Speculate to accumulate.
One of the oldest lines in business, the kind of thing you’d expect to find framed on a wall near a man who built a billion out of finance and airports.
There is no record of Dermot Desmond ever saying it. On tonight’s evidence, not to mention the past decade, nobody at Celtic Park has ever heard it.
Celtic took a 3-0 lead to Austria – perhaps a flattering final scoreline on the balance of play last week, but last season’s pantomime felt washed away with three breathtaking goals and our new attacking players clicking beautifully.
When skipper Callum McGregor put us ahead on the night tonight, one member of our WhatsApp group started speculating about potential trips.
He should’ve known better.
This time it was cataclysmic in the way it all fell to bits. Again.
Four-nil up in the tie. One foot and four toes in the league phase. Forty million pounds just about banked, geared up ready for the forthcoming spend which has been reported in the past day or two – but only pending confirmation of our place in football’s top club competition.
But that’s not how it works. You have to prove you deserve to be there, players, club, the whole operation.
Make sure you give it a wee bit more effort than just hoping you “did enough” and then leave it to chance. That appears to have been the transfer strategy this time around.
To be fair, it’s an improvement on “let’s hope Brendan Rodgers still has that old Leicester striker’s phone number saved” but even though there has been a more targeted approach, they’ve still been waiting to see if the cash arrives before spending what was needed on areas of the team that most fans could see, especially in the first leg reading between the lines, were still woefully deficient.
The strongest three of Celtic’s starting back four have all proven to be injury-prone. Behind them you have Liam Scales (currently backup left-back), Anthony Ralston (who is about as good at measuring distances on a football park as me) and Dane Murray, who has never looked to have the mentality of a first team player at Celtic and is not as young (at 23) as his occasional timidness would suggest.
Scales is worthy of backup status, but Auston Trusty and Murray share a softness that irks me in modern central defenders and Ralston has looked like a deer in headlights at this level for a long time now, perhaps ever since facing Neymar in another drubbing against PSG almost a decade ago.
Then, the midfield. You allow Arne Engels to depart by letting him and his agent call the shots on the timing of the move to West Ham meaning the most physical player in that area is gone without a replacement. Luke McCowan was forced to come on in the game and looked so far off the level – summed up by a scarcely believable 19 possession losses in 50 minutes, including for the goal that knocked us out.
These Scottish players, outwith McGregor and Kieran Tierney, who are in the squad to help supplement the homegrown quota are not up to it if you want to be serious about the Champions League. I hope the next academy crop is an improvement but that’s another major concern about the club for another time.
The actual price of not buying players to supplement the depth in defence and midfield is financially colossal.
The guaranteed cheque alone is four times bigger (£16 million vs £4m) in the Champions League compared to the Europa League, and that’s before the TV money factors in which means it’s closer to £40m or £50m that disappears when you fail to qualify.
That’s now six qualifying campaigns in a row ending in failure: AEK, Cluj, Ferencváros, Midtjylland, Kairat, LASK. Every time Celtic have had to qualify since Astana in 2017, they have not managed it. The years in between, the league handed them a bye.
Due to our domestic superiority, it means the club exists in a unique bubble and only very occasionally such as last season and when Rangers won the league under Gerrard, does it ever threaten to burst – and that’s only when we try our best to gift it away.
We’re too good domestically for the drop-off ever to hurt unless the club tries really hard to allow another team to dethrone us but we’re also never resourced for the Tuesday and Wednesday nights that define modern football finances and any chance to progress the team.
The board banks the title, budgets for the group stage tentatively, and does the reinforcing afterwards, if at all. They speculate on nothing and expect to accumulate anyway.
Six times running, they’ve been found out.
Martin O’Neill didn’t hide. “That’s my team, and that’s my responsibility,” he said, and he put the night alongside losing the UEFA Cup final in 2003. From him, that’s quite the statement.
Asked whether the squad is deep enough, he said that was for another day. It always is when it’s clear the dereliction of duty has come from above.
But with respect to the utter legend of a man whom I admire deeply both in and away from football, the lack of depth in the squad IS the whole story. As Stan Petrov observed on the coverage, the manager has to protect the team. You’d expect that.
McGregor, on the other hand, was brutally honest post-match calling out his colleagues for being “passive” and “scared” and he even admitted they “got away with it in the first leg” before apologising to the support.
Savage from the skipper, and he – as much as anyone – has earned the right to say it. He said the responsibility was on the players, as he should, but he must feel some degree of frustration at the lack of further reinforcements because he and this squad had just got the club’s momentum back.
The brutal part about this feeling as I write tonight is that most Celtic fans were ready to forget last season and all of the discord, hubris, disrespect and contempt. We were ready to believe and buy in, both literally and figuratively, again.
Duran and Høgh have transformed the front of the team. The £20m banked for Engels was seen as a decent return financially at least, despite the timing, and there’s a Chelsea full-back supposedly arriving. Links with Niko Sigur, Ermin Mahmić and maybe a genuine number six, at last.
It was all looking up.
But they probably won’t come now. Kasper Schmeichel, who was outstanding on co-commentary and my MOTM on the night, gave some really good insight into the human realities of being a pro footballer, including how the Thursday-to-Sunday grind of the Europa League is difficult and impacts the lives of players in a way they struggle with both on and off the pitch.
It is not what potential targets dream about, and it is not what convinces players to sign for a club that consistently lacks the bollocks to back itself to reach the big time or to strive to improve its situation.
You have to back yourself, back your players to keep them hungry and especially the manager who delivered the most ridiculous double-Lazarus resurrection job of a title triumph last season.
Benjamin Nygren has probably been the player of the early season so far, which is exactly why his part in tonight stings, and my pal Robin Bairner called his backpass which helped swing the momentum the most expensive mistake in Scottish football history on Twitter tonight.
It wasn’t. The most expensive mistake is the same one which has been made time and again, and will continue to be, by a regime which is not fit for purpose.
My challenge to them is, prove me wrong.
The window has a week left. Enough money is there – the accounts and the Engels fee say so – to go and strengthen, even if the previous intransigence up to this point means your biggest recruitment carrot of Champions League football is gone.
If the board’s answer to tonight is action, then based on the start of this summer window perhaps there can be hopes of a run in the Europa League – just like when we crashed out to Basel in 2002 then went all the way to Seville.
But if the answer is continued silence from the corridors of power, papering over the cracks again and maintaining a healthy balance sheet, the support should feel entitled to treat the Europa League campaign exactly the way the board treated the Champions League – as something optional, to be budgeted for only if it proves worth it.
They will tell us they care about the fans. They’ve seven days to show it.
The football club deserves better.