Nancy Bhoy

I’ve been branching out recently into videos. It was something I thought of a while ago, that I wanted to try and tell the story of the history of Celtic in a way that people could absorb in the way people consume content these days. And maybe it would be something I could expand into other teams, because although my interest is clearly in the team I support I’ve always been interested in Scottish football in general.

Obviously. I’ve been involved here for fifteen seasons.

My original plan was to have videos of roughly 15-20 minutes in length on a season by season basis, that also set the context of the world at the time and included a bit more focus on one key player who was playing at the time. I did a pilot of it, talked about the founding of Celtic in 1887 up to their first game in 1888 and mentioned things like the Eiffel Tower construction commencing. Then I talked about Neil McCallum, the scorer of Celtic’s very first goal.

Unfortunately, what I discovered is just how long these things take to create. Even if I got into some kind of rhythm with the research, the script writing, the sourcing of pictures to match what I was talking about and the actual creation of the video itself, I was pretty much going to have to quit my day job to have the time to put it all together and be able to publish in some kind of cadence that would keep it going and keep people coming back to it. Regular publishing is a key to growing and keeping your audience.

A few weeks ago, I revisited the idea as I was having a clean up at home and planning to get rid of my old football tops from over the years that are just taking up space in the loft. So now I could showcase these, have a bit of a laugh about it as none of them fit me at this stage in life (I was a teenager when I got some of these), and do a cutdown version of what I was planning to do originally.

I’m not sure what’s the tighter squeeze – my 1999/2000 hoops or trying to cram all this information into the YouTube shorts where the maximum length is three minutes.

I’m more or less up to date with these videos, and over the next few days I’ll fill the gap in the 1990s which will mean there’s one video for each season from 1987/88 up to present day. It’s been good fun, but does take a bit of time, although admittedly nowhere near as much as my original plan. I’m not entirely sure what to do next. There’s 100 years of Celtic history still there to be covered if I want – even if I have run out of Celtic tops at this point. I have other ideas that don’t relate to Celtic too, but at this point it feels like a New Year consideration.

Now imagine at some point this coming summer I’d be able to add 2025/26 to the playlist. As Charlie in our group chat noted, this one might be very interesting to watch! Personally, I’m not sure how I could get it down to three minutes even now with over five months of the season still to run! The last couple of weeks along could fill the three minutes!

So far Celtic have parted company with Brendan Rodgers after results went sour following a summer transfer window that left the Celtic squad with more holes than Swiss cheese. That parting was met with two statements from the club, one thanking him and his team for all they’d done and one from the largest but still minority shareholder Dermot Desmond absolutely savaging him.

While some of what he said might be true, many suspect it was to deflect from the growing criticism of the board coming from the fans who had seen Celtic go from competing with Bayern Munich in the Champions League to losing at Dundee in the space of six months. No disrespect to Dundee, but the ambition that Rodgers was promised on his return to the club seems to have got lost along the way to the point that Celtic were clearly going backwards – never more evident than in the goalless 210 minutes and eventual penalty shootout loss to Kairat Almaty in the Champions League qualifiers.

The fans have mobilised, looking for change at the highest level of the club. Personally, I think it’s long overdue. There are countless reasons why it needs to happen, from good corporate governance to freshen up the faces on the board (some of them have been there since before Fergus McCann completed his five year plan in 1999) to simply stagnating on and off the park. The board, obviously, point to the number of trophies won on the park and the health of the balance sheet off the park. To which many say they don’t want to see a healthy profit, they want to see that reinvested properly. Peter Lawwell once said that Celtic should come out of the very transfer window stronger than they went into it, apparently he meant the profit margin and not the quality of the squad.

Martin O’Neill came in when Brendan Rodgers stepped down and steadied the ship. No one is pretending it was vintage Celtic, although the manner of the win over Feyenoord was a definite highlight of his six weeks, but he clawed the gap back on Hearts at the top of the league and got Celtic past Rangers and into the League Cup final. Many said that was good enough, which is fair when you consider he was outside of a transfer window and couldn’t even attempt to fix the holes in the squad. “Get to January” has been said many times, in the hope that those in charge couldn’t possibly make a mess of yet another transfer window… could they?

Well we’re not even there yet and in the two weeks since Wilfried Nancy was brought in from Colombus Crew it has all completely collapsed again, and indeed is a bigger mess than before O’Neill stepped in.

Nancy was thrown in for three of the toughest fixtures he could have been. Martin O’Neill finished up with a Wednesday night win over Dundee, and left to thanks from the stands as it put Celtic level on points with Hearts and still with a game in hand. Thursday morning, Nancy was in charge. Sunday afternoon, Nancy was in the dugout to face Hearts.

