A DECADE on from that night in Seville and Brian Quinn's memories are still arranged neatly as a series of anecdotes.

There was the chance encounter in the town centre with two Spanish policemen who informed him they had yet to arrest a single supporter; the competing emotions of pride and disappointment at watching his club fall in extra time; and the steady realisation that this mob from Porto might just be the best team in Europe.

That Jose Mourinho would lead the Portuguese side to success in the Champions League final the following season would show Quinn just how right he was.

"I don't think some people appreciated at the time just how close we'd come to defeating one of the real powerhouses of European football," says the former Celtic chairman.

Such prescience would prove to be a rewarding feature of his stewardship of the club. Today marks the 10th anniversary of Celtic's 3-2 defeat in the UEFA Cup final; when two goals from Henrik Larsson threatened to upset a Porto team boasting the likes of Deco, Dmitri Alenichev and Maniche.

It is a date which still resonates deeply with Celtic supporters, but which also sounded one of the most testing periods of Quinn's seven years as chairman.

His tenure would comprise four domestic trophies before Celtic reached Seville, but the proximity to success in Europe led many fans, and Martin O'Neill, to expect that the money made from that run would be given over to the manager so as to ensure the momentum would not be lost.

Arriving at a time when the Parkhead club were restructuring under Fergus McCann, Quinn was disposed to acts of prudence, an attitude which would strain his relationship with O'Neill in 2005 – with the former inadvertently leaving a message on a stranger's phone in response to his manager's claim that Quinn had miscalculated the size of Celtic's wage bill.

O'Neill had been told he could not afford to sign Craig Bellamy to an already well-endowed playing squad, with Quinn suggesting in his message that he would help the manager do the sums with "the help of a bottle of wine and my abacus".

The reaction of supporters was easier to figure out. Quinn was jeered during a home match with Hearts later that season as he made a half-time presentation to a delegation of Villarreal supporters, while he was also barracked at a club annual meeting.

"There was a phrase which was used by some Celtic supporters at the time: 'speculate to accumulate,'" he says. "I remember one fellow shouting that at me at the end of the meeting and I said 'that's not a plan, that's a slogan'. You have to have a business plan and have a way of putting yourself on a firm foundation. That was not a bad thing to have done, let me put it that way."

Quinn would be recast as a popular figurehead by the time he stood down from the board in November 2007 and can look upon the landscape of Scottish football as further evidence that his financial policy served Celtic best.

This season the Parkhead side created more European memories by defeating Barcelona on their way to the last 16 of the Champions League, as Rangers, Dunfermline Athletic and Hearts each competed with hardship back home.

"My own position has never wavered," says Quinn, as though flattening a challenge all over again. "I have seen examples in football but also other places that hubris takes over and people lose balanced judgment. If you sit down and do the sums and say to me, 'look at what the options are', then it doesn't take long to see what you need to do, although it might take a bit of effort and fortitude. You must not resort to punt your way through it but to plan your way through it."

It is a principle which Celtic have since applied to player recruitment, signing the likes of Victor Wanyama, Biram Kayal and Emilio Izaguirre for a combined fee of around £2m with the intention of selling them on for a substantial profit.

It is something of a digression from O'Neill's policy since the former Celtic manager risked greater competition by thinking British – the UEFA Cup side comprising Chris Sutton, Alan Thompson and Neil Lennon – with the success of this latest strategy founded on an ability to source players from parts of the world which tend not to be cultivated by bigger European clubs. Yet Quinn is not convinced that his former club will be able to operate below the radar for much longer.

At 72, but with a wealth of experience in economics following a previous position as deputy governor of the Bank of England, he was coaxed back into football by UEFA to help draw up Financial Fair Play Rules and led a presentation on the new fiscal restrictions at Hampden last month.

The intention is to curb largesse in the game but Quinn feels that the regulations will also add greater competition to any club which intends to scrounge for a bargain.

"The response to pressure at clubs previously was to spend a lot of money," he says. "There will be a limitation on that from now on and therefore I think there will be better resources at a lot of clubs put into scouting, training, development and so on. Whereas previously it has been possible to spot players from less favoured parts of the world, that is going to be made much harder to do in this new financial fair play environment."