And now, the end is near, and the final curtain is at last about to come down on Peter Lawwell’s official association with Celtic Football Club. One of, if not the most divisive figure in Celtic’s recent history, one thing that cannot be disputed is that right to the end, he did it his way.
Lawwell's parting words as the club announced that the man who was chief executive for 18 years and then chairman for the last two is to stand down on the last day of the year were hardly designed as a last attempt to bring his detractors onside and persuade them of the good he did for Celtic. Though, the achievements of the club and the honours won under his watch were, of course, listed.
Instead, his cutting, concluding remarks were mostly a broadside against the supporters who have made it their mission to let Lawwell, current CEO Michael Nicholson and principal shareholder Dermot Desmond know in no uncertain terms that they want them out of the club.
A colleague once remarked to Lawwell around the time of the inception of the Green Brigade - when as CEO, he was accommodating and encouraging the growth of the group - that if he gave them enough rope they would ultimately hang him with it.
Opposition to Lawwell comes from a broader church than Celtic Park’s North Curve, but one way or another, that warning seems to have carried a prescience.
"I believe that my 18 years as Chief Executive and three years as Chairman at the Club have shown my ability to meet and overcome challenges on many fronts, but abuse and threats from some sources have increased and are now intolerable,” Lawwell said.
"They have dismayed and alarmed my family. At this stage in my life, I don’t need this. I cannot accept this and so I leave the Club I have loved all my life.
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"The motivations and aims of these detractors can be investigated by others. I prefer to look back on my career at Celtic with deep gratitude and satisfaction.”
Lawwell’s Hogmanay departure though carries more than a hint of irony, because if any Celtic fans think his exit signals a chance to be out with the old and in with the new, they may be in for a rude awakening.
The main reason for that, of course, is that Desmond is still in situ. Lawwell may have been known for charting his own course, regardless of ill winds from the terraces, but the Irish billionaire could hardly care less for the opinions of supporters (or journalists, for that matter).
Furthermore, Nicholson was and is a close ally and friend of Lawwell’s. He too took aim at the fans for their treatment of his mentor in Celtic’s statement, with the CEO seemingly as content as Lawwell to burn bridges with the fans rather than look to mend them.
Such a stance though may ultimately backfire, and the fact that he has largely been a ghost during a time of tumult on the pitch since the summer, but granted a six-minute-plus interview to Celtic TV to have a pop at fans over the treatment of Lawwell, is likely to go unheeded either.
Highlighting the level and scale of the abuse that the various members of the Celtic board have faced recently may well have been an attempt to shame the perpetrators into changing their ways, or elicit sympathy from what the board perceive to be a more moderate, silent majority that exists beyond the rabble rousers.
And there are those who would empathise with Lawwell’s position, and express gratitude for the service he gave the club that – no matter your opinion of him – he does love, even if he was handsomely remunerated for it. There will be a great many too, the vast majority perhaps, who will agree that nobody deserves the abuse or threats that have come his way.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for him in that regard, given that memories of his cars being torched on the driveway of his home back in 2021 are still fresh in his mind. In a rare public show of vulnerability, Lawwell admitted that the incident had left him ‘deeply shaken’, and it has to be hoped that fears of such an escalation in the present day remain unfounded.
The likely consequence though is that the ‘toppling’ of Lawwell will be seen as a victory among those who have protested against the board, and far from provoking a much-needed dialling-down of the temperature around the club, his departure will undoubtedly be interpreted as a vindication of such non-violent methods.
Indeed, the Celtic Fans Collective immediately sent out a post on social media featuring Lawwell with his eyes scored out alongside Nicholson and chief financial officer Chris McKay alongside the caption, ‘One down, more to go’.
Celtic are, and have been for some time, a club at war with itself. The once barely disguised, simmering contempt that a sizeable section of the Celtic support feel for their board, and vice-versa, has now bubbled over into the open, onto the terraces, and even into the club’s official communications.
Lawwell’s exit, welcomed as it seems to be by many and no doubt lamented by some, will do little to change that. And in terms of the way the football club operates, it is unlikely to make much of a difference either.
After all, the club have been stressing both publicly and privately ever since Lawwell’s resignation as CEO, and then during his short tenure as chairman, that he no longer had any say whatsoever over key football areas such as the recruitment of players or staff (most notably, when Celtic appointed his son Mark as head of recruitment).
For many, it mattered not. The name had become so toxic in some quarters that the legacy of being the big beast around the boardroom table was to be perceived latterly as a bogeyman, with a residual influence – even if it was imagined - upon which every failed transfer window was blamed.
Accusations of a managed decline under his watch, a failure to react to the shifting sands of the modern game, and a perception that he was ultimately responsible for a club mission statement that amounted to little more than being slightly better than Rangers, have clung to him as stubbornly as his famous year-round tan.
Had he departed the Celtic scene some years earlier, he may well have been viewed as a hero for the way he steadied the club's finances after a period of excess in the early 2000s, but hanging around as long as he has was perhaps certain, as the old adage goes, to see him become the villain.
However you view him – a frugal guardian of Celtic interests and a careful custodian who guided the club through a period of unprecedented success, as he himself and his supporters would argue, or an overly conservative throwback whose lack of ambition for the club ultimately stymied its potential in Europe, as his detractors would claim – the smart money is that the club continue to do it his way.
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