Fergus McCann – Misc Articles

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DICTATOR; (Front Page Daily Record)

One of these men was branded `a devious, arrogant, uncompromising dictator’ by a judge yesterday. The other one is Saddam Hussein!

Daily Record 1998

Celtic supremo Fergus McCann was yesterday branded “devious, dictatorial and arrogant” by a High Court judge.

The astonishing personal attack came as Lady Cosgrove ruled on the club’s cash battle with ex- boss Lou Macari.

She described him as “an amiable man” – but threw out his pounds 430,000 damages claim for unfair dismissal.

Shattered Macari, who now faces a pounds 250,000 legal bill, said last night: “I can’t believe it.”

He is now considering an appeal against the ruling.

The judge also dismissed Celtic’s pounds 250,000 counter claim against Macari.

However, she had some stinging criticism for Parkhead chief McCann, who spoke for the club at a bitter court hearing.

Lady Cosgrove said: “He was frequently reluctant to answer the precise question posed and I formed the impression of a rather devious individual.

“I had the clear impression of an uncompromising and somewhat arrogant employer who expected unquestioning compliance with his instructions and unfailing deference to his views.”

She described his dealings with Macari as “extremely demanding and even dictatorial”.

The former Celtic striker left Stoke City in October 1993 to take over as Parkhead boss.

In April 1994, McCann took over at the club – and two months later Macari was out on his ear.

In his action at the Court of Session, Macari claimed the club broke his contract which had a clause in it saying he couldn’t be sacked in the first year.

But Celtic said they had couldn’t be sacked in the first year.

But Celtic said they had every right to dump him as he refused to move his home from Stoke to Glasgow, was often an absentee manager and didn’t provide McCann with weekly reports.

Lady Cosgrove said she backed Macari’s claim that McCann was out to get him from the outset.

She said: “I formed the impression that he clearly would have preferred to have a manager of his choice as opposed to one who had been appointed by the old board.”

But she added: “Macari, who impressed me as an amiable but not particularly astute individual, seemed to appreciate either the nature of the man who had become his employer or his methods.”

She said McCann had invested a lot of his cash and the new board had given him full executive powers.

So he was entitled to issue orders which Macari had to obey.

Lady Cosgrove said: “His approach was that there required to be a sharp change of emphasis from family tradition to commercial enterprise if Celtic were to maintain their position as a leading club.

“It appears that Macari unfortunately failed to come to terms with the changing situation and the realisation that the ways of the old board were not the ways of his new employer.

“Whether through understandable anxiety about losing his job or through a stubborn, rather blinkered belief that the way things had been previously was right, he forced the issues to the point of confrontation.”

Lady Cosgrove said Macari should have moved home to Glasgow and she described his excuses for not doing so as “shot through with contradictions”.

She said he had devoted himself with all his energies to the job during his short spell at Parkhead.

But the question was whether McCann had acted reasonably in demanding he spend more time at the club.

She said: “The fact Macari insisted on carrying on as he saw fit seems to me to be a further example of his attitude and of a rather stubborn refusal to change his ways.

“His view of himself as a professional who would not in any circumstances take instructions from an employer did not allow him to acknowledge the reality of life embodied in the maxim, `He who pays the piper calls the tune’.”

Lady Cosgrove’s 83-page judgment ruled Macari was “in clear breach of his contract of employment”.

But she rejected Celtic’s claim they were entitled to recover the pounds 250,000 they paid Stoke for Macari as he had broken his contract.

The club are also facing a pounds 250,000 legal bill, but spokesman Peter McLean said Celtic were “very pleased”.

However, the only winners in this case were the lawyers – who between them pocketed something like pounds 500,000.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Scottish Daily Record & Sunday
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 1998 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

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Fergus and Jo have to follow Jock out the door; End of the trail for Three Cowboys.

Author: Keevins, Hugh
Publication: Sunday Mail (Glasgow, Scotland)
Date: Nov 8, 1998

CELTIC had hired extra security men to be positioned around the directors’ box yesterday afternoon.

They were sent home again when the news broke two hours before kick-off that Jock Brown had decided to resign from his job as Celtic’s general manager.

What more does anyone need to know about the depth of Brown’s unpopularity at the club?

He was without doubt the biggest disaster ever to be inflicted on Celtic over the course of the club’s 110 year history.

But his sudden departure is only one third of the action needed.

