Fergus McCann's adviser fears Celtic are vulnerable to Qatari takeover

“They start losing, they are about to go bust or they get a horrible new owner. If everything is going well nobody gives a s***.”

With Ange Postecoglou’s team currently nine points clear at the top of the cinch Premiership table and bidding to complete a fifth domestic treble in seven years after their Viaplay Cup win on Sunday, there have been no baying hordes brandishing pitchforks outside the front door of Parkhead of late.

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Nor is there any prospect, as there very much was 29 years ago this month when Low was a member of a rebel alliance agitating for much-needed change, of the receivers being called in.

The Scottish champions have recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic and recorded a healthy pre-tax profit of £6.1m in their last annual results back in September.

“Celtic are doing swimmingly,” said Low. “They are winning and they are extremely unlikely to ever be in a rescue situation. Corporately, they are very well run.”

Why, then, is he uneasy? Why does he feel it is vital that fans have a greater stake in the Parkhead club? Why does he believe supporters need far more of a say in its day-to-day affairs than is currently the case?

There is, as the Italian maverick Paolo di Canio famously remarked during his brief spell as a player in the East End of Glasgow, just one “leetel problem”.

“That hoary old subject,” said Low. “Who owns the club.”

Dermot Desmond, the billionaire Irish financier who McCann brought on board in 1995, has presided over periods of unprecedented success on the field and prolonged stability off it since becoming the major shareholder in 1999.

The 72-year-old has also, on the rare occasions that he has granted interviews, stressed that his involvement is an emotional not a financial one and stated he has no intentions of cashing in on his investment.

Low, though, has misgivings about the disparity which now exists between the number of shares held by wealthy individuals like Desmond and the number of shares owned by ordinary supporters at Celtic.

READ MORE: How fan-owned Hearts are closing the gap on Celtic and Rangers

He is wary of what the implications of that could be in the long-term amid a definite global trend.

In the 21st century, American gazillionaires, Russian oligarchs, Arab sheikhs and Middle East investment funds have snapped up the beautiful game’s most famous, successful and widely supported clubs for gargantuan sums on an almost weekly basis.

Low is concerned that Celtic are vulnerable to such a takeover in their current state.

“It was always very important to Fergus McCann and I, and to many others as well, that Celtic had the right balance between corporate ownership and fan ownership,” he said. “To such an extent that Fergus committed to offering his half to the fans after five years to establish that balance.

“But not enough fans bought shares to enable them to own half. There were four share issues in 11 years (in 1995, 1999, 2001 and 2005). Fans were all shared out. There was a smaller and smaller fan uptake with each successive issue and that allowed corporate interest to get higher and higher. Dermot Desmond emerged as Mr Big.

“The fans’ influence has waned. When McCann and I were they held over a 50 per cent stake. It is out of synch a little bit now. This is nothing to do with the stewardship of the club or how it is run. It is just the way of the world.”

Low continued: “Dermot Desmond is in a controlling position. I am not saying this will happen, but we could wake up tomorrow and find he has sold his shares and control. It would not just be a case of him selling his shareholding like he did with Manchester United to the Glazers. As I say, with Celtic he has a controlling position.

“When you have that, you can find control has been sold to someone the fans don’t want. It has happened to Newcastle United fans, Everton fans, Manchester United fans. Fans have no say, it just happens. I am not picking on Dermot Desmond, it is just the reality of what could happen. It might be something that comes to a head.

“Ideally, the corporate owner of a football club wants to get as much as possible for their stake. They go through the motions and say: ‘I am only going to pass it on to someone with the best interests of the club at heart’. A lot of the time that is true, but a lot of the time it is not true, it is just down to the amount of money they have been offered.

“I just don’t want to find that Dermot Desmond has sold his shareholding to Qataris. As well as being a businessman, I am a fan and believe fans should have a say and an influence in their club if not necessarily ownership of their club. As Jock Stein said: ‘Without fans, football is nothing’.”

Low’s discomfort led to him joining The Celtic Trust, an Industrial and Provident Society that was set up in 1999, and putting forward a proposal.

It was not entirely dissimilar to the “cunning plan” which he hatched – he acquired shares covertly from the “disenfranchised, dislocated and disrespected” - when he was spearheading attempts to oust the universally reviled Celtic board back in the early 1990s.  

