are a stooge of the latest Nepotistic dynasty at Celtic - we haven’t replaced Kyogo, we have sold Kuhn, Taylor is gone, and we have let two central defenders in Lagerbielke and Nawrocki leave the club.

But hey we are sitting pretty with a healthy bank balance. But I guess thats what happens when your club is run by bankers and accountants - they don’t care about entertainment. They don’t care about the support and what we want. All they care about is the bottom line - how much money can they make this season without spending too much.

So while Celtic fans can sit back pretty tonight, laughing once again at the fallacy of the Rangers support and the laptop loyal, there is a clear foreboding of what we can expect this season. We finished last season very poorly from a performance point of view despite being 17 points clear on the final day. We also failed to muster a single ounce of fight against Rangers in the derby games and were toothless against Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup Final as we lost out on another treble, and even after witnessing all of that Lawwell and Desmond have still not shown the ambition to improve Celtic, to strengthen Celtic, to make sure Celtic are number one this season domestically and to take us forward in Europe off the back of a good campaign last season.

Rodgers was right to call them out - even if he did so subtly - but both of them are so high up in their lofty ivory towers that they don’t care what the plebs, what the supporters think. They believe they are the club, they believe the club belongs to them, and only roll out Jock Stein’s famous saying ‘football is nothing without fans’ when they want to flog the new tranch of season tickets offering less but charging more.

Brendan Rodgers fires a not-so-subtle broadside at Celtic's board as fan concerns grow

If they are not careful, not only will we be dragged down to Rangers’ level of mediocrity but the fans will hurt them where it hurts the most - in their pockets.

We will know who we will face in the qualifiers later this week, and in little under two weeks we will kick off our European campaign - and whether we qualify or not rests on the heads of Lawwell and Desmond.

So while they dream up another 40 different ways to sell overpriced poorly designed merch to the fans with the usual ‘inspired by’ PR bullshit, they need to remember Jock Stein’s words. God how we all know they love to use Stein when it suits them.

“Without fans who pay at the turnstile, football is nothing. Sometimes we are inclined to forget that. The only chance of bringing them into the stadium is if they are entertained by what happens on the football field.”

Celtic fans demand excellence, we demand passion, fight, entertainment, but above all we demand success from our club. Not because we believe it is our god given right to win, not because we are arrogant, because we want our club to be winners. It is that winners mentality that Alex Ferguson instilled at Aberdeen during his tenure there, that Jim McLean tried to instill at Dundee United, that successive Celtic managers have instilled at Parkhead, and even the late Walter Smith instilled at Ibrox and tried to do with Scotland alongside Ally McCoist and Tommy Burns.

Bleeding Green & White: An Indictment of the Disconnect at Celtic

What matters most for the fans is what happens on the pitch, not the club’s bank account. We are a football club, not a bank. We don’t talk about how great it was to bank our latest £5 million cheque from one of our sponsors, we talk about the goals scored by our players, the saves by our goalies, the upending tackles by our defenders. The accountants and bankers in our board room need to remember that, they seem to be forgetting that without the football side of the business they’d have nothing.

So whether they believe they overpaid for players last season, it’s what we do this season that matters. Do they want us to be mediocre like another Rangers side? Or do they want us to push on in Europe and secure further success domestically?

Time will tell what Celtic we will see this season.