Now, I have not only worked under several managers in my time but I’ve also been a manager in my time so I like to think I have some idea of how to deal with taking over a team that’s in the middle of something. When Nancy came in, he promised that he wasn’t going to change much, which is absolutely correct. This isn’t close season, you don’t have time to rip things up and change everything to suit what you want to do. You can’t change the people in your team so you have to do what works. Whatever Martin O’Neill was doing was working in that regard. Pretty is for after January, or maybe even after May. Right now, do what works. Which means change nothing to start with, and maybe slowly tweak things as you go.

A lucky new manager gets to talk to his predecessor and find out in more detail what works and what doesn’t, what’s good about the team and what isn’t. Nancy had that opportunity with O’Neill, but for reasons known only to him decided that a fifteen minute chat was enough.

Oh, and also, what Nancy said in that first press conference turned out to be a lie. He changed lots of things. He made the team play an entirely new formation, despite having just a single training session to work on it before Hearts, and it went exactly as you would expect it to go in that regard. Hearts picked through the holes in the new back three formation and won the game 2-1.

That was the good game!

Since that game, Roma have spent 45 minutes picking that defence apart in first gear and winning 3-0 by half time and then taking their foot off the gas. St Mirren took just two minutes to make that defence look a shambles in the cup final, and while Celtic did get back into things thanks in part to St Mirren passing up opportunities to extend their lead, a half time tweak turned the game back in St Mirren’s favour and the League Cup was being waved over the Paisley Town Hall balcony on Sunday night.

Last night, Dundee United for some weird reason just sat back and let Celtic come at them for 45 minutes before thinking maybe they should do something like St Mirren did in the second half. 1-0 to Celtic turned into 2-1 for Dundee United within fifteen minutes of the restart and they hung on to win the game as they protected what they had.

Honestly, Dundee United played for just fifteen minutes and beat Celtic. And those aren’t my words, that’s Andy from DUFC Stats!

The Celtic fans have already turned, for the most part. Audibly at Tannadice, as the now regular chants of sack the board were joined by… well lets be polite and say requests for Nancy to leave.

There are certainly some who think he needs time, but I’m not one of them. I usually knew which managers I worked under were any good pretty quickly, they usually show you from their actions. Whether there is any merit in what Nancy wants to do on the park or not, he has made too many rookie management mistakes already, mistakes I wouldn’t make myself (and I’m in no way suggesting I be Celtic manager!)

Those new tactics might well have merit somewhere along the line, but he has neither the time nor the players to make it work right now and he’s arrogantly continuing with it in the hope that it works. Many have likened Nancy to Postecoglou changing things, but Ange had a pre-season and transfer window to work with. The changes, while not quite working to begin with, were evidently further along the line by the time competitive fixtures came along and worked better when new players were brought in to fit it. That was partially done in the summer, but the real benefits were realised in January.

Even then, I don’t agree that we’ve seen signs that what Nancy is trying to do actually works, we only see them when the opponents let them. Personally, I saw brief glimpses in the first half against Hearts, whilst Nancy himself talked about the second half performance against Roma – but they were 3-0 up and had knocked themselves down from first gear into neutral! Celtic created plenty of chances against Dundee United in the first half, again similar to what was seen in the Hearts game and had they taken them then the picture may well have been different. But they didn’t, and Celtic didn’t create the same chances in the second half after United made a simple tweak, just as they didn’t show anything in the second half against Hearts.

Managers that are stubborn in their thinking aren’t anything new, particularly at Celtic. Ange Postecoglou had an exciting way of playing but it got picked apart in Europe more than once. Celtic usually got one hiding in Europe under Brendan Rodgers, Borussia Dortmund last season being the most recent, but he at least seemed to tweak that after that one to get a decent result away to Atalanta. Even Martin O’Neill back in the day stuck by his 3-5-2 far too long when Alex McLeish figured out how to defeat it leading to Rangers winning five trophies out of six in his first eighteen months – and the other was already gone by the time he came in.

But Wilfried Nancy is stubbornly sticking by a plan that has never worked in the first place, with a squad who don’t look like they can play it, and even if they did there’s no time to work on it on the training ground. This isn’t close season where you do nothing buy train. This isn’t even a period where you can at least work on it midweek as there’s too many fixtures. You just don’t get the time at this point in the season. There’s too many light training sessions to recover from the previous game. Too much focus on who they’re playing next. That’s just the reality of football in December. But he’s persisting with it anyway, despite saying he wouldn’t when he came in!

The stubbornness goes all the way up the club too. Nancy was the only candidate for the job, apparently. Why is that? Who signed off on a complete lack of due diligence? Paul Tisdale, a man who has achieved nothing in lower league English football and has supposedly been in charge of the football operations that got us into the position where the squad is Swiss cheese and the expensive purchases can’t even get a place in the starting XI?