I referred to Brown, Fergus McCann and Josef Venglos as smash it, grab it and run after Celtic had failed to qualify for the final stages of the Champions League.

Smash it has now gone. The other two MUST follow before Celtic’s ambition can start to match that of their deadliest rivals at Ibrox.

The managing director last week called Pierre Van Hooijdonk, Jorg Cadete and Paolo di Canio the Three Amigos.

Brown, McCann and Venglos had turned into the Three Cowboys. And now the Hole in the Wall Gang has to be disbanded altogether.

Brown and McCann conspired to botch the appointment of a head coach when they gave the job to Venglos and then left him to get on with proving he wasn’t up to the task he’d been given.

Brown interfered in team matters in my opinion and Venglos allowed him to buy and sell without giving the coach his place.

It was the kind of interference which drove Wim Jansen from the club. And Murdo McLeod. And David Hay. And very nearly saw Paul Lambert and Craig Burley take the same route.

Venglos is cast in the role of victim and does little to put anybody off the idea. But victims don’t get a six figure salary for acting as a puppet.

Celtic suffered as a direct result of having no central defenders against FC Zurich in their UEFA Cup tie on Tuesday night.

WHO approved the transfer of Malky Mackay to Norwich City earlier in the season in that case?

And WHY wasn’t defensive cover bought for him after he’d gone?

That was managerial incompetence and there was an air of celebration about Celtic Park yesterday in the wake of Brown’s exit.

There to hear the news of Brown’s farewell was the PR guru who had been asked to privately canvas journalists and discover if the general manager’s image could be reinvented.

I was one of those asked if the public relations disaster could be given an image makeover.

The discussions were supposed to be confidential. But I decided to go public on the subject this weekend BEFORE Brown walked.

Why should I have helped Celtic to secretly make good their mistakes while their fans were enduring a very open humiliation.

Now Brown has gone. And McCann is going. Venglos would be better off arranging a removal van as well. He will NOT be part of the new Celtic.

In the meantime I would offer the club’s spin doctors one piece of advice for free.

A dark cloud started to lift over Celtic Park at one o’clock yesterday afternoon. There is one figure who should now be brought into the place in an ambassadorial capacity.

The club and supporters need to be reunited to show a sense of being compatible and committed to a single aim. His name is Billy McNeill.

He shouldn’t pick the team. He shouldn’t negotiate the players’ contracts.

But he should be allowed to help give the club back its integrity and dignity. Others will follow.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Scottish Daily Record & Sunday

Forget Henrik .. Fergus is Celtic’s real saviour after hauling club back from edge of oblivion.

Tax exile McCann ends Celtic era

Sunday, April 4, 1999 Published at 10:00 GMT 11:00 UK
BBC

Fergus McCann (with arms aloft) rejuvenated Celtic

It was the end of an era at Celtic on Saturday as Fergus McCann left Parkhead after stepping down as managing director.

McCann, who has taken the club from the brink of bankruptcy to the top of the Scottish game in five years, plans to live in Bermuda as a tax exile.
But as the Canadian-Scottish entrepreneur walked away from Paradise – as the ground is known by fans – yet another managerial crisis loomed.

Speculation has been mounting that team coach Dr Jozef Venglos will quit at the end of the season, following the lead of Wim Jansen, from whom he took over.

McCann received a standing ovation as he took his seat to watch the champions’ 5-0 win over Dundee on Saturday.

It was in marked contrast to last August when he was jeered as the championship flag was unfurled.

His time at Celtic has been marked by a love-hate relationship with the fans, and within recent months Kenny Dalglish and Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr launched a move to wrestle control of the club away from him.

Now the club looks likely to miss out on the Scottish Premiership title to arch-rivals Rangers.

Slovakian team coach Dr Venglos said: “I will make a decision in the next 10 days. It will be up to me but it is not to do with money, or whether I am happy or not.

“Of course I am happy today, with this victory. But you have to look after your health too.

“It is possible under the terms of my contract that I can leave after a season but I am not making any decision at the moment.”

But Dr Venglos, 63, has found strong support from striker Mark Viduka: “He is a great coach and the one who brought me to this club.

Five-year plan

”He has not spoken to the players about this. I am sure he will do in his own time but I would be sorry to see him leave.”

Wim Jansen was the third coach to part with some acrimony from McCann but the first to have achieved genuine on-field success.

McCann’s side of the story in all three instances is strongly put. Lou Macari was rarely at Parkhead, Tommy Burns was prone to emotion swaying his judgement, while Jansen was apparently a law unto himself, he said.

