06:00, 07 Sep 2025Updated 19:37, 07 Sep 2025
Veteran sportswriter and broadcaster with a distinctive style. A boxing expert as well as a football writer and columnist for the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, Hugh also presents Clyde 1 FM’s Superscoreboard show.
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Thirty-one years have passed since I was thrown out of Celtic Park in the company of Fergus McCann.
Otherwise known as the man who, history will show, saved Celtic from going out of business.
The story has, in the wake of Celtic’s disastrous transfer window dealings and its furious reaction, present-day relevance.
It’s about the club’s governance – and whether or not people have forfeited the right to administer Celtic’s affairs.
Daizen Maeda’s revelation that he was part of a transfer window shambles at Celtic is the latest piece of evidence in support of the accusation that the place is a mess.
Maeda had agreed terms with another club but Celtic had no replacement for him on the final day of the window. Adam Idah was, however, allowed to go to Swansea under identical circumstances.
And Yang Hyun-jun watched his Birmingham move descend into farce as he returned to a place where he is surplus to requirements. Nonsensical.
Five weeks in Tokyo for the 2002 World Cup might be a small sample size but I found the Japanese to be an honourable people. If Maeda says he will knuckle down and help Celtic, in spite of how they have treated him, I believe the player.
As for the people who orchestrated this never-ending chaos? Fergus and I were turfed out after a game and prior to the start of a radio phone-in on the orders of the then Celtic board.
A group of men who had accumulated existence-threatening debts and taken Celtic to the brink of foreclosure at the bank.
The order to evict their potential saviour was based on one questionable behavioural trait.
When Celtic directors are confronted by their own failure they tend to take it out on those who write or speak about it.
I haven’t been wakened by an early-morning phone call from club chairman Peter Lawwell for a while but I’ve no doubt others have been put on the naughty step in the wake of the window that shamed the club and outraged fans.
I like to go on about the infamous John McGinn transfer window fiasco during Brendan Rodgers’ first stint as boss. When the club somehow failed to sign someone who was a Celtic season-ticket holder in his youth and whose late grandfather, Jack McGinn, was a former chairman of the board.
But what’s going on now makes the McGinn case look like a misdemeanour.
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By the time Celtic signed Kelechi Iheanacho on a free transfer late on Tuesday night, after earlier contemplating a move for the 32-year-old Patrick Bamford, they were at the stage of signing random passers-by to help defend their league championship.
Their title is in peril through what fans perceive to be a combination of indolence, negligence and incompetence by the club’s decision-makers.
The team has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, something the supporters can see from a long way off while the hierarchy choose to look in the opposite direction.
There is no mechanism by which anyone can sack the board of a rigidly-structured club like Celtic, despite the fans’ demands.
But when the hierarchy has gone as stale as the team on the park it is clear regime change might cross the mind of the disaffected and disillusioned.
It’s quite a trick to have more money in the bank than all of your league competitors combined, and with 13 of the last 14 titles on your record, yet to have brought your fan base to the brink of revolt.
An orchestrated withdrawal of money from the club has taken place during the international break, with supporters cancelling ticket-buying schemes and refusing Europa League packages.
Fans propose to boycott home matches in Europe and domestic games while the atmosphere at the club is, as I wrote three weeks ago, more 1994 than 2025.
But there are subtle differences. When I ended up, along with McCann, in the back of an outside broadcast van in Celtic’s car park, following our curt removal from the stadium, I knew two things to be fact.
He was the right man for Celtic – and revolution was in the air.
The sitting board was too vulnerable to resist removal and not long after Brian Dempsey, who had sought out McCann to save the institution, uttered the immortal words: “The battle is over. The rebels have won.”
Dermot Desmond is, however, in charge of an undeniably solid business and yet more remarkable financial gains are set to be announced in two weeks’ time. The de facto owner has traditionally given off the impression he’ll have nothing to do with anyone trying to unseat him.
(Image: PA)
Or be unduly troubled by fan groups demanding the club break their silence and explain what’s going on after a humiliating Champions League exit and an unfathomable transfer window.
Rodgers has, in recent days, described Desmond as a “super intelligent guy”. That being so, he must be aware that all is not well at his club.
Rodgers also said, prior to an Old Firm game that was grotesquely low on quality, that the board “bleed Celtic”.
Surely, then, they must be concerned the club are about to haemorrhage cash in the form of unsold match tickets and loss of commercial revenue.
Fans are mutinous. The board stand accused of sabotaging the progress of their own club on the park. Meanwhile, Rodgers looks in a state of cynical – as opposed to clinical – depression.
He has seen dubious transfer windows before but his downbeat post-match press conference at Ibrox told you all you need to know. The manager is not long for this parish.
There now appear to be people briefing against the manager for public consumption and that really is the beginning of the end.
Accusing the manager of engineering a way out of the club is a stance weakened by whoever is engineering a campaign to blacken Rodgers’ name.
But I would guess that the support is on Rodgers’ side and not those conspiring against him.
What Brendan has had to say about Celtic’s transfer business is only what fans believe at the same time.
If he goes, Rodgers will depart with the full understanding of those who can recognise a failing administration when they see one.
It remains to be seen if he fulfils his obligation to see out the remaining months of his contract.
If Desmond was to go to Lennoxtown to deliver a motivational speech, as 49ers Enterprises leader Andrew Cavenagh did at Rangers’ training complex last weekend, what would he say to the players? Celtic have taken to gambling in the big moments and have never landed a winning ticket.
People in authority owe it to their own intelligence to realise how bad the breakdown in relations has become.
The question is simple: What are the club’s heiracrchy going to do about the alienation that is staring them in the face?
When Celtic exited the Champions League they were hostages to fate, taken captive by their own lack of ambition.
Doing nothing now is not an option. Matters have become even worse since then.