I doubt Dermot Desmond gives much of a thought to Celtic.
You’d really have to think the board are prepared to throw the players, the supporters and the club in general under the bus to cling desperately to their leatherette chairs at the big shiny table.
And the morons have bought into this absolute spoofer.
People don’t understand how good you’ve to be to make football look like basketball, what these Man City, Barca and PSG teams are. Most pros need simple instruction, Celtic are full of journeyman association football players eking out career through accident of geography as much as anything an probably coming from good homes.
see how Pep has adapted the 8 from KDB to Cherki and changed the whole style of the team, its like a different sport. When you’ve the best players, you can do anything really.
Nancy is unlucky how unbelievably shit they are, I thought so possibly in summer but its mad to actually see it.
I would think he does but not necessarily in the way you want.
I think whoever who had bought in has already sold out.
Without being much of an expert the world of social media accounts and podcasts which cover Celtic it seems to me that there were a cohort of such people who wanted to emphasise the advertising spiel about Nancy rather than the blatant reality people could see, probably based on wanting access.
At the same time, he’s still only had four games and you can see why some social media people dependent on the club would want to, eh, look on the bright side within the first four games.
I wonder what plans the Celtic board now have to try and alienate the support some more.
Maybe they could get a Karoline Leavitt type spokesperson who gives daily press conferences and vilifies every journalist and supporter.
Maybe make the Israeli ambassador to the UK Chairman or something.
I’ve no idea but I’d say they tried to get the Liard from Brighton into Celtic but it wasn’t possible
There are two common denominators between those teams - Guardiola and Luis Enrique.
Both great players with personalities that can carry men with them.
You can be be a great man manager and not be a tactical genius and have success.
It’s harder to do the opposite - to know your tactix and be a shit man manager or somebody players perceive not to have the personality for the job.
One of the great phenomenons of the modern game is the humiliation of the cookie cooker Guardiola type manager who thinks they know it all, who thinks they have a “philosophy”, but prove to be rigid ideologues who in fact know the square root of fuck all.
Stephen Kenny, Russell Martin, Nathan Jones and now Wilfried NANCY are good examples. I’m sure there’s tons more but I don’t follow football so I wouldn’t know who they are.
I have this nagging feeling that Mikel Arteta will ultimately be exposed as a spoofer who is a slave to a rigid pastiche ideology he has cobbled together, as somebody who believed his own bullshit too much. And that Guardiola, long pigeon holed as the arch ideologue, will prove triumphant over him through being pragmatic and adaptable. Arteta right now strikes me as a less charismatic, more ideological Kevin Keegan exactly 30 years ago.
Football management is like music. There are very few true innovators. The true innovators spawn copycats who aren’t as good but are trendy for a while.
Beyond this you have other artists who aren’t innovators but work with the basics and come up with something good, or even great.
Palace are playing KUPS from Finland tonight winning comfortably with this team:
Benitez, Benamar, Canvot, Lerma, King, Sosa, Rodney, Devenny, Esse, Drake-Thomas, Uche.
Lerma is playing out of position at centreback. It doesn’t matter He played for Juventus and Southampton. Celtic are closer to KUPS than Palace.
The owners need to put their hand in their pocket and buy good players. The mean cunts. Lerma would be Scottish Footballer of the Year and isn’t in Palace plans.
Coach Nancy has to be given to implement his vision.
Agree completely bar you need the raw material too.
Pep has ripped up the script again and with a Cherki/Haaland centric, transition based team and could leave Arteta the height he grew next summer if Arsenal don’'t win as Pep is probably leaving an he wants to take the lineal belt. Ferguson did the same.
You’re dead right, there’s only a handful of top guys and they’re all 18 months ahead.
Zaha player/coach
I’d hope so, he has previously moved clubs for €30m and is apparently on £70k per week. He is a good example of why Celtic have to almost completely disregard England when doing their shopping.
Doesn’t excuse bringing in 7 guys who physically and technically can’t succeed on 10k per week each…Maybe the model needs to change and you bring 2 or 3 Lermas plus local guys because what they have now is franky a disgrace to the heritage of the club…not because they don’t win…but because they can’t play football. What they are doing now isn’t working.