McCann always said it was his five-year plan to depart a club operating at a profit.

Rangers director Hugh Adam said: “Fergus McCann came in and I think people have already forgotten this, he came in when the club was on the verge of bankruptcy.

“From there he has built a European class stadium, you just cannot argue with that. His football team won the league after a period they hadn’t looked like winning anything so you just cannot fault the man.”

Celtic share sale ‘delights’ Fergus McCann

(BBC Oct 99)

Former Celtic managing director Fergus McCann says the sale of his 51% stake in the club has been a resounding success.

And the former Parkhead chief applauded fans for seizing their opportunity to buy into the club.

Mr McCann confirmed, as expected, that Irish businessman Dermot Desmond now has just under 20% of the holdings to become the club’s new main shareholder.

Of the 9,997,728 ordinary shares put up for sale last month, a total of 7,525,880 valid acceptances have been received – just over 75% – generating a sum of £21,072,464.

But with the shares being underwritten it means none are unsold and all went for the same price, £2.80 each, with Mr Desmond upping his 13.8% stake by 6% to 19.8%.

Mr McCann said that about 17% of the share total has been taken up by city institutions, which was lower than anticipated, but he stressed that the fans will collectively own more than half the Glasgow club.

After saving the club from bankruptcy in 1994 it was always his intention to distribute his shares among supporters and on Friday Mr McCann said he was delighted with what he called an “overwhelming” response.

“I am pleased with the overall result of my share offer and placing, especially with the take-up by supporters who have invested more heavily than in the initial offer by the club in 1994-5,” he said.

‘Great potential’
“Although the actual number of shareholders, 5,300, is lower than expected, the average investment per person was higher which shows their great confidence in Celtic’s future and satisfaction with the share performance up to now.

“Shareholder supporters will now own approximately 63% of the share total.

“Institutions will own approximately 17% of the overall share total, their strong interest in the placing and offer reflects the strength and great potential of the company.

“Dermot Desmond will own 19.8% of the share total.

“I was happy with how I was able to assist over 3,000 subscribers through the interest free payment plan.

“This helped to ensure that a solid majority of the shareholders of Celtic will be supporters.

“I would like to thank them and the supporters in general for responding and backing my plan over the last five years.”

The disposal, which was underwritten by institutions for £40m, gave current shareholders an opportunity to increase their portfolios and allowed season ticket holders and staff an opportunity to purchase a stake.

Current shareholders were able to buy one new share for every three currently held.

Mr McCann has agreed to gift a potential £1.5m of the profit to help fund a Celtic football academy.

Action hero who lifted the Celtic mist

By Lawrence Donegan
The Guardian, Thursday 25 March 1999 22.56 GMT

There are still nine months to go but the competition for unlikeliest sports-related event of the millennium surely ended as a contest this week when the legendary actor Robert Duvall was seen at Gayfield, home of the Scottish Second Division club Arbroath FC.

Duvall, who readers may recall made his name playing Tom Hagen, consigliere to the Corleone family in The Godfather, was in Scotland scouting locations for his new film. Hence the guided tour of Gayfield. Details are a bit scant as yet but it is believed the American actor has his heart set on making a movie about a heroic but slightly eccentric figure who saves a ramshackle Scottish football club from the pit of despair and guides it to a cup final victory.

Far be it for me to dish out advice to the man who once gave advice to Don Corleone but Duvall made a big mistake when he went looking for inspiration at Gayfield. What he should have done was what I did yesterday morning and take in the awe-inspiring view from the centre circle at Parkhead, home of Celtic FC.

If Duvall was looking for a ramshackle football club that has been saved from the pit of despair he need look no further than the famous Glasgow team. And if he was looking for a role model for the ‘saviour’ figure he need look no further than the man who made it happen: Fergus McCann.

Some time within the next month or so, McCann will sell off his shares in Celtic and retire to Bermuda to play golf. His departure will end a five-year tenure as the club’s chief executive during which he has been ridiculed, abused, booed by his own supporters and this is the absolutely salient point kept the promises he made them when he took over the club on March 4, 1994.

Standing in the centre circle at the new Parkhead, it is almost impossible to believe that five years ago the very same ground was a decrepit slum; or that its owners were just hours from bankruptcy; or that the team that took the field every week could scarcely beat Arbroath never mind recapture the glory days when the club challenged for European trophies.

