A NEW Celtic fans’ group has been set up to try to wrestle back some control from the board and largest shareholder Dermot Desmond.
Fans and the board have been at loggerheads for months over the way the club is being run, which led to a stormy AGM that ended up being abandoned.
Supporters are furious over the club’s recruitment strategy over the summer, which they believe led to the Hoops crashing out of the Champions League to Kazakh outfit Kairat Almaty and decline in performances on the pitch.
Brendan Rodgers departed on the back of that before largest shareholder Desmond delivered a stinging statement, accusing him creating a “toxic atmosphere at the club.”
Chants of ‘sack the board’ have been heard at games throughout this season and the Celtic Fans Collective – established in the last few months – have called for current board members chief executive Michael Nicholson and Chris McKay to resign.
But Duncan Smillie – a former Partick Thistle chairman – and behind Celtic Supporters Ltd believes there is a better way to go about effecting change at the club.
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He told Clyde 1 Superscoreboard: “Sack the board was a metaphor, I was part of it myself in the nineties, you could smoke out that old board back in the day because they didn’t have any money.
“By not buying tracksuits and not buying pies that isn’t going to do it right now at Celtic.
“The only way to effect change is to do it properly. We’re talking about being evolution not revolution.
“We’ve not got pitchforks and flaming torches, and kicking down the barricades.
“We are at the boring end of this trying to do it from a corporate governance and a business perspective.”
The new group was set up around “four or five weeks ago” and says its core objective is to create a voting block that can prevent “something bad happening at the club.”
Their long-term goal is to reach 15,000 members, which they reckon would give them enough to hold around a 30 per cent shareholding in the club.
They can’t go above 29.9 per cent because Celtic is a PLC and that would mean needing to make a bid for the entire club.
Smillie admits it’s a “huge ask” and they don’t have the “£70-80million” that would be needed to get to that level of ownership, but believes getting to 15,000 members wouldn’t be too different from what’s been achieved at Hearts who he says have around half that.
He added: “That’s the goal that we have but between now and then there are small milestones that we can get to by finding the ‘lost’ shares that are in the Celtic family.
“Around 14,000 people bought shares at Fergus McCann’s share issue – it was the biggest football share issue in the world certainly in Europe at that time.
“And a lot of those shares were probably bought by people who bought their first ever share and possibly their last ever share.
“A lot of them have been displaced – they’re in old houses, with ex-wives, in the name of dead family members, we want to try to reunite those shares with families and individuals, we’ll do that but that takes a long time.”
Smillie says the main objective currently is to show they are serious and have already “held several conversations with some prominent people within Celtic.”
He said: “If we can demonstrate we’re doing it with a straight bar and a legitimate way with strong corporate governance, those chunkier shareholders have said they would get behind us should we need to.
“That’s the objective – for us to show confidence by doing what we would say we would do at the smaller end and then legitimately going to the chunkier guys and saying ‘come on let’s get it under one roof just in case something bad happens at this club’.
“We’ve removed a board in the club’s history before and one of our board members David Low was in the room the day that happened.
“We know what that looks like and, if we want to we can effect change if that means removing the board, or other shareholders, or significant people that don’t have Celtic’s best interest at heart that should be made by supporters.”
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