IS THIS THE WAY TO THE EPL ? BY James Forrest

Main Forum Description
jimbob
Posts: 0
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 4:47 pm
Contact:

IS THIS THE WAY TO THE EPL ? BY James Forrest

Postby jimbob » Fri Dec 18, 2009 7:12 pm

In 1997, Wimbledon Football Club was facing oblivion, and there was talk of some kind of re-launch. One of the plans mooted was to pick up sticks and move the club, lock stock and barrel to Dublin, and from there to expand and grow into a hybrid side. At a special meeting of the Football Association in England, this seemingly bizarre idea got the green line. Wimbledon FC would, indeed, have been able to operate out of another country completely, and retain its membership of the Football League.

At the same time, Celtic was undergoing a transformation all its own, with the Fergus McCann revolution kicking into high gear. Fergus was and is a great man, with a mind that looks deep and far. Like many exceptionally smart men, McCann likes to keep his brain working, even whilst he trains it on a single idea, and tries to focus on it, so his restless nature might have been the reason he jumped into the Wimbledon debate, or it might just be that Fergus knew there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and he wanted to show he had ideas beyond just getting the stadium built. Or perhaps it was another typical Fergus McCann moment, a chance to stir debate and get one over on David Murray, who would never in his life have come up with what Fergus was about to deftly suggest, and then drop, as though the matter had never really interested him.

Fergus did nothing on a whim, though. He thought it through all right, and maybe even made some discreet enquiries. In the end, his remit at the time was to make us the best side in Scotland, not drag us off to England, and so, officially at least, the idea was never more than just talk. At its heart was a simple question, but at its core was a possible roadmap for our future, and it still represents the best possible route of escape open to our club at the present time, with England saying no.

If the Football League was willing to let Wimbledon move to Ireland, why not move them to Scotland instead, and then change the name to Celtic? If the club was to go out of business, all bets were off, after all. The fans might not like it, but Fergus wouldn’t have let that stop him. Across the Atlantic Ocean in America and Canada, where Fergus McCann had made his fortune, clubs did it all the time, moving to new cities, moving to new leagues, disbanding and reforming whenever economic conditions were right or wrong. And with the English League having given Wimbledon permission to move and reform, whilst retaining their status as a professional registered side, Fergus wanted to know what legal hurdles might stand in his way.

No-one answered the call, no-one could point to a single thing which would stand in the way, but Fergus had other things on his mind and over time, as other issues came up, it got away from him. He had promised Celtic fans to hang around for only five years, and to move on for a fresh perspective to take hold, and he kept to his word. In 1999 he left us, with the job he came to do done, and the future much brighter.

Things have changed in the ten years since. The colossus that is the EPL has come to dominate the landscape, right across the European game. They claim to be the biggest league in the world, and although the money on offer to giants of the game like Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid, because of their individual television rights, is larger than even those sides at the top in England, there is no other league out there where the TV pot is so richly dispersed, with even the smallest EPL clubs getting a slice of the pie which puts them on another financial plain.

One of my present bug-bears about the Celtic board of directors is the constant complaint that because we don’t have access to the English style TV cash that we cannot attract quality, and that the Scottish league drags us down. Sadly, I see no way of making the Scottish setup better; that would require an effort of government, clubs and the ruling bodies in the game, an effort which would involve people who like to remain in the background doing something new and stepping to the forefront, and which would require large-scale changes at the SFA. To do that, someone would have to take the lead in putting together a revolutionary plan, and it would need to start with sweeping away the established hierarchy. It’s a job which clearly needs done, as the international team fiasco of recent years proves, but it’s one nobody wants to take on.

As Scottish football is not likely to improve in the future, there would appear to be only one route back to the top for our club, and that is to relocate, and it’s here where the flights of fancy have started to affect the direction of our football club. Not for nothing is this board obsessed with zero debt; the policy is geared towards making us an attractive prospect for some future setup somewhere down the road, and if that day appeared somewhere close in the distance, and if our club was actively engaged on a number of fronts to make it happen, that I would be fully supportive of the zero debt strategy no matter it’s short term limitation.

