FERGUS McCANN raps his sentence out briskly from across the Atlantic.

“He was one of my best picks,” says the saviour of Celtic of the businessman he appointed commercial director.
David Taylor chooses his words carefully from Zurich. “He pulled Hampden back from the brink. It was staring into the abyss,” says the head of marketing at UEFA of the man who took over the running of the national stadium.

Paul Lambert chips in from Norwich. “Celtic were a massive football with a fantastic fan base. He helped the club turn around in a commercial sense,” says the Norwich City manager of the man he met in the wake of the McCann revolution.

This business tyro, this significant player in the commercial world of Scottish football is a quiet, under-stated man. Perhaps, David Kells, chief executive at Hampden, prefers to let his actions speak for himself.

He walks away from his post at Hampden this week leaving behind substantial achievement and looking forward to a bright future for the national stadium. Central to the renaissance of both Celtic and Hampden, Kells remains a peripheral figure in terms of publicity.

At 63, he now faces a retirement that will include some non-executive work at Hampden. He may also find time to hone his golf game. He has come a long way from the moment he left Lancashire in 1967 to come to work for a catering firm. Spells with Mackies and United Biscuits were followed by his job at Celtic.

“I started out on a trial basis with Fergus [McCann],” he says. “Fergus had a bit of a reputation and I felt it was best to find out if it worked out for both us. After a long time with another firm, I was a bit wary about the uncertainty of football. It was 1995 and Celtic were in a period of substantial change.”

This is typical Kells understatement. 
The commercial culture at Celtic was changing rapidly and Kells was an integral part of that transformation.

McCann says: “He was a star at Celtic. He was a key person in driving the club’s revenues.” The former Celtic owner points out that Kells delivered the lucrative NTL sponsorship deal that benefited both Rangers and Celtic. “David headed up a division of several departments and he developed the merchandising and retail arms strongly. 
He picked good people and it worked well. David was one of my best picks when I was there,” said McCann, who left Celtic just before Kells went to Hampden in 2000.

Kells has a revealing take on the businessman who saved Celtic from the bankers and rebuilt Parkhead.

“He is a unique individual with masses of opinions but he was a great person to work for, a very fair boss. He could get people’s backs up but a lot of things that he said have been proved to be absolute correct,” says Kells.

He elaborates: “People talk of five-year plans, well, someday somebody will do some sort of critical analysis of Fergus’s five-year plan. And if you look at the promises in his initial literature and then look at the final product, every one of those was delivered.”

When Kells left Celtic, it was “slightly perverse” that he took a job at Hampden. “The national stadium was not one of Fergus’s favourite projects,” he admits with a smile. McCann is more blunt: “I am a big fan of David Kells but I am not a big fan of Hampden Park. No other city in Europe has three five-star stadiums and it was a disgrace that it consumed so much taxpayers’ money.”

Kells, though, turned the fortunes of the stadium around “with the help of an excellent, motivated team”. Kells left Celtic Park after McCann to travel to the South Side where a stadium was just coming out of administration. It was 2000 and Hampden did not look like seeing out another year.

“That was a bigger project than Celtic, the state Hampden was in,” says Lambert of the task facing Kells.

Taylor makes a simple judgment. 
“He helped save Hampden. The project was staring into the abyss and he pulled it back.”

Kells will only concede that Hampden was “an exciting challenge.“ He adds: “The fortunate thing was that Hampden was here so all the criticism over whether it should have been rebuilt was redundant. The reality was that it was here.” His priority was 
“to rebuild the reputation of Hampden”. He faced a blizzard of negative newspaper headlines. “We were an easy target,” he says, “but most of the criticism was justified.”

He now looks out over Hampden with some pride. “If the game is good, the atmosphere out here is fantastic,” he says.

“When did we know things were right? That 2002 Champions League final was the moment that showed Hampden was back. The Zidane goal was the moment in time that marked the final turning point. The impact it had round the city was enormous. Hampden is key to Glasgow in that it brings big matches, events, and concerts to Glasgow.”

This year the stadium hosted eight concerts, the biggest annual total. Kells has overseen a
UEFA Cup final in his tenure as chief executive.

The national stadium is now safe. “Hampden does not receive any financial support from the public purse and 2009 was a financially very good year. We have made two very small losses in the nine years I have been here. We have strong positive reserves, and 
we continue to spend money on the stadium.”

The Olympics, in the shape of 10 football matches, come to Hampden in 2012. Two years later the stadium will host the Commonwealth Games. The future seems bright after the stormy days of 2000.

What does Kells regard as his greatest achievements? “I believe we as a team have proved that Hampden should exist as a neutral stadium and that it can stand on its own,” he says. “At Celtic, the NTL deal was the high point as it was the highest sponsorship deal of its time.”

He adds with a smile: “But my biggest success is keeping Hampden out of the papers. If it is not in the papers, it means we are doing things right.”