The Celtic Board’s Defensive Smokescreen Against Modernisation
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A Peek Behind The Curtain – Decoding “Coercion”: The Celtic Board’s defensive smokescreen against modernisation. It’s the latest hard-hitting column from Colin Dempster…
The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at The Old Course, St Andrews, Scotland on 03 October 2026: Celtic majority shareholder Dermot Desmond on the 18th green at the Old Course, St Andrews Photo Alex Todd IMAGO
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£66 million cash reserve used as a shield against ambition
With a £66 million cash reserve used as a shield against ambition, the boardroom’s attack on fans exposes an autocratic regime desperately fighting to protect its monopoly on power.
If you spend enough time watching the administrative machinery of modern football, you start to realise it isn’t built to be dynamic; it’s built to endure. It’s reinforced with corporate concrete, coated in PR gloss, and designed to absorb shock.
A bad weekend on the pitch? Absorb it. A wave of anger on social media? Let it break against the barrier and wait for the tide to recede.
13th September 2026; Ibrox. Scottish League Cup Football, Rangers versus Celtic; Rangers players applaud their fans as the scoreboard reads Rangers 3 Celtic 0. Photo Vagelis Georgariou
For years, the standard playbook for the fanbase was the loud, emotional outburst — a roar of frustration that echoed through the stands for ninety minutes and then evaporated into the Glasgow air by Monday morning.
The administration knew exactly how to handle that. They’ve built soundproofing into the windows and learned how to wait out the storm.
Tennis balls on the Old Course at St Andrews as Celtic fans protest against Dermot Desmond’s running of the football club. Photo via Conor Spence
The Shawshank Redemption
It starts to look a lot like The Shawshank Redemption. On one side, you have Dermot Desmond playing the part of the warden—sitting comfortably behind institutional walls, pulling the strings from a distance, believing his authority is absolute, and assuming the supporters will eventually quiet down and fall in line.
On the other side, you have the Celtic supporters, tired of being managed, realising that no amount of shouting at the Governor’s office is going to unlock the doors.
Nothing exposed this warden-and-prisoner dynamic more clearly than the board’s recent panic over the official Celtic Football Club statement.
Dermot Desmond’s quiet afternoon on a golf green
For months, a parallel, highly structured network of independent supporter organisations has been pointing out major operational bottlenecks. Yet the moment a few symbolic tennis balls disrupted the principal shareholder’s quiet afternoon on a golf green, the machinery found its voice, unleashing a furious corporate broadside.
Alfred Dunhill Links Championship Dermot Desmond walks off the 18th green with a close security guard. Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, Golf, Round 3, Old Course St Andrews, Scotland, Photo Stuart Wallace/Shutterstock IMAGO
The language used was a classic piece of institutional engineering: the board claimed they would not be “coerced” or “intimidated” by organised supporter groups.
A deliberate rhetorical smoke screen
Let’s clear the tracks right away: when an autocratic management screams about “coercion,” it is a deliberate rhetorical smoke screen. They are perfectly comfortable with passive disagreement — fans venting on phone-in radio shows or buying tickets while grumbling under their breath.
What they cannot tolerate is coordinated leverage that bypasses their clinical corporate communications apparatus.
To the boardroom, forcing a direct confrontation where their PR buffers can’t protect them feels like extortion. It is simply the only language an unyielding infrastructure understands when every official channel has been intentionally designed as a dead end.
Alfred Dunhill Links Championship Dermot Desmond walks off the 18th green with a close security guard. Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, Golf, Round 3, Old Course St Andrews, Scotland, Photo Stuart Wallace
Shutterstock/IMAGO
The supreme irony
The supreme irony is that the fans are not asking to burn the stadium down; they are asking for basic, structural modernisation. Supporters want to drag the club’s operations out of the early 2000s and replace outdated internal compromises with world-class, elite European standards.
They want a fully empowered Director of Football commanding an independent, data-driven recruitment system, rather than an archaic scouting setup reliant on boardroom networks, alongside top class coaching at all levels.
They want genuine democratic accountability alongside a decent match going or online experience all perfectly achievable within the club’s current finances.
Alfred Dunhill Links Championship Dermot Desmond is driven away from the Old Course after finishing his 3rd round with a close security guard in the front seat of the golf buggy, Old Course St Andrews on 03 October 2026. Photo Stuart Wallace Shutterstock/ IMAGO
True progress means giving up absolute control
But the board is intentionally blocking these changes. They aren’t rejecting modernisation out of laziness; they are doing it because true progress means giving up absolute control.
In a modern football club, a billionaire shareholder or a legacy chairman cannot personally veto a transfer or pick a manager based on pure gut feeling. Professionalising the club means handing the keys over to independent specialists.
