What will the new season bring to Celtic and our supporters?

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Joe O'Rourke
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What will the new season bring to Celtic and our supporters?

Postby Joe O'Rourke » Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:32 pm

Well it looks like the Scottish professional football season 2020/21 could be underway in the not too distant future. The plans appear to be at an advanced stage, but the real concern for me, and many others is, that it is going to be (at least at first) behind closed doors. That must be sending alarm bells through every club, and especially the top clubs.

Celtic Football Club derives the vast majority of its income through the pockets of our own Supporters. So if the games are played behind closed doors, how does the top team in Scotland bring revenue into the club?

There is simple guidelines for the ordinary everyday working class people that I’ve always believed in, and that is this. If you’re not putting money into the bank, then you must be taking it out to live a normal life. It is the same with a Football Club, if a team like Celtic aren’t banking money every week, then they need to be using resources to pay wages and services etc.

The Celtic annual wage bill is reportedly around £60 million a year, that’s around £5m a month. So if you’re not brining money in through your normal revenue streams, then money you have in the bank won’t last very long going by those figures. I believe this is where we, the Celtic Support can play our part. We need to maintain the financial advantage we had, and if possible increase it, we can only do that be investing in Our Club.

I don’t know how long Celtic could survive playing behind closed doors, obviously the Club would need to come to an arrangement with Sky to allow season ticket holders to watch all games on television, but we would also lose the advantage of a Fantastic 60,000 home support, that could suit all the visiting teams coming to Celtic Park, we would need to hope the players could cope with it and play to their normal standard.

I believe there are a couple of countries in Europe considering letting in 25/30 % of their ground capacity, that would certainly help the likes of Celtic 15/20,000 would be better than nothing, I don’t know the exact details, but hopefully something can be agreed.

Going into next season will not be as easy as some supporters like to think. I was never one to sing about 10 in a Row (even the first time around), I always thought we should wait until we achieve 9 before doing that, well we’ve achieved that now, so I guess I’ll be a bit more relaxed about it, but it still isn’t assured.

Going back to the financial implications of no income, or at least not on a normal scale. The normal way the club would react to a shortfall would be to have to sell a player, or players, that is something can do without doing if we want to achieve 10 in a Row. We have already lost four players, two of whom we would say were first team players in Jonny and Jozo, we cannot afford to lose Odsonne or Callum, and although I think he has a bit to improve, I would like to retain Kris Ajer as well.

We need to be at our strongest next season, that means keeping our top players, and hopefully bringing in another 3/4 good players to keep our squad at the very top level. Who knows what the new season will bring us, I would only say this, we are strongest when we pull together. Everyone has their part to play.
Take care everyone, and stay safe.

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