McCann bought a majority shareholding in Celtic for £9.4 million. That kind of money is loose change to the likes of Jack Walker. But for McCann, an emigre Scot and life-long Celtic supporter who made his money selling golf holidays in Scotland to North Americans, it represented most of his lifetime’s earnings. It was a real risk.

He arrived in Glasgow from his Canadian home and set about implementing a five-year plan. This involved wiping out the club’s debt, building a new stadium and restoring the club’s fortunes on the pitch by winning the Scottish Premier League as a prelude to becoming a force in Europe again. Finally, he promised to hand over ownership of the club to the fans.

Five years on, the 60,000-seat ground is complete, the debt has gone and the league has been won. As of this season Celtic are one of the five best-supported clubs in the world behind Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Inter and Barcelona. They now have 53,000 season-ticket holders (compared to 7,500 when McCann arrived). Steps have been taken to rid the club of the last vestiges of sectarian bigotry and return it to its charitable roots. As promised, the fans will get their chance to buy McCann’s shareholding when he goes.

It’s been a remarkable turn-around. However, what is more remarkable is that a significant number of Celtic supporters will probably be glad to see McCann disappear off to Bermuda.

One reason is that McCann has a forthright manner in dealing with the prima donna antics of fans’ favourites like Pierre Van Hooijdonk and Paolo Di Canio. It didn’t endear him to some on the terraces. It scarcely mattered that subsequent events proved him to be right in both cases.

But no one apart from Camilla Parker Bowles has had a worse press than Fergus McCann. For instance it wasn’t so long ago that he was compared to Saddam Hussein on the front page of Scotland’s biggest-selling tabloid. McCann’s friends say he has become immune to the personal abuse but it would be a shame if such garbage was allowed to obscure his achievements at Celtic.

Perhaps Robert Duvall could put the record straight if he ever got round to making Fergus The Movie.

The man who changed Celtic so radically also had a lighter side

(The Herald Oct 2008)
The Official History of Celtic Football Club weighs in at four DVDs and more than seven hours. It is an impressive piece of journalism, a claim which cannot always be made for merchandisewith an official club stamp on it.

This is not the usual attempt to bathe a club’s history in a rosy glow. History’ delves into periods of turmoil and gives a platform to thosewhose contributions to the club are mired in controversy.

Michael Kelly, the former director eventually ousted by Fergus McCann, is allowed his say. Kelly’s arguments defy logic but, as a leading protagonist, his inclusion remains justified. So, too, that of Jock Brown,who had a short but controversial spell as general manager in 1997-98. At one point, Brown rhymes off the successful 97-98 squad, most of whom arrived at the club during his time there, before adding: “Now, don’t mistake me, I’m not taking credit for that …”

It is gold. Comedy gold.

However, it is the documenting of the McCann era which makes for the most fascinating viewing.

The Scots-Canadian emerges as the key figure in the club’s history, along with Jock Stein and Brother Walfrid. In fact, McCann should be remembered as an important figure in British football. His five-year plan was the perfect template for the development of a modern club. He was first to introduce the season ticket culture on a grand scale, which proved to be the platform for the club’s prosperous future.

McCann recalls: “The stadium had to be rebuilt and peoplewere saying why don’t you just buy the players Fergus? We’ll stand in the mud.
But the stadium was a tool. We had to have a season-ticket base.

“Jack McGinn was saying, We don’t want season-ticket holders, they are nothing but trouble.’Well, I just couldn’t live with that marketing philosophy at all.The answer is that you have got to fill the park. The average crowd was 28,000 and we built a 60,000- seat stadium. How smart was that?
Well, it was the right thing to do.”

McCann also pushed through football’s first really successful share flotation. He did so shortly after the club’s defeat to Raith Rovers in the 1994 Coca-Cola Cup final, hardly the ideal market conditions.

“I had many doomsayers saying you won’t raise money from supporters’,” he recalls. “They will talk a lot but they won’t put their hands in their pockets’. I remember the night before the deadline I was standing looking out of the window of my office in the Jock Stein lounge. It was a Friday night, pouring rain and there were people lined up waiting to invest before the deadline. It was such a daunting moment that I felt I can never let these people down’. Twelve thousand fans came up with cash. No other club has had that happen.”

That McCann was a visionary is well documented. That he possessed an acerbic wit is less so.

Andrew Smith, the former editor of the Celtic View and an entertaining contributor to ‘History’, was a witness to many of the millionaire’s eccentricities.