For men who have spent decades running the club as their private fiefdom, giving up that power is unthinkable. Stagnation is their protective shield. We see it laid bare in the club’s own annual financial accounts: the board is perfectly content sitting on a massive cash reserve of over £66 million, viewing it as a buffer of comfort rather than a tool for ambition.
They don’t want a modern, dynamic club
They tolerate a massive 22% drop in revenue and a slide into an on-paper financial loss because missing out on the Champions League phase is an acceptable cost to them, so long as the domestic status quo remains insulated.
They don’t want a modern, dynamic club because a modern club belongs to the people who care about the football, whereas a stagnant, insulated club belongs entirely to the boardroom.
Celtic v theRangers – Scottish Premiership – Celtic Supporters hold up a Let Celtic Flourish banner during the match at Celtic Park on Sunday September 1, 2024. Photo Steve Welsh
A staggering inability to learn lessons
We as Celtic supporters are forever on at the board for their staggering inability to learn lessons. Year after year, we watch them make the same structural blunders in Europe, repeat the same recruitment failures, and hide behind the same tired excuses.
But if we are going to demand that they learn, we must be honest enough to look in the mirror and learn our own lessons first. In this fight against institutional stagnation, emotional knee-jerks are no longer fit for purpose.
Discipline is the key.
Jimmy Reid’s historic Upper Clyde Shipbuilders speeches
We need to look back at the finest traditions of this city’s working-class struggle to find our blueprint. Go back to Jimmy Reid’s historic Upper Clyde Shipbuilders speeches. When the workers took control, Reid didn’t call for a wild, chaotic riot; he demanded absolute tactical discipline.
He told the men that unity was their only shield, warning them that the establishment was actively waiting for the first sign of trouble, the first broken window, or the first piece of anti-social behaviour to weaponise it and smash their movement.
The exact same logic applies to us today. The Celtic boardroom and their well-compensated PR gatekeepers are sitting behind their corporate concrete, watches synchronised, desperately waiting for the fanbase to slip up.
The absolute second an online campaign crosses the line, or an in-person protest descends into undisciplined chaos, they will pounce. They will use it to paint the entire Celtic Fans Collective as a fringe group of lawless agitators, completely vindicating their narrative of “coercion” to the wider public.
Celtic supporters at Fir Park. Photographs by Vagelis Georgariou
We cannot give them that leverage. If we break ranks, if we let frustration turn into a chaotic rabble, we lose. Unity and iron-clad discipline are the only tools that can protect this movement.
We must become a highly organised, immovable front that handles its business with clinical precision. That is how you turn a wave of raw anger into a functional tool.
They don’t have epiphanies
When you start reacting out of pure frustration, you think a single, well-crafted argument is going to make the penny drop and change everything overnight. Then you realise institutions don’t work like that. They don’t have epiphanies; they have compliance departments.
To truly challenge that kind of control, you must change how you fight. You stop swinging for the fences with short-lived outbursts and you pick up the hammer.
Freedom doesn’t come from a single dramatic moment; it comes from consistent, unvarnished, systemic analysis aimed straight at the root causes of institutional stagnation. No emotional knee-jerks, no corporate spin, just the steady sound of a tiny rock hammer chipping away at a massive institutional wall, day after day, until the narrative belongs to the supporters again.
Let Dermot Desmond and his appointed wardens keep their guarded corridors and their closed-door meetings.
Celtic Fans Collective
The wall doesn’t need to come down in one loud crash, it just needs enough steady, patient pressure until the light finally starts to get through. They can say they don’t recognise the Celtic Fans Collective, but they can’t ignore the vast numbers of Celtic fans signing up.
Celtic Fans Collective
But the fans on the streets of Glasgow cannot swing the hammer alone. The strength of this club has never been confined to the parameters of the East End; it lives in the lungs of a massive, global community. From Boston to Brisbane, New York to Toronto, our identity was forged by an immigrant diaspora that understood the absolute necessity of collective solidarity.
A battle to reclaim the soul of OUR football club
Now, the modern front line of that heritage is the Celtic Fans Collective. It is time for every supporter’s club, every international enclave, and every member of the worldwide Celtic diaspora to actively stand up, join the Celtic Fans Collective, and get in this fight.
This is no longer just about ninety minutes on a match day. It is a battle to reclaim the soul of OUR football club. Stand disciplined, stand together, and let’s start chipping away at the wall.
Colin Dempster
For more on the Celtic Fans Collective watch this…
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Celtic in the Fifties by Matt Corr, in two volumes, both published on 4th September 2026 by Celtic Star Books. Click on image to order.
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