All Quiet On the East End Front

Manfred Lurker was our fly on the chicken satay at this year's AGM.

Gone are the days when those fans of an entrepreneurial bent could have made a fortune by setting up a stall outside the Celtic AGM selling rotten fruit to throw at the board. No longer does the Walfrid car park look like the angry village mob scene from Bride of Frankenstein, complete with brandished pitchforks, flaming torches and howls of "Sack the Board".

Similarly, at one time the top table could be seen at the AGM busily pouring cups of tea for the March Hare and Alice while asking the Mad Hatter if he could possibly lend them a couple of million quid so they could put more bucket seats in the Jungle.

Not any more. The Celtic PlC AGM of the third millennium is slicker than the finals of the Mr. Brylcreem contest. The meeters and greeters at the entrance to the Jock Stein Stand would have done justice to any airline commercial while inside, the Parkhead stewards were behaving as if they'd all had a crash course at a Swiss finishing school to brush up on comportment and genteel manners.

The meeting itself began with a minute's silence as a mark of respect for those who had died in New York before Brian Quinn introduced the Bhoys on the board. They lined up on the platform in front of a crowd of around 600 in a flat back 8 formation: Kevin Sweeney, Dermot Desmond, Iain MacLeod, Brian Quinn, Robert Howatt, Eric Reilly, Sir Patrick Sheehy and John Keane.

Martin O'Neill as team manager would normally have been in attendance at the AGM but Chairman Brian Quinn offered his apologies, offering the feeble excuse that the boss was away on some ridiculous pretext like picking the team for that afternoon's match at Dens Park. I mean really!

"Martin takes team preparation as seriously as anyone I've ever seen", said Quinn, words of comfort indeed.

The attendance, I have to say, was something of a disappointment. It had been held on a Saturday in response to requests from the Celtic Trust, among others, but this failed to produce anything but a relatively sparse turnout. True, the weather was somewhat inclement, and Saturday mornings are notoriously bad for hangovers, but even so I had expected more shareholders to turn up. Maybe it's simply that the low profile of this particular board and the fact that Celtic won the treble last season have induced a feeling of apathy among the fans.

Anyway, once Brian Quinn had made his opening remarks, the giant 50p pieces were duly slotted into the giant meters at the back of the giant telly screens by unseen giant hands (what the hell are you on about Lurker? baffled ed) and the screen sparked into life.

What followed was an interview with... Brian Quinn. Why did he have to appear on a video when he was present at the meeting, I hear you ask. Don't know, I reply. Maybe it's got something to do with slickness. As somebody who is generally as rough as a badger's arse I'm no expert on matters slick.

Quinn's Paxmanesque interrogation was carried out by the guy who reads out the raffle ticket numbers at half-time. How the chairman must have been squirming at the thought of having to face a barrage of uncomfortable questions in a clearly unrehearsed live situation. It must have been like being savaged by a dead sheep.

During his grilling Quinn revealed that the board opted for another share issue rather than acquire more debt and that the board would use the £22.5 million raised to (in order of priority): strengthen the football team, strengthen the scouting and youth development side of the club, invest in the club's multimedia and commercial enterprises.

He denied reports that Celtic are still paying the wages of Rafael Scheidt, who will be in Brazil "until the end of the year" at the expense of Corinthians and he attempted to ease supporters' fears in the wake of the OFM for Old Trafford stories by dismissing these as speculation. "Martin will stay if he is allowed to go from success to success."

The final few minutes of Quinn's appearance on the video consisted of him punting the party line with regard to not inviting a fan on to the board.

Next up for the treatment was Chief Executive Iain MacLeod. Having spent a considerable part of his career working for Asda and Wal-Mart, MacLeod seems to find it difficult to shake off the jargon. Hence, supporters are "customers", opinions are canvassed at "focus groups" and leagues are "football environments".