Alas, this is not the case. Our strategy is not a strategy at all. The zero debt plan is based on events beyond our control, events we are sitting waiting on like a child on Christmas Eve, hoping for a vision of Santa out the window. If we are waiting on some convergence of events, like the EPL sinking into financial oblivion, we will wait longer than that child. As Peter Lawell has pointed out, when broken down to their roots, what those plans depend on is “someone wanting us.” It’s an invite which will never come.

At the start of the film The Departed, there’s a stunning monologue by the veteran actor Jack Nicholson. The first line in the movie is “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” If the board at Celtic possessed the will or imagination to tackle the problems facing the game at large, I cannot help but think Scottish Football would be much stronger than at present; forward thinking, outward looking, and ambitious, and not the insular, small-minded, localised structure it is today, where lack of imagination goes hand in hand with an old pals act which has brought us to the very edge of absolute ruin.

As we have been unwilling to mould our environment into a shape more suitable to our ambitions, we have become products of that environment instead, and that is what’s killing us.

Nicholson’s monologue continues. “Thirty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job, we had the Presidency .....” That didn’t happen by pure chance. It was a product of something more than luck. He tells us what the central philosophy that drove change was, closing with a line which should be burned into the psyche of the Celtic board of directors. Nicholson, speaking the words of William Monahan’s fantastic script, cuts right to the chase, and sets it all out. “No-one gives it to you. You have to take it.”

We know the invite isn’t coming. They told us that much, on three separate occasions now when this issue has been mooted. The EPL does not think it needs us, and waiting for a time when it does will simply not get this job done. Besides, it’s not the way to shape the world the way you want it, and all we would be doing is coming in to rescue an ailing system, and it’s here I get most angry with Lawell and Reid for the blind-spot in their plan. If we are invited in to save that league, it’ll be at the tail end of a dying system, and one in which we’ll have no control. Imagine we found a way to crack the door open ourselves, imagine we were already there when the top clubs start to buckle under the debt. Imagine we were already there to take advantage of that state of affairs. We would run the table.

Fergus McCann would never have sat back and waited for someone to want us. He would have found a way to pick the lock on that door, possibly be legal means, as he did when he took on UEFA over Monaco’s membership of the EU to chase a fee from that club when they signed John Collins on a Bosman. It was an unsuccessful pursuit, but McCann spotted a hole in the framework and tried to gain an advantage for us. We already know Fergus did not buy into all that “we are products of our own environment” nonsense as he was not shy about going after the SFA as well. He brought down Farry in a moment unprecedented in the history of the Scottish game, and he forged the modern-day Celtic, making us so strong that, in spite of the odd league titles slipping across the city, we are undisputedly the game’s one and only super-power here. Do we always use that power as we should? No, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s there, if the right hands were on the wheel, to steer us in the right direction.

Fergus would have known how. He did know how, and in 1997, when the talk was of Wimbledon going to Dublin, he set out the possible road by which we could get to the Promised Land. Today it’s a hundred times more lucrative than it was then, and our desire for it has never been greater. Yet we depend on nothing more than charity, instead of taking the steps which could get us there as an equal player, demonstrating our intent, our power, our ruthlessness and, as Jack said, making our environment a product of our own drive and ambition, instead of being shaped by it.

The key which opens the doors is debt, as Fergus knew it would be.

The combined debt of the 20 Premiership clubs is reportedly over £3 billion. The total turnover for English Football in the last year for which we have accurate figures, 2007-08, was just over £2.6 billion, with over half of it coming from the English Premier League itself.

As I wrote these words, I was told that Kings Lynn Football Club, in the English Unibond League, has gone out of business. Not into administration, mind, but gone, and that leaves the league short of one team.

Therein lies our road. Imagine, had we possessed the will, Celtic’s owners had stepped in and bought Kings Lynn by paying off its debt to the taxman. It would have cost us a mere £67,000 to do it, not even the wages of eight members of the senior squad for a week.

We would have owned a lower league English club, and the door to the EPL would have been open ..... by our own hand. How? It’s simple. You buy the club, you change the jersey, change the name, turn them first into a feeder club and loan them every player we can, and then watch them go. Celtic’s English fan-base wouldn’t all flock to their games, but who doesn’t think their attendances wouldn’t treble overnight?

