Dermot Desmond needs to offer Celtic fans serious revamp

So long as Dermot Desmond is calling all the shots, the chances are that it won’t make much difference at all.

Dominic McKay learned that the CEO who ploughs his own path won’t be around Parkhead long enough to make any impact at all.

The controlling shareholder wants the club to be prudent and sustainable and retain cash in the bank. By retaining £70million, fans feel Celtic are taking fiscal caution to extremes and ushering in the very rainy day they’ve spent all their time saving for. When push comes to shove, that’s how Desmond’s outfit does its business – and that won’t flip until he decides the time has come to let someone else have a go.

Stay-away fans won’t have much influence on when that day comes around, assuming it ever does. While many find it hard to grasp why a man with 34 per cent of the shares has 100 per cent of the say, that’s the blunt reality of Celtic plc.

There might be some crumbs passed down the table. A promise to improve communication and engagement during peace talks with disgruntled fan groups before season-book renewal time. Expect a fan advisory board, a new chairman, some fresh faces in the boardroom, maybe even a beefed-up football operations role for Shaun Maloney beside a permanent manager. At some point they might even replace that canvas tent outside the South Stand with some proper press facilities in the Jock Stein Stand.

If the restraints on transfer fees and the wage bill remain as they are, fans will still feel like banging their heads against a brick wall. If final decisions on new signings and negotiations drag on longer than they should, their frustration will linger. Celtic will continue to operate more like a European bank watching every penny than a progressive club with ambitions of making an impact in UEFA competition.

For a club which takes pride in its player-trading model, turning down big money for the likes of Daizen Maeda, Yang Hyun-Jun and Arne Engels because the squad is too thin to cope must be a painful business. More so because they brought it on themselves.

Had a £20m offer for Belgian Engels come from Nottingham Forest two weeks into the window, they could have taken the cash and used it to buy a replacement. In the contrived mayhem of a transfer window, clubs chance their arm in the final hours and Celtic are more guilty of that than most.

If they made their moves a bit sooner, they might be better placed to bank the cash for the likes of Engels and fill that hole on the balance sheet created by the failure to reach the Champions League. Fans think that’s all they really care about anyway and, because they see no real need to explain themselves, the perception goes unchallenged.

While there might be the odd statement on the website pinning the blame for the team’s demise on Brendan Rodgers, supporters are offered no real insight into the way the club is run. They are kept at arm’s length.

Contrary to what some seem to think, there is no ‘briefing’ going on. It might be easier to get Peter Mandelson on the phone than it is for a representative of the mainstream or fan media to speak to someone on the Parkhead board about football matters.

Brian Wilson made an appearance on the BBC yesterday and he wants to improve the lines of communication by setting peace talks with fan groups over the next week.

Celtic’s interim chairman was a Labour party politician for 18 years. He served Tony Blair’s government in the Scottish Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Trade. He is no stranger to dealing with cats in a sack.

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Some supporters hold his Labour affiliations against him. Withering columns lacerating the SNP Government are regarded, in some quarters, as a black mark against his name. All those years as a non-executive director on an unpopular board might make the quest for peace in the Middle East feel like a walk in the park in comparison.

If or when he sits across a table from angry fan groups, Wilson might find the experience as uncomfortable and awkward as questions from the BBC on how the club handled the Celtic Boys Club scandal.

Frustrated with a perceived lack of ambition in the transfer market and the paralysis of recent windows, the Celtic Fans Collective called a boycott of the Scottish Cup tie with Dundee on Saturday.

Not everyone thought that was the way to go. Some fans go to the game to get away from politics and don’t care much for the student union posturing of the Green Brigade. While the rank-and-file seem to agree that change should come, they suspect that the tactics of 1994 probably won’t move the dial very far at all.

‘Celts For Change’ smoked out the old ruling families running the club into the ground when a crowd of just 10,882 watched a game against Kilmarnock. The biscuit-tin board were escorted off the premises days later and Fergus McCann swept to power

The difference here is that Desmond has significantly more money than the Kellys or the Whites or the Grants ever did, and regards the 46 trophies won during his time at the club as all the justification anyone should need for the way it does its business. If he goes, the choice will be his and his alone.

At the recent AGM, his son Ross attacked “aggressive or irrational factions” in the support, claiming that their “only vocation in life is to be anti-establishment”.

So long as a billionaire is running the show and the club have tens of millions of pounds in the bank, the boycotts, protests and ‘Not A Penny More’ campaigns will have less impact than they did 30 years ago.

They might have an impact on the team on the pitch. Martin O’Neill has done the Parkhead board a huge favour by agreeing to move back to Glasgow and slap a lick of paint over the cracks on the dressing-room wall.

Yet Saturday’s get-out-of-jail card against Dundee showed that the legendary boss has enough on his plate coaxing his squad of players to the end of the season without acting as a peacekeeper between the football club and its supporters in a half-empty stadium.

Weekly questions over the toxic relations between the board and the fanbase are a diversion he could do without and, if he really is hanging around, Celtic’s largest shareholder could always help by giving the green light to a serious, far-reaching revamp of the way the club goes about its affairs. They can’t go on like this.