No one has seen Shin Yamada. Callum Osmand was only brought in from the cold by Martin O’Neill with no explanation as to why the manager who supposedly brought him in didn’t rate him. Michel-Ange Balikwisha doesn’t even get to come off the bench under three different managers now. Even Arne Engels, Celtic’s record signing, doesn’t start every game and when he does he certainly doesn’t look like the most expensive man on the pitch.

Now, I’ll caveat this bit because it depends who you ask as to who is responsible for signings. But I find it very hard to believe that the manager is involved in signing players who then might not even get on the bench for them. Celtic have a track record over multiple managers of signing projects in the hope of developing them and selling them on for a big profit. That sounds more like a plan from above than anything to me, especially when the constant is those people above and not the manager himself.

As I mentioned earlier, the Celtic fans have their own battle with the Celtic board. That covers quite a broad range, from protests in the stand, to the ongoing issues with those in the standing section, but the bit I would focus on is the Celtic Fan Collective. That’s a superset of Celtic supporters clubs, affiliations, Celtic online creators, you name it. It’s not just “the Green Brigade” and “the Celtic Trust” and it covers a wide range of ages so it’s not just “the young team who don’t remember the 90s” either. Trust me, some of them remember far earlier than the 90s!

The Collective have had meetings with Celtic. They’ve put questions to them. They’ve got no answers that mean anything. What is abundantly clear from each of these meetings is Celtic not only don’t think they are doing anything wrong but they won’t hear otherwise and they pretty much just treat the fans with contempt. Shut up and pay your money would be the a very simplistic way of putting it but that’s how it feels. It was never more evident than at this year’s AGM.

Now, I’m not going to pretend the fans exactly boxed clever here. At best, they fell into a trap. At worst, they were more disruptive than was helpful.

Prior to the AGM, the Collective had tried to get answers from Celtic and didn’t get them, so it was seen as a way to publicly hold their feet to the fire. I’m almost certain the Celtic board knew that was coming and so set up to avoid that where possible. The red card display that the board walked into looked impressive and was definitely not disruptive in itself. One person getting up to demand they move on from the video that just took up time was a way to call out the plan to minimise questions, but it just gave the first excuse to delay and shorten the effective time of the AGM itself.

But after they returned from that adjournment came the Ross Desmond statement, on behalf of his father, that was just an attack on any Celtic fan who dared question those in charge. A statement designed to stir up the ill-feeling to the point that the chairman could just call for a poll to cover the legally required business and wrap things up the AGM itself to completely avoid the Q&A section. Mission accomplished.

Incidentally, since that got canned, the Collective put those questions to Celtic. I’m not aware of them getting any answers to them. Much easier to ignore than in face to face in an AGM.

The rest of Scottish football must be rubbing their hands in glee at all of this. Celtic’s dominance is collapsing at a spectacular rate, possibly even faster than it did during the miserable behind closed doors season of 2020/21, and this time it doesn’t seem to have an end. When Ange Postecoglou came in, following the dragged out failure to get Eddie Howe it should not be forgotten, they managed to paper over the cracks because they had a man whom everyone could get behind.

If you want to compare Wilfried Nancy to Ange Postecoglou, show me his equivalent of the “we never stop” video. That was so inspirational that the Celtic support quickly decided this was a man for whom they would run through a brick wall. All I’ve heard from Nancy is lies about not changing things and telling us he’s nothing to prove having so far delivered nothing but defeat.

Without wishing to rewrite history, I’ve been questioning the manner in which the Celtic regime run the club for over fifteen years now. And I know that because I wrote an article on another website back in May 2010 about it, and that was borne out of frustration over what I’d seen unfold over the course of more than just the season just finished!

It’s clearly not that they do everything wrong, there are things they’ve got right. Gordon Strachan maintained a relatively high level of success whilst cutting the wage bill and putting together a younger squad, at least to a point as his final season had many hallmarks we still see today. Neil Lennon, Brendan Rodgers and Ange Postecoglou have all won domestic trebles, whilst Ronny Deila won a double and back to back titles whilst also managing to bring through some of the academy players, something none of the managers since have managed to do.

Celtic have bought and sold some players and made terrific profit on them from Victor Wanyama to Nicolas Kuhn. The biggest success there though is Kieran Tierney, one of those academy players that Ronny Deila helped get into the first team, one that ultimately Celtic got £25 million for with no cost to bring in.

But there’s so many other areas that don’t work. For every player Celtic have brought in and turned around a tidy profit there are five others who need loaned out and eventually leave on a free transfer.

Off the park, Celtic don’t have ticket resale options like other clubs in Scotland have never mind those in bigger leagues. That’s just short sighted. The main stand at Celtic Park has been “upgraded” several times allegedly but you still have people complaining about the hot water in the toilets and you still have the tent outside on European nights. The club is just stagnant in so many ways, and a lot of that is in the purely business side.

