If Celtic’s directors were hoping that delivering a double would bring an end to the fan unrest which blighted their season then they were disabused of that notion towards the end of their comfortable Scottish Gas Scottish Cup final win over Dunfermline at Hampden last Saturday.
As the clock ticked down, a banner was unfurled in the section of the Mount Florida stadium which housed the Green Brigade and Bhoys Celtic ultras’ groups which read, ‘Time for change. Time’s up Celtic board. Time to go’.
The more partisan element of the Glasgow giants’ worldwide support had pledged to channel their energies in a positive manner and get firmly behind Martin O’Neill’s men during the final weeks of the 2025/26 campaign and they were true to their word. Their vocal backing made a tangible difference.
Their dig at the occupants of the padded seats in the South Stand, though, underlined they had by no means put away their pitchforks and burning torches and suggested there would be more protests, possibly even further boycotts, in the months to come.
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For many among the Parkhead club’s support, for those who feel the rabble rousers have adversely affected the performances of their heroes on the park at home and abroad during the past nine months and yearn for unity, the banner was an unnecessary gesture which filled them with a deep sense of foreboding about the future.
For Charlie Methven, the former Sunderland investor and executive director and ex-Charlton Athletic chief executive who has been critical about the Celtic board on The Breakdown sports business podcast which he has co-hosted since the start of this year, the disharmony has been entirely justified.
“I'm regularly sceptical about fan frustration,” he said. “In most cases, they are like a spoiled kid who just wants their owner to spend more money. In the case of Celtic, I see it exactly the other way round. There are things their fans feel in their bones which I think they're right to feel in their bones.
“Celtic fans feel in their bones that their club should be a globally relevant, competitive club. But they're not actually asking their owners to spend any of their own money. They are effectively saying, ‘Can you please at least spend our money? We contribute enough ourselves for this to be made a reality. Could you now please execute on that?’.”
For Methven, the Scottish champions’ need a new main stand, a new global marketing strategy, a new recruitment model, a new youth policy and ultimately new leadership in order to capitalise fully on their enormous potential, meet the myriad challenges of the modern game and compete for honours in Europe, not just Scotland.
But why exactly? Celtic have enjoyed an unprecedented spell of domestic dominance during the past 15 years – they have won the Premiership 14 times, the Scottish Cup eight times and the League Cup eight times since 2011 - and have consistently posted eight figure annual profits. Their last financial results showed they had £77.3m in the bank.
They are regularly held up as a shining example of how a club can enjoy on-field success while flourishing off it. Indeed, they were named club of the 2024/25 season in the Global State of Football report that was published by PLAIER and the University of St Gallen last month.
However, Methven reckons they can still be doing more. He believes that building a new main stand – which chief executive Michael Nicholson revealed would cost a cool £100m at their AGM in 2022 – would enable the former European Cup winners to make a significant impact in continental competition on a consistent basis.
“If you are a large club in a league that does not give you big television revenue, match day revenue becomes absolutely critical if you're going to be competitive outside of your own domicile,” he said. “You've got to max out on your match day.
“If Celtic view their peer group, and to my mind they should, as being Ajax, Benfica, Porto, these big clubs which happen to sit in leagues outside of the top leagues, then they need to be able to match or beat those clubs when it comes to match day revenue.
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“The Johan Cruyff Arena where Ajax play is an absolute money machine. It's specced up to the nines. It holds massive conferences. The hospitality facilities are unbelievable. It is what a modern stadium should look like. It can generate big money. I was over there a couple of years ago and they were about to stage two Taylor Swift concerts.
“Celtic would maybe say, ‘But our stadium holds 58,000’. But it's not necessarily capacity, it's more facility. Look at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. It took the capacity from 35,000 to 60,000, but it also massively increased their spaces and earning power. It is now the most revenue-generating new stadium in European football.
“If Celtic were to build a new main stand, I would expect the capacity to rise by at least 10,000. So you go from basically 60,000 to 70,000. But I would expect their hospitality and their premium spaces to increase very substantially as well.
