| Year by Year: 1999 I 2000 I 2001 I Allan MacDonald |
Celtic's great expectations; Parkhead has hardly been Paradise for chief executive Allan MacDonald during his reign in Glasgow's East End.
Ron McKay finds out more
Sunday Herald 13/08/2000
Ron McKay
THE rivulets and runnels of Celtic Park are lined with the pictures, mementoes and iconography of former glory. However, the chief executive seemed to be turning the past to the wall – at least the recent past – in a prolonged and remarkable assessment of what had gone wrong at the club in the last year and what needed to be done to redeem it. He was now his own man. For good or bad.
Fergus McCann, his mentor, was implicitly condemned, for failing sufficiently to invest in the football team, for selling a false bill of goods to Allan MacDonald – substantial investment in new equity would be forthcoming, the manager, Dr Jo Venglos, was securely locked-in – and the men he brought into the club, Kenny Dalglish and John Barnes, were verbally dispensed with for their failure of nous and nerve for the battle. MacDonald was, too, disarmingly candid about his recruitment of Martin O'Neill. If he did not breach football's "tapping" regulations in his courting of the then Leicester manager, then the spirit has surely been ravished.
The bald facts are that MacDonald, despite his eloquent defence of the underlying growth in the Celtic business, was defending a loss last year of almost £6 million, together with a provision of almost £2m to pay off the pals he brought in, principally Dalglish and Barnes. But in a two-hour interview in which he answered every question put, albeit at times in that econobabble his business background has imbued in him, he went resolutely on the attack.
Fergus McCann, he said, had assured him that more investment was about to be ploughed in. "I took the job on the condition that he would raise more equity. At my first meeting with Fergus," he continued, "I told him that the business was under-capitalised." The additional funding did not happen. Since McCann's departure, he continues, there had been no contact between the two, except ''that I got a letter from him thanking me for raising his £40m for him". A reference to the sale last year of McCann's equity at the end of his five years in control of the club. MacDonald did not comment on McCann's failure to endow, or even partly-fund a football academy, a plan still mired somewhere in the dusty files at Parkhead. Pressed on whether he has had any kind of pay rise in his volcanic year at the club – offered, he says, but refused – it emerges that he has put £60,000 bonuses awarded to him by the board towards youth development.
Although MacDonald refuses to outrightly skewer McCann for failing to invest sufficiently in wages and players in his tenure, the slides and statistics he readily produces are condemnatory enough. The correlation between success on the field and investment in players, he says, is an undisputed economic truth in football: Rangers, for instance, spent £87m in the 11 years from 1988, Celtic just £34m. And he makes it clear that the future policy, his and the board's, will be to invest heavily in the football side of the business, expanding the commercial activities to fund it. The proposed new European league, in which Celtic and Rangers are the prime movers, will not just put the his club on a level commercial footing with the major Italian and English ones, but will also be a major stimulant to the Scottish game.
Another serious allegation against McCann is one of misleading MacDonald, innocently or culpably, over Venglos's contract. The chief executive maintains that he took the job on the assurance that the manager did not have an 'opt-out' clause which would allow him to walk out in days. Venglos did. And according to MacDonald this birled him into his big mistake, appointing his golfing pal Dalglish who, in turn, appointed his mate Barnes.
MacDonald has put his hands up to this one before. He cites his inexperience in the game, the unpredictability of football compared to his previous job, creating and marketing machines which defied gravity with British Aerospace. At least, he says, having been involved in all stages of the creation, you came to believe an aircraft would fly. But you can get the wages and conditions right, the training facilities superb and the general ambience correct, but players can still let you down.
"Football," he sums up, "is not a business you can ever feel comfortable in." After the Inverness Caley humiliation Barnes came to him, according to MacDonald, in the ruins of it all, and asked "what do I do next?" MacDonald's reply was, "I don't know, but I'll let you know".
The next day he had the answer. Dalglish, then in La Manga, where he has a holiday home, would come back and take over the day-to-day running of the team, Barnes would be his deputy. "I had asked Kenny not to go to La Manga" recalls the chief executive, the implication clear. "That was the solution. That was me saying to the Director of Football "You run the showâ because he (Barnes) wasn't managing the dressing room. Kenny comes back and John works for Kenny. But John refused. So he was fired." In MacDonald's description, this was him stepping up and doing what he was paid to, taking responsibility in the failure of others.
From then on there was "never a prospect" of Dalglish remaining at the club in his overarching role. MacDonald then needed to appoint a day-to-day football coach, a job Dalglish had refused.
"When he didn't want day-to-day responsibility the responsibility rested with me," says MacDonald, reiterating that he pointed out to his friend what the inevitable consequence would be.
"He said: 'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.' "Well," he continues after a slight pause, "we're now talking about the toll price to cross that bridge."
When Dalglish had effectively ruled himself out, MacDonald moved for a successor. Martin O'Neill, as he tells it, was the principal candidate. But O'Neill was then Leicester manager, officially unapproachable. Contractually, there was a summer window where prospective employers could approach him. But the problem was that Celtic could not wait for it. "Through the good offices of certain people who were close to both of us, at my instigation, Martin was asked if he was interested in the job. His response was that he would crawl up the M74 for it."
However, the death of O'Neill's mother caused a rethink, and he let it be known through the same channels, that he was no longer interested. "It then went cold for four weeks," MacDonald adds.
He then quickly moved on Guus Hiddink, then at Real Betis, but, according to MacDonald, the Betis president then briefed the Spanish press, turning the surreptitious visit into a public spectacle. There was a third option, unrevealed until now, the Lazio manager Svenn Goran Eriksson. At that time it seemed that his Rome team might lose the league – "He phoned to say he wanted a challenge like Celtic" – but, with Serie A victory then clinched, thought again. "He killed it."
It was then that Celtic's major shareholder Dermot Desmond, the controversial and reclusive Irish billionaire, "resurrected" the O'Neill connection and "brought Martin back on the scene". The ticking on Dalglish's future quickened.
Summing up, and in a final banishing of the past, MacDonald concludes that his motivation is not to walk away with £40m, but to put Celtic on a competitive level for their long-term survival. The club's shareholders, he points out, are now 17,000 fans who are interested only in success on the field and 500 others, institutional investors, who are looking only for profit. "I have never been in a business before that has managed these different expectations."
MacDonald's future, and Celtic's, will rest on him accomplishing them.