I know the EPL has changed the game, but off the top of my head, Bellamy, Keane, Defoe, Gascoine, Laudrup and a load more have gone up there in 30 years, they can’t do better than Nygren from Stockholm to lead the attack relatively? Its not Championship Manager. Celtic executive are only too aware of the financial realities of football but not the physical ones. Lerma and Wilson are worth 150k per week to Celtic as theyd be the two best players in the league and Celtic have that money. the young players will not improve playing with players like Nygran and I can’t even remember because they are such non-entities to what Celtic should be.
I have no skin in the game and have always enjoyed watching Celtic.
But, seriously - what is their level of ambition?
In reality, the SPL is one of the worst leagues in Europe. The likes of Shamrock Rovers, Derry and Shels would comfortably hold their own in it. Is it to win this and lord it over Rangers or try make a meaningful impression in European football?
Is it to try to buy/develop cheap and sell on expensively to survive? Is it to try and establish/maintain a relevance that seems lacking?
I’m not knocking Celtic, I like the club. I just don’t see (me and many others) the point of what they are trying to achieve.
The chasm between the EPL and SPL was much closer back then bar when Defoe played for Rangers in more recent times. In the last decade Scott Sinclair would be a classic example of what you’re thinking of. Patrick Roberts too. I thought Shane Duffy would be a similar success but turned out to be a disastrous loan spell.
Strange as it may sound now but Celtic were the doyen of good recruitment for a period about 12-15 years ago when they were snaring the likes of Van Dijk and Wanyama at source. That market is still there although you maybe have the likes of Brighton dipping into it now.
They’re simply enjoying the forelock tugging from cath on reception
Is that not enough ?
The fans are paying top wack. The executive are serving up shit and calling it butter for years since Van Dijk and Wanyama vindicated their bullshit.
There’ll be more Kazak episodes in qualifying, the cachet of the club will erode and the people will do something else because that team does not pass the eye test whatsoever.
Fuck Desmond, put you’re hand in your pocket. You’ve guaranteed UCL income if you run it right and 60,000 every other week plus Europe. Fuck him.
Ok, I’ve no idea what that means, pal, and I’m as confused as ever.
KuPS 2
Palace 1
Palace being sent home with their tae in their KuPs.
Celtic, in common with lots of other traditional powerhouse clubs around Europe, has an identity crisis.
That identity crisis has been created by i) Football economics ii) The fact that Scotland as a society no longer produces footballers. It produces fat children who play video games and get fat on ready meals and when they grow up they become dependent on Temazepam.
Supporters of Celtic have two main ambitions. i) Hump them lot every year for the rest of that person’s lifetime. Lord it. And ii) Win the European Cup again.
Ambition ii) is obviously completely deluded but it’s a core ambition all Celtic supporters have. To return to the GOLDEN AGE.
In a general sense, the aspiration of returning to the GOLDEN AGE has obviously proved to be a disaster throughout societies worldwide and leads to Trump and people like Trump.
Thus, a lot of Celtic supporters have turned into mini-Trumps who can’t accept that Celtic has become a backwater with eff all financial power in a country that doesn’t produce footballers.
Being a follower of Celtic for the last 35/40/45 years or whatever your having yourself is like living with a the visual symptoms of a detached retina. You long for the past, when you coluld see properly, you believe you have limitless potential, or would have, as long as you weren’t trapped in this bastard head with this bastard vision from which you cannot escape. That bastard head is the Scottish League. Yet you have to exist in that basatrd head/bastard league.
The fantastical desire to escape that bastard head/bastard league led to Ambition iii) which was: Get the fuck out of Scotland. Clubs like Ajax and Benfica and Feyenoord and Porto and Anderlecht of somewhat similar ambitions. This was what led to the plan for the so called Atlantic League over 20 years ago.
But this isn’t going to hapen in our lifetimes. Probably not anyway.
Ambition iv) clashes with ambition i). Ambition iv) is that Scotland be a vibrant league where Celtic are actually challenged because humping everybody else every year is boring. But nobody will admit having that ambition.
Sort of. But that clashes with Celtic’s BIG CLUB status.
The mismatch arises between the Desmonds’ quite sensible aspiration that the club doesn’t bankrupt itself in a financial environment in which it could easily do so, and the deluded spiritual demand among Celtic supporters that the club win the European Cup.
Ambition v) is that the Desmonds loosen the purse strings a little bit more than they’re doing, within reason.
Unfortunately Celtic in the modern age can only be truly relevant through shambles. It’s the only way Celtic supporters can feel truly invested.
And this is why Celtic are relevant right now, relevant in a way they haven’t been since Martin O’Neill’s GOLDEN ERA.