Such was McCann’s parsimony that he would frequently admonish Smith for scoffing toast in the player’s lounge and even administered a toaster’ ban. “No one ever worked with Fergus. You worked for him,” recalled Smith.

McCann had a nice turn of phrase and Smith, a respected football writer onThe Scotland on Sunday, has included some of his favourite McCann quotations in his newbook, The Celtic Miscellany’, a splendid stocking filler. Here are some of his best lines:

• “The Three Amigos.”

On the big screen, they were the hapless bandits. To McCann they were Celtic strikers Pierre van Hooijdonk, Jorge Cadete and Paolo di Canio,who attempted to extort salary increases by crying to the press that the club’s owners had reneged on (fictitious) verbal promises to improve their contracts.

• “Principles, sir? Sorry, I can’t afford them.”

From George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, McCann scoffingly recited this whenever it was suggested he occupied the moral high ground by not giving in to monetary demands.

• “And all the stars that never were, are parking cars and pumping gas.”

The lyric from the Bacharach and David song Do You Know the Way to San Jose, which McCann offered as a retort to a press man who asked if he was worried about losing stars’ on pre-contract agreements.

• “The dog barks but the caravan moves.”

After the club’s share issue was an outstanding success, McCann offered the old Eastern proverb as a retort to critics, chief among them ousted director Kelly, who predicted it was doomed to fail spectacularly.

• “Do you believe that stuff the old man was saying the other night at the Oso Negro about gold changin’ a man’s soul so’s he ain’t the sort of man as he was before findin’ it?”

A line from The Treasure of Sierre Madre McCann would recite when despairing at the greed of footballers and their agents.

During the building of the stand on the site of the old Rangers end, the increased height of the new structure brought complaints from residents in the council houses behind it.They claimed the stand was causing interference with their television pictures and demanded compensation. McCann said he would make a payment to all those who brought their TV licences up to the club. No-one ever did.

Saturday 18th October 2008

By MARTIN GREIG

Celtic, the house that McCann built

The Final Say…James Traynor;

(1998, An article that was to prove to be prophetically wrong esp in light of Rangers combustion in 2012)

GET OUT NOW FERGUS OR YOU’LL BE HATED FOREVER

FERGUS McCANN has basked long enough in the warmth of his deeds.

Today most of the goodwill once commanded by Celtic’s managing director has been blown away by an ill wind which swirls around Celtic Park.

In fact, Celtic’s irksome managing director has overstayed his welcome. Mr McCann, it is time for you to be somewhere else. Anywhere will do because Celtic’s fans are tired of your posturing and disgusted by your parsimony.

McCann did give Celtic fresh hope but now his grip is choking the life out of the old club.

He should get out and take Jock Brown and Jozef Venglos with him.

As football rushes towards the millennium this trio might just be a little out of their depth. One is committed to maximising profit, apparently at the expense of the team’s ambitions, another keeps returning empty- handed from searches for new talent, and the third is a kindly old uncle figure unable to stand up to the club’s masters.

In the beginning McCann’s methods seemed quaint, and for a while most of us made excuses for his confrontational and abrasive style because he was unaware of the football business’s unwritten rules.

McCann could have adjusted but he hasn’t and comes across as a stubborn little man who will do it his way no matter what. It’s his train set and if he wants to run it right off the rails then so be it.

If McCann really were a supporter, someone out of the same mould as the thousands of foot soldiers who bought into the dream almost five years ago, he would be able to lift his eyes from his ledgers and see the damage his refusal to break his pay structure is causing.

Pretty soon his stock among the rank and file will be so low he may be allocated a place in the club’s hall of infamy alongside those directors who ruled before him. If he is not careful the mere mention of his name in crowded Celtic strongholds, like Bairds Bar in the Gallowgate, might cause a silence to fall over the places.

It would be a great pity if it should come to that but McCann and his disciples within the club have only themselves and their egos to blame.

They behave as though they and only they know better and that is an arrogance which has alienated each one of them and which now prevents the club from making progress.

Celtic, who lost again on Saturday, are a club without trusted leadership on and off the pitch, and it is pointless for McCann to emerge only occasionally either to patronise the fans or to toss verbal hand grenades in the direction of the media, sometimes his own players, and sundry snipers. It seems every time he speaks he makes more enemies, and Celtic don’t need to be isolated.