"You have to listen to the customers", said MacLeod, and his focus groups have reported back to him that the customers would rather have a series of regular season ticket price rises than one massive hike every now and then as happened last year. He never explained on the video where he managed to find so many customers who actually wanted any price rises at all.

If you've got any ideas, let him know (I've attached a couple of memos of my own to one or two of the points following). Things like improved parking (customer transport assembly facility: opportunities for retail outlets: demographic groups A-C: customer focus: driving-related Celtic souvenirs) and a train station (customer relocation point: opportunities for retail outlets selling Celtic-related newspapers, magazines confectionery and fancy goods) are still under consideration but, like the redevelopment of the South Stand, are "dependent on moving to different football environment".

By this time my -admittedly limited - attention span was beginning to wander (or "temporarily refocus" as Iain might say) so it was a welcome relief when Our Favourite Martin appeared on screen.

He began by attaching no significance to the fact that he didn't want a seat on the board, partly because he didn't fancy the idea of being at a meeting where item one on the agenda was whether or not the manager should get the sack.

Half Time Draw Person then brought up another burning issue, the transfers of Scheidt and Berkovic (I never did figure out this man's preoccupation with our Brazilian star). O'Neill replied that Lubo is better than Berkovic in that position - most heads were nodding sagely in agreement at this point - while Rafael's fitness wasn't quite ready for the "hurly burly and frenetic nature of the SPL". Seven months after his signing, if ever there was a scathing indictment of the Barnes and Dalglish training methods this was it.

Bertrand Russell's final question about whether Celtic should have one team for Europe and one for the Premier league (another issue which I'm sure has had you all debating into the wee small hours every weekend) was dismissed with a curt "Not at all".

Video finished, we returned to the business of the day, the first part of which consisted of voting on an assortment of routine resolutions. For the most part these were pretty routine matters, like the re-election of board members and the reappointment of company auditors. The voting was by shares held, so the results were 99% in favour of whatever the board wanted. The figures themselves were preposterous - 18,571,428 for, 13,000 against - which lent a touch of farce to all of us sitting there holding up our wee cards to vote.

Having said that, every single resolution was opposed by at least some shareholders, and this even included an incentive scheme of bonus payments for Martin O'Neill should he continue to enjoy success at Celtic. Either the resolutions are couched in language that is difficult for some people to follow or there are some pretty contrary Celtic fans out there.

Resolutions 11-14 had been requested by the Celtic Trust. The first of these called for the board to have regular meetings with representatives of the Trust. The board had already agreed to this one so the Trust withdrew their resolution as a gesture of goodwill, although they did ask the board in return to lift their ban on the Trust placing an advert in the View.

The next one was the "fan on the board" resolution. The arguments in favour of this are all in NTV 95 and they were put quite cogently by Peter Carr at the AGM. He also refuted some of the earlier point made by Quinn in his video presentation.

As part of his seething rebuttal, the live version of Brian Quinn reiterated what MacLeod had earlier said about listening to the fans ... er customers. "We take enormous steps to listen to the ordinary fan", he said, then rhymed off the various channels through which the board are held accountable to the people who pay their wages: MacLeod meets representatives from the Celtic Supporters Associations (or Celtic Customer Associations as might prefer them to be called); there are Celtic road shows; open days (two a year at the last count and one of them was to punt shares); they are represented at Celtic Trust meetings; there are "strip design focus groups" who decide on such things as what predominant colour the away strip should be (try variations of green and white - you can't go far wrong with those colours); there are customer feedback cards in the superstore; there is the cyber equivalent thereof on the website; "we read the fanzines" (oh shit - worried ed); there is the letters page of the Celtic View (honest, he actually cited this as an example) and finally there is the AGM.

At last a lively (ish) dialogue was beginning to take place and shareholders beginning to take their places at the microphone stands strategically placed among the crowd. Current lines of communication were openly criticised as being crap (I'm paraphrasing here but you get the gist) while other shareholders were complaining that letters were going unanswered.