The “Drive for Five” – an initiative which aims to increase the trust’s shareholding bloc of supporters to five per cent and give them the power to call general meetings and submit resolutions to the PLC board - was launched in 2021.

READ MORE: Ange Postecoglou opens up on his Celtic future after Viaplay Cup win

“Most football fans only own one share,” said Low. “They are not what you would call sophisticated investors. They don’t know their way around stock market protocols and procedures. They don’t know how to manage their shareholding if they move house. They are not sure how to get it transferred into another beneficiary’s name.

“So these shares are lost in the ether until somebody corrects it. This has had a cumulative effect over the years. If you are someone like Dermot Desmond and you own, say, 40 per cent of the club, in reality it is over 50 per cent because 20 per cent might be lost.

“Because of the issues I had, I thought: ‘We need to have a campaign to reactivate all these dead and missing shares’. I thought the Celtic Trust would be a good vehicle for doing that. I suggested that we help fans get reattached to their shares and we did that.”

Low added: “When you join the trust you pay a sum of money, it could be as low as £5, it could be higher, every month. The trust has no overheads, no salaries to pay, nobody who takes any money out. What they do is buy shares when they have enough money.

“They have 150,000 shares and are in the top 10 shareholders now. In the grand scheme of things, it is nothing. But it is still top 10. When you own shares in a club you own part of the club. In the eyes of the law, whether you are Dermot Desmond with 40 per cent or Joe Schmoe with one share, you are still legally a part-owner of that club.

“But there is now a second strand to the trust – to help reactivate dead shares. If you can reconnect shares with the person who bought them or inherited them, that is the same as buying a share. If you guide a person about how to remedy a defect, suddenly that is a vote.

“The third strand of what the trust do is to get proxy votes. Effectively, they are saying to the 25,000 fan shareholders ‘together we have 25 per cent of the club, give us your proxy’. If they all did that, the fans would have 25 per cent of the club. But that won’t happen unless there is a crisis.”

No fewer than three cinch Premiership outfits, Hearts, Motherwell and St Mirren, are now fan owned and none of them have encountered any significant difficulties with their business model. Quite the opposite, in fact, is the case.

Whenever the possibility of Celtic or Rangers following their lead is raised, though, it invariably provokes the same response. They are too big for it to work.

Low, who stood down from his position as trust chairman in 2021 due to professional commitments and is now simply one of 1,000 or so paying members, disagrees. However, he believes that supporters holding greater sway at Celtic would ultimately have to be facilitated by Desmond himself.

“I am not a fan of 100 per cent owned clubs,” he said. “There is always a cash crisis around the corner. Sometimes you do need businessmen and sugar daddies if something unforeseen happens. A lot of clubs are two postponements away from a cashflow problem. You are looking for a happy balance between corporate ownership and fan ownership.

“Celtic and Rangers are not too big. But the only way you can transform from a corporate structure to a fan-owned structure is with the cooperation of the controlling shareholder. They achieved that sympatico with Hearts. The fans only got to the position they are in because they had an owner in Ann Budge who worked in tandem with them.

“Hearts fans achieved majority controlled fan interest through corporate interest money. Motherwell and St Mirren were similar. Celtic could only move to that model if it was a cooperative endeavour – with help from Dermot Desmond.”

The current attempts by the Nine Two Foundation, owned by Qatari banker Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Ineos, the multinational chemicals company run by Manchester-born billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, to buy Manchester United are reminders for Low of what could transpire at Celtic.

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“Football has changed in the last 40 years and it has changed forever,” he said. “It is now about money. Everything is much more serious, much more professional, much bigger and even much more corrupt.

“Before money came in, it was the local butcher, baker and candlestick maker who owned clubs. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was local millionaires. Now, a further generation on, it is billionaires.

“Now that Pandora’s Box has been opened, you have billionaires of every hue owning ‘franchises’. They are like trophies, assets, for them. I have worked for American owners. They are not really interested in success, they are interested in breaking even.

“They know there are more billionaires than sports franchises in the world and if they break even they will get more for it than they did when they bought it. The Americans at Manchester United and Liverpool are now wanting to cash in their chips.

“Anyone can wade in with money and buy any club at any time. In the UK it is a free for all. That is part of the Celtic concern. Nothing is not for sale forever, everything and everyone has a price. I know that from personal experience.

“What the Celtic Trust are doing is about balance, equilibrium, co-ownership with corporate interest. It is a protective measure against a hostile takeover.”