“If you've got an extra 10,000 seats and they charge, say, £20 a seat then that's £200,000 more per game. Then you've got your extra mural income, food and beverages, merchandise and such like. So that £200,000 becomes, in all likelihood, £250,000 to £300,000 per game.
“You then multiply that by how many home matches you have in the season. So multiply your £300,000 by 25 and you are at £7.5m. And that's before we get onto the hospitality. So probably you'd be looking at an annual increase in revenue of about £12m from that new stand. Is £12m a year a good return on £100m investment? Yes, absolutely.
“But it's not just the cash, because Celtic don't need that cash in theory. It's what then happens with that cash in terms of being able to, on a sustainable basis, increase your player budget and wage bill. That's what enables you to then compete with Benfica, Ajax, Porto and these types of clubs.
“Once you're doing that, then you're accessing the really big money that comes from qualifying for the league phase of the Champions League, which is worth £40m to £50m a year, on a regular basis. So for me, as an executive, it's one of the biggest no-brainer expansions ever.”
Methven continued, “A lot of clubs embark on these expansions without necessarily knowing whether they have the underlying fan base to fill those spaces. So they commit and then say, ‘We believe that we can create a broader audience’. It's almost like a build-it-and-they-will-come type mentality.
“But in Celtic's case, they can't put in what they already have. So they're not even taking that risk. I've got a lot of friends in America who are Celtic fans. But they say it can be tricky to get a ticket when they come over.
“So you're not just not able to fit in your domestic fans, you're also unable to capitalise on your global brand, which is basically the thing that Celtic has that few other clubs, even a lot of the Premier League clubs, have.”
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Methven, the Eton College and University of Oxford-educated former journalist who is the managing director of Mount Pleasant Football Academy in Jamaica and a non-executive director with the Global Institute of Sport, is also convinced that Celtic could cash in on their sizeable American fanbase to a greater extent than they currently do.
“It all depends on whoever is on the board of Celtic and who they view as being their rivals,” he said. “But I think their current board regards Rangers as their rivals. Rangers are the same as Celtic as far as I can see. But they've got to look at it more broadly than that.
“Clubs can limit their catchment, their brand size, their audience reach, the size of their infrastructure. Celtic don't really have any limitations in terms of their catchment. Therefore, it comes down to the infrastructure.
“But it goes beyond stadium infrastructure into digital infrastructure. Are you actually driving your global audience? Are you driving engagement and the overall revenues of the club? I don't see any strategy which exploits, seriously exploits, their American fanbase.”
The Sky Sports broadcasting deal in the Premiership in Scotland is worth just £30m a year to its member clubs and means that Celtic are unable to spend what their Turkish, Dutch, Portuguese and even Austrian counterparts can on new players never mind their English, German, Spanish, Italian and French rivals.
But Methven has seen how smaller clubs have benefited from developing innovative youth policies and player recruitment strategies and has urged the Parkhead club – who have banked huge sums, and remained in the black as a result, by selling raw young talents who they have developed and improved over time - to think outside of the box.
“It is sometimes uncomfortable to talk about demography,” he said. “But my old club Charlton Athletic currently has the fifth best academy in England, despite being not that big a club. But Charlton sits in one of the biggest Caribbean populations in the country and has great access to top young athletes.
“That's a challenge which has to be thought about. Nordsjaelland in Denmark, who have been very successful, is linked to a big academy in Ghana. They've brought all sorts of players through that academy in Ghana to Denmark and then sold them on across the world, like Mohammed Kudus, for instance.
“So there are lots of different ways to do it. Increasingly as a club, if you stand still, if you don't do anything, if you just pretend that you're still in the 1950s, then you do get left behind. I think Tony Bloom's arrival at Hearts has exposed that within Scottish football.”
Like so many neutral observers, Methven was bitterly disappointed when Hearts, who had led the William Hill Premiership for the majority of the season, were pipped to the Scottish title by Celtic on the final day of the league season earlier this month.
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But he expects the strong challenge which the Tynecastle club – who have relied heavily on the data which is provided to them Jamestown Analytics when they are signing players since Brighton owner Tony Bloom became a major shareholder – launched to bring about change in the East End of Glasgow.