That might even turn a [I:365a6233]profit [/I:365a6233]for us, as every additional fan who paid at the gate would funnel money into the pot. The players themselves wouldn’t be Kings Lynn players, but Celtic players on loan, with us picking up their wages as we do right now.

The Unibond League winners are promoted to the Northern Conference next season. The winners of that league are promoted to the National Conference. Whoever wins that enters England’s tier 4 footballing structure at Coca Cola League 2. Five years, from taking Kings Lynn’s debt, to the front door of England’s top flight. For an initial outlay of £67,000.

That’s what we’re talking about here.

I, for one, would have happily watched a million a year of the resources generated here at Celtic Snr getting siphoned into Celtic Jnr, knowing full-well that we were watching the side which would become a Premiership team. We could fulfil all of our obligations to Scotland in the meantime, carrying both sides as we go. There is no legal framework to stop us, and we have examples here and in England of how it could happen. The Milton Keynes Dons, the result of all Wimbledon’s internal reorganising, are only one such case in point. We also have Airdrie Utd, Inverness Callie Thistle and others we can point to, and then there are our friends over at Hearts of Midlithuania, who had almost the entire Kaunas FC side on their books at one point, and none of it contravened either Scottish or UEFA rules.

The franchise road is perfectly legal, and the central idea perfectly valid. Does anyone doubt our second string, or reserves, would be good enough to take Kings Lynn up through the ranks? Gretna did it in Scotland in four straight seasons, with a fraction of Celtic’s power and resources. And if you don’t fancy starting at such a low-level, then don’t. Right now, League 1 Southend United are on the verge of administration, and Chester City, of the Conference, were saved from going under entirely by a local consortium. What was the cost of keeping them alive? £36,000. Blue Square side Weymouth have drifted to the brink several times this year alone, and debt is threatening to crush numerous others.

When Fergus McCann took over Celtic, in 1994, he did it to revive a sleeping giant. He did what he set out to do. Less than a decade later, we were playing in the final of a European competition. As much has changed in the years since as changed in that time; Fergus could not have known what was around the corner. Fifteen years on from his revolution at Celtic, our club is again moving in the slow-lane, and fearing another European Final might be forever out of our reach. It isn’t. It will take imagination, and ambition, and the willingness to reshape our world.

The irony of ironies is that Fergus’ five year plan set us up for the moment we would be too strong for Scotland, but not strong enough to compete with England. He gave us the tools to maximise our potential, and we have, and now we’re being strangled by the limits imposed on us by that fact. That’s what’s gone wrong here, a failure of long-term thinking combined with an unwillingness to tailor our environment to suit our own needs. Our failure to push our agenda and further the interests of the Scottish game has cost us as the value of that game has shrivelled into nothing. Our stock as a leading side is on the wane.

There has never been a more important time for our club directors to show imagination, innovation and true ambition. In the end, what we need more than anything is another Fergus, someone with the guts to reach for the stars instead of waiting for the stars to come to us. We need someone who can take the big risk, to reap the big rewards.

Happily, for all of us, another Fergus isn’t needed, because we have the unfinished blueprint left behind by the man himself. Yes, it might have been a half formed idea, never fully thought through, never fully explored, but I don’t believe that’s the case. Fergus never spoke without thinking, never acted without having a plan. If he voiced the thought it was because he had put more than just thought into it.

The idea exists, somewhere, in some form. How it could be done. How it could be managed, presented, sold to the world. The idea was more than just a throwaway remark, a shot in the dark, but even if it had been, even if it was, even if the notion was no more than a one-time Fergus flight of fancy, he knew it could be done, he knew it was viable, and he thought it might be something to explore in the future.

The future is now. The day has arrived.

To Fergus McCann, the Man with the Plan, I say “Thanks again. I can see now this is your one piece of unfinished business.”

To the Celtic Board of directors, I say; “If you can’t put together something better than ‘we need to be wanted’, well, I know a man who can.”

The McCann Method will get us there. All we have to do is step to it, and we will reach the Promised Land.

Onward Celtic. With courage. With strength.

No-one’s going to give it to us. We have to take it.

Return to “Main Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 37 guests