As far as fan representation on the board was concerned, someone said that major financial players seemed to be well catered for but not the common supporter and small shareholder. Looking at Dermot Desmond et al it was hard to disagree with this.

Not everyone present was convinced by the arguments of the Celtic Trust but at least the debate got a bit of airing. Cards were waved in the air like the end bit of Ready Steady Cook but it was always obvious that the 18 million or so red tomatoes at the disposal of the board were going to trounce the few thousand green peppers which had rallied to support the Trust.

The next resolution called for AGMs to be held on a weekend, an issue which seemed to provoke a wave of apathy. The attendance on the day did little to strengthen the case for this one.

The final resolution was that the customers... er fans, should be consulted over future strip designs, presumably so that we can avoid any more hoopless hoops civil wars. The board would rather not be obliged to do this, if that's all the same to you, but appeared to put great faith in MacLeod's focus groups.

Just before the question and answer session began someone on the audience felt the need to stick up for the board. "Stop being so negative and aggressive and giving the media more ammunition", was his comment. If only this gentleman had been privy to some of the AGMs of the mid-90s presided over by the Kale Crunchers and attended by the likes of McCann and Dempsey. Now they were aggressive!

The Q&A session is my reason for attending AGMs. It's the one part of the meeting which the Party cannot control, which can't be rehearsed or video taped in advance, where a spade is a spade and a fan is not a commercial consumer unit. It's the time when loose cannons get to let off!

That aside, it gives Half Time Raffle Ticket Man the opportunity to step aside and let the punters ask the questions that are of concern to them.

First up was Eddie Toner, a representative of one of the supporters associations, who was complaining about the distribution of tickets for big matches and the queues which went along with them. He questioned why Celtic couldn't sell tickets through other outlets. The reply was that this would be looked at "in due course".

The next shareholder was another complainant who accused the board of incompetence over their hiring of Barnes and Dalglish and was angry at having to pay to go to the Sunderland game in order to see the three trophies won last season all at the same time. The trophies were all sitting at the front of the stage that afternoon and admission to the AGM was free but that didn't seem to placate this particular fan.

This was followed by a gentleman who began with what seemed like a complete non sequitur about ancient technology designed to produce complex cloth weaving patterns in the Highlands but was actually a dig at Umbro for not being able to fill the gaps under the players' oxters with a green bit to complete the Hoops. "It won't happen again", was the response.

Another point put to the board from the floor was that clubs should keep the money from tickets they sell for away games, claiming that there were more people in the press box and the St. Johnstone end of the directors box than there were in the part of the stadium sectioned off for their supporters.

Other concerns raised were about Keane To Travel running a virtual monopoly on overseas travel and fleecing the fans, the necessity of offering Martin O'Neill a new contract (it's "under review" was the reply), fielding Celtic teams containing no Scottish players raising issues about the preparation of Scottish youngsters for the Celtic first team, the board's attempt to clamp down on the use of the H word to describe Huns and the perennial lack of tickets for Cup Finals.

The meeting finished with a question about the price of away tickets, the answer to which was a bit of a fudge.

Brian Quinn brought the meeting to close and, to be fair to him, he allowed a generous amount of time for questions from the ordinary shareholders. Quinn and MacLeod had been the board's Larsson and Sutton while Dermot Desmond kept up his international man of mystery persona by not saying a word of any consequence all afternoon.

The Celtic Trust seemed reasonably happy with whatever concessions they had wrung out of the board and the shareholders present seemed very happy that there were three shiny trophies sitting at the front of the stage, regardless of what they thought of the people sitting behind them.

I declined the Chairman's offer to head downstairs for tea and biccies and a chat with a director (I'd had enough boardspeak for one day). It had been a reasonably good day all round and the only thing nagging away at me was the thought that more ordinary shareholders really should get involved in things like this.

My other thought was that AGMs sure as hell ain't what they used to be!

 

MANFRED LURKER

back to top