And let’s face it, as Kevin Bridges once jokingly said, at one point the two horse race that is Scottish Football became more like showjumping in 2012. It’s actually a curious quirk that Celtic’s four season quadruple dominance from 2016/17 to 2019/20 only occurred at the point that Rangers had reached the Scottish Premiership and not in the four seasons before.

Or is it curious? It’s somewhat symptomatic here that Celtic take their foot off the gas when there’s no real challenge. That quadruple treble followed a semi final defeat in the Scottish Cup to a Rangers on the cusp of their promotion to the top flight. Celtic’s ambition stretches as far as doing just enough to stay on top in Scottish football because, as that AGM statement from the Desmonds said, the rest is unbridgeable. So why bother doing any more?

I don’t think anyone in the Celtic support is expecting a Champions League win, so it’s not like we don’t understand that. It’s more the problem that Celtic’s disappointments in Europe have come against teams who are doing better than us despite being smaller. Copenhagen. Ferencvaros. Bodo/Glimt. Kairat Almaty. Celtic challenged Bayern more than those names in recent times. A one off is understandable, that’s football, but it’s not a one off and it’s often because of mismanagement like was seen this summer.

The crux here is that Celtic suffer from the same problem from top to bottom. It’s the manager who thinks his formation is right even when the players he has can’t play it. It’s the self proclaimed football doctor which itself is based on nothing at all and is somewhat ironic given the number of hamstring injuries Celtic players have suffered this season. It’s the Celtic board themselves whose ambition hasn’t matched that of several managers who have come and gone over the years and always reject ideas from outside. Whether that be Dom Mckay who was briefly at the club and wanted to make changes before suddenly leaving soon thereafter, or the Celtic Fan Collective who have fresh ideas themselves and just want some evidence of some kind of plan to take the club in a direction that isn’t just limited to these shores.

Arrogance of people who think they are right and won’t change what they’re doing no matter what anyone else says and will point to specific bits of evidence that backs up their thinking while ignoring the reams of evidence to the contrary. I’ve tried to avoid falling into that same trap here by highlight what has been done right, but I appreciate there might be a little irony in that statement!. The Celtic board, in particular, do it safe in the knowledge that football isn’t a normal business and so the customers won’t take their business elsewhere. If I don’t like how Asda is doing something I’ll go to Tesco. If I don’t like how Celtic is doing something… well I’m still a Celtic fan, I’ll just buy my merch from elsewhere and watch the game on TV.

Even last night, in the wake of the announcement that Peter Lawwell was stepping down as chairman, while that may please many Celtic fans there’s still no acknowledgement that anything he’s done has been the wrong thing. The club put out a video of an interview with CEO Michael Nicholson in which he stated that the departure of Lawwell is due to threats. He also mentioned three club officials were assaulted. Obviously if true that is hugely unacceptable and you would expect there would be police follow up on these accusations. But there was also a statement that it just strengthened the resolve of the board to do what they think is right.

It makes you wonder what has to happen for the board to take a step back and question if they really are doing the right thing. The ill-feeling isn’t limited to these individuals who are allegedly threatening and assaulting people at Celtic, it’s all through the support..

That video also had an interview with the new interim chairman, Brian Wilson, a man who has been a non-executive director at Celtic since 2005. That’s more than twice the recommended length of time for someone to be a NED (an acronym that never fails to make me laugh). He was on mostly to tell us what a great job Peter Lawwell did and the minority who don’t see that will come round. The arrogance just permeates.

In all likelihood, nothing is going to change at Celtic soon. The games keep coming – there are six league games before Celtic come up against Auchinleck Talbot in the Scottish Cup. There’s still little to no time to work on changes in training. So how well this new way of playing is going to improve doesn’t seem very certain.

Three of those games take place before January comes around for any squad strengthening, and even if you do get players in right at the start of the window, you’re then looking to throw them in against Rangers. Not unheard of, but that’s asking a lot. Besides, Celtic rarely have anyone in that early in a transfer window, only the first season of Postecoglou has seen that actually happen in recent seasons, and that was also the busiest January window. There’s not usually a lot of movement in the mid-season window.

Nancy isn’t going to be going anywhere, despite certain rumours in the time I was writing this blog, that would mean someone at Celtic admitting they got something wrong. If Nancy were to go this soon into his tenure, the men who appointed him have to go too as well surely, and then how far up the chain does that go before it stops?

Of course, there’s also a chance I am completely wrong here and it suddenly all clicks against Aberdeen on Sunday. Maybe Aberdeen start like Dundee United did last night and Celtic actually finish their chances this time. Not that it would improve the Celtic defence problems that are evident to all, but it’s a lot easier to give yourself time to put your plan in place when you’re picking up wins. 4-2 is a win after all!

One thing is for certain though. I’m already dreading that 2025/26 three minute video.