Tea-time on a Friday was once looked upon as a good time to bury bad news and the details of the interim financial accounts put out by Celtic at 5:33pm certainly put the short-sightedness of the board into grim perspective.
Revenue down almost a third from £83.5million to £59.4m as of December 31. Operating profit, including transfers, down from £42m to £11.1m. Forecasts hardly rosy for the final results later in the year.
That’s what happens, of course, when you take a Champions League qualifier against non-entities from Kazakhstan for granted and fail to buy a new first-choice centre-forward or, for that matter, any of the other players the manager wants.
Chairman Brian Wilson, in his notes accompanying the accounts, conceded that losing that now-infamous play-off to Kairat Almaty and failing to make it into the group stage of European club football’s premier tournament was the primary reason for the drop in income.
How much of a hit there has been on merchandising, thanks to the ‘Not A Penny More’ boycott put together by the Celtic Fans Collective, is more difficult to measure. Previously included in the accounts in a separate column, merchandising was bundled in alongside multimedia and ‘other commercial activities’.
Celtic CEO Michael Nicholson did not comment on the club’s financial results
Celtic’s Champions League play-off defeat to Kairat Almaty had a big impact on their financial results
In an exercise in trying to put the genie back into the bottle, there was, at least, a mention by Wilson of the board admitting they have made mistakes and are ‘endeavouring to develop, enhance and refresh key areas of governance and strategies’. It’s all just a little bit too late for that.
Naturally, there was nothing from CEO Michael Nicholson. Again, just as with these attempts to meet with fans’ groups and find a truce, it’s 77-year-old Wilson pushed out front to face up the mess left from some awful decisions made earlier in a quite chaotic and embarrassing campaign.
Don’t be surprised if there are more protests, then, over Nicholson, finance chief Chris McKay and major shareholder Dermot Desmond at Kilmarnock on Sunday.
In the age of the internet, burying bad news is almost impossible. Celtic fans will have had plenty of time to digest the full accounts by the time the action gets under way at Rugby Park this afternoon – and concur that they reflect, in great detail, just how badly the current directors shot themselves in the foot.
Nicholson was conspicuous by his absence from those Friday financials. How long can it be before he is taken out of the line of fire completely?