“I think it can be a turning point,” he said. “Scottish football, even compared to English football, which tends to be a bit behind the times and very conservative, has taken a lack of innovation to a whole new level.
“A lot of stuff has been explored over the last 20 years in terms of youth development in Germany and the Netherlands, in terms of smart recruitment in England, in terms of the use of parts of the world in Scandinavia and France, has been ignored. Scotland is the only place where no one's tried anything.
“Until Tony Bloom came to Hearts that is. For me, that's the first time that anyone's actually said, ‘Hey, we could win by the way, but we're going to need to do something different’.
“The unifying factor here between all the big clubs has been a lack of ambition. In Celtic and Rangers’ case, it is a lack of ambition about their natural peer group in Europe. In the case of Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs, there’s been a lack of ambition about Celtic and Rangers.
“There have been instances of lesser clubs winning most major leagues in the last 20 years - Leicester City in the Premier League, Monaco in Ligue 1, Twente in the Eredivisie, Bayer Leverkusen in Germany, Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium.
“They've found ways of closing the gap. Not closing it totally. Generally speaking, those clubs will get beaten by over a 40 game season or whatever it may be. But when big clubs are a little bit off it, you've always got clubs who are pushing and saying, ‘We could beat these guys’.
“There has been an acceptance by clubs in Scottish football that they can’t compete. My experience in football is that everything's possible. But you have to be open-minded about using different ways of doing things.
“At Celtic, all they are aiming for is to be a minor European player. For me, they should look at different ways of finding talent and attracting it, of being smart. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't work. But when it does work, then you have your moment in the sun.”
Celtic have admitted that “mistakes have been made” when it comes to fan communication and transparency and have committed to putting in place a new supporter engagement process.
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They are also looking to appoint a new permanent chairman – Brian Wilson took over from Peter Lawwell on an interim basis when the former chief executive stepped down in December due to “threats and abuse” – and may replace long-standing non-executive director Tom Allison.
It will be interesting to see if the imminent changes herald the dawn of a new era, meet with the approval of those behind the controversial “Not A Penny More” campaign and end the off-field turmoil.
But Methven is of the opinion that a more radical overhaul is required.
He has been impressed by the vision of Celtic Supporters Limited, a not-for-profit fans organisation which was set up last year to build a “structured, unified and legally powerful voting bloc of shareholders”, and would like to see them achieve their heady objective.
“It is going to require the removal of the current board in my opinion,” he said. “That board is not set up, either by age or by expertise, to be in charge of an ambitious sports club.
“It's obvious by their actions. There is no way that ambitious sports club directors would sit on a rainy day fund. That just doesn't happen in sport anywhere. There's just no way you'd do that.
“They're going to need the board to change. For that to happen, the effort which is being spearheaded by David Low to bring all the smaller shareholders together has to work. I don't see the current board removing themselves.
“There are so many different ways in which the current board is ambitious - but that all derives fundamentally from the initial thought being that beating Rangers is the entire point of the exercise.”
But surely in this day and age, a time when major clubs across Europe are being bought over by private equity firms, Gulf state sovereign wealth funds and billionaire-led consortiums, having an individual like major shareholder Dermot Desmond, the wealthy Irish financier who is a passionate and lifelong supporter, involved is absolutely vital?
“No, it's the other way around,” said Methven. “Clubs the size of Celtic are the ones which don't need a billionaire owner. It's smaller clubs who need billionaire owners. Dermot Desmond is a billionaire. But does he contribute any of that to the club? No, he never has. As far as I'm aware, he's never put any money into the club.
“He's bought his shares, which is fair enough, but he's never actually invested in the operations or the infrastructure of the club. Celtic, which itself is profitable most years, is actually one of the very few clubs that does not need an ultra-high net worth owner.
“Most clubs who aspire to try to make something better of themselves than would naturally be the case can be put on steroids by having a wealthy owner for a bit. But when you are as big as Celtic are, actually there's no need for it whatsoever.”
