Martin O’Neill and his Celtic flops were certainly to blame for the club’s abysmal collapse and elimination from the Champions League against LASK on Tuesday night.
But there is a deeper rooted issue inside the corridors at Parkhead and has been for some time. The hierarchy – chief executive Michael Nicholson and finance head Chris McKay in particular – have been accused of hoarding cash and gambling on the £40million jackpot that comes with sitting at Europe’s top table.
Celtic have signed only four players this summer so far despite arguably the biggest games of the campaign coming early and they did the same thing last term when Kazakh minnows Kairat Almaty knocked them out at the same stage of qualifying.
Chris Sutton described the problem as “failing to prepare is preparing to fail”, and the former striker was spot on.
But for former Sunderland executive director and Charlton Athletic chief exec Charlie Methven, he believes Celtic’s money-men are running the club like rookies and failing to grasp the bigger picture.
And Methven, of Sunderland Til I Die documentary fame, knows his stuff. The experienced businessman turned the Black Cats around in 2018 and boasts an intriguing insight into the problems of running a large, historically significant club outside England’s financial elite.
When he left the Addicks back in March 2025, chairman Gavin Carter waxed lyrical about Methven and praised him for providing the vision to drive standards and putting the right people in place across both football and business operations.
So it’s true when he says finishing ahead of Rangers every season in the Scottish Premiership is the bread and butter. It is an expectation rather than a hope. But the former journalist is adamant Celtic should be prioritising the Champions League and strategically planning their recruitment in a much more professional and long-term way.
“In my opinion Celtic is one of the biggest clubs in the world,” Methven said in an exclusive sit down with Celts Are Here. “Top 20 biggest in the world I’d say, and should be targeting Champions League as its number one priority.
“It should take it as read that they’ll be in the top two in Scotland, if you target the Champions League and want to be competitive there, de facto you will be in the top two of the Premiership. There’s no worry about getting ahead of ourselves, if they’re serious about this – like Benfica, Ajax – if they target progressing in the Champions League knockout stages, the domestic stuff will take care of itself because they’d have a strong squad by definition.
“To my mind they should be ruthlessly targeting that and how they can optimise our chances of progressing there on a regular basis. It’s not easy, there are other big clubs who target the same thing, but when you’re being knocked out by clubs like Almaty, there’s no strategic advantage to that.
“If Celtic think, ‘We’re going to knock off £2/3m on a player or two because we’re in the latter stages of a transfer window but we’re not gonna bother if we progress to the Champions League’, that’s not a strong strategy.
“Transfer planning window to window… the top clubs are already thinking three windows in advance. Really, you should not be getting yourself into the position that you’re having to hoover up some players late in the window. It’s not strong planning full stop.
“I get that fans would be frustrated about recruiting before the playoffs, but it should never come to that.
“Celtic’s squad should be strong enough on an ongoing basis to be able to beat the likes of Almaty and not be worried about recruiting a player two weeks out from a Champions League qualifier or two after. It should have been being done.”
Celtic’s dreadful evening in Austria may already have cost them signings with Gvidas Gineitis and Niko Sigur potentially pricing the Hoops out of the race. Another sad indictment of where Tuesday evening left the club.
But while there has been radio silence from the higher-ups in Glasgow in the aftermath of the 5-4 aggregate defeat in Linz, fans learned some alarming insight last season when the club blamed UEFA’s cost control regulations for refusing to spend big money on new players.
Methven had his thoughts on that issue, too. And for the English exec it comes down to the way the Scottish giants are run behind the scenes and their lack of desire to implement real, legitimate change in taking Celtic into the world of the elite on and off the pitch.
“UEFA’s cost control regulations are all about revenue so that’s why I think Celtic have to focus everything on increasing their revenue,” he added. “You can’t just sit and leave £100m in the bank account, not renew the stadium or improve match day so they’re gonna have lower revenues, which means they have to turn to our fans and say, ‘We can’t spend on players because of our revenues not going up’.
“The fans should be telling the club to improve more on stadium and matchdays, then you’ll be able to spend more on players.
“To my mind in the last decade, there’s been a stasis around Celtic as if, as long as they mostly finish ahead of Rangers that’s fine. But in the meantime the rest of the world of football moves on, delivers a better product, a better stadia, delivers European campaigns that get people excited. Delivers players who excite and then go on to great things.
“But if you’re a club with a 60,000 crowd whose biggest ambition is to hopefully beating one other club more often than not, that’s just too limited a horizon to keep a big club happy. It’s never going to work. The thing I’ve been most critical of in an era where Scottish football’s TV revenue is very low but the Celtic fanbase is very big, you’ve got to have a strategy of maximising your matchday revenue.
“That means around the stadium. Some great work was done 25/30 years ago on the stadium to bring it out of the dark ages to what was back then a good level. But nothing’s been done since. If you think about what’s been done at other big clubs during that intervening 25 years, they’ve really pushed the envelope in terms of their matchday situation.”
Celtic have always considered themselves to be a European giant having lifted the big cup, but that reputation is dwindling. Clubs in other countries are overtaking the Hoops both on and off the field despite having similar TV revenue deals.
So Methven, again, believes the likes of Ajax, FC Porto and PSV among other clubs are proving much more ambitious in Europe than Celtic and that has to be addressed.
“When you’re in a league with a limited TV revenue – and it’s the only lever you can pull – to sit on vast amounts in a bank account and then having a stadium that’s not up to scratch or big enough for all your fans, seems to me to be fundamentally business negligent,” said Methven.
“You’ve got to be using the money to make sure you can fit in as many people as possible, as high quality hospitality areas as possible, you give your fans as good a matchday experience as possible. Give your wider diaspora fans the biggest chance to attend matches when they can. That helps you drive your merchandising revenue, food and beverage revenue, and all of this helps you recruit better players.
“That’s what really keeps the majority of fans onside which is the understanding that, yeah sure okay, we of course want to beat Rangers but just as Ajax and PSV aren’t happy just beating Feyenoord, they wanna go somewhere in Europe. You wouldn’t say to an executive at Ajax, ‘Is it going to be a massive success if more years than not you beat PSV’.
“They’d want knockout Champions League football, they need to win stuff. So what’s the difference between Scotland’s top league and the Dutch because they don’t have massive TV revenues either. Why are they much more ambitious than Celtic? You can say the same about Portuguese leagues where the clubs have pushed themselves to be ambitious in Europe.”
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