Apart from last season’s premier-division championship win, Celtic have known only trouble and misery. The last 10 years or so have been fraught with problems, manufactured mostly in-house, and the fans are bewildered and anxious.

They want genuine stability and a reason still to believe, but under McCann, whose allies would have the fans grovelling in appreciation until the end of time because he delivered the new stadium, this club has courted controversy.

How often have we witnessed the managing director rage at the world when he should have been building bridges? These outbursts are not laudable, they are laughable and his stand-alone policy is not bold, it is boring.

Even so, the fans would still be behind him if he had provided a team to take on all-comers.

Yet, Celtic are still waiting for the player who could strike a blow for them and strengthen their hope of retaining their title. That, Mr McCann is what is most important to your customers, yet you and your people have failed miserably to provide.

Celtic are still without a top-quality striker because they will not put themselves into the big-pay league. It is that simple and it is also where McCann lets the fans down.

Listen to this Fergus and try to take it in. You insult your club’s fans when they are told they don’t understand the economics of the business or the workings of the transfer market. And stop telling them players are too greedy and make enormous demands.

These are not newly-uncovered secrets, Fergus. The supporters could have told you how much would have to be spent to keep Celtic on top. The fact is fans don’t give a damn about how much money players want to grab for themselves and unlike McCann they don’t spend too much time fretting about the profit margin.

No one is greatly impressed either that McCann appears to have embarked on some kind of holy crusade to bring football’s expenditure under control, and his season- ticket holders would rather have the title with some debt run up on the transfer market than no title and no borrowings.

These fans are willing to gamble, and remember they, too, are shareholders.

They still find it difficult to believe Celtic didn’t sign reinforcements during the close season and they are appalled that a top-class striker has not yet been secured.

If anything the signing of Lubomir Moravcik at a cut price has merely caused them further embarrassment.

If you analyse Celtic’s behaviour since the title was won, you come to the conclusion this club are guilty of misjudging the mood of the fans and also their needs, but McCann is not the only culprit.

Recently Murdo MacLeod, who was Wim Jansen’s assistant, suggested Brown had come up with a possible signing target, and if the general manager now believes he is qualified to do that then Celtic’s problems are worse than any of us might have suspected.

Brown isn’t remotely qualified for such a specialised task. This man’s function is to close deals and run a smooth operation.

Can we honestly say he has succeeded in his remit?

Enough has been said about the lawyer-turned-television-commentator-turned- whatever- it-is he and McCann see him as now, but what are we to make of the good doctor?

He is a charming and thoroughly decent man, but that isn’t enough. Managing either half of the Old Firm requires steel as well as tactical know-how and I just don’t believe Venglos has enough left in his armoury.

He has been successful in the past but he is older now and I fear he is a gentle man out of his time.

Fergus still in business

FERGUS McCANN insists strict financial discipline has saved Celtic from turmoil

Published: 2011-03-08, The Sun

FERGUS McCANN insists strict financial discipline has saved Celtic from economic turmoil.

The former Celtic chief helped save the Hoops from bankruptcy in 1994 before embarking on an ambitious five-year restoration project.

And, while McCann was often accused of instilling a ‘biscuit-tin mentality’, he has heaped praise on Peter Lawwell and Co for implementing a business model that will not endanger the club.

He said: “I have to give a lot of credit to the excellent board of directors at Celtic. They have made the club much stronger under very difficult conditions.

“Celtic have been very disciplined and effective in buying players and I commend them because the environment in Scotland is extremely difficult.

“It’s very difficult for Celtic to compete at the top level where they ought to be.

“Getting to Seville was a tremendous achievement and it’s something to aspire to repeat in the long term.

“I have to commend everybody at the club, especially the supporters who have stayed in huge numbers.

“Everyone thinks their club is special, but Celtic IS very special. It has a lot of roots and has broadened with supporters worldwide.”

The Scots-Canadian endured a frosty relationship with fans desperate for the purse strings to be loosened to halt Rangers’ decade-long dominance of the Scottish game.

But McCann believes it was well worth it in order to secure Celtic’s long-term future. He added: “It was a more public job than I ever expected it to be and some things had to be done which some people did not like.

“Nevertheless, on balance I like to think I made a difference and the club was in better shape when I left.

“I did what I could and I kept my promises which was important and now I just want to see the club continue to improve.

“It was an intense five years at the club but a lot of good things happened.

“We completed a huge construction project with the new stadium and also undertook a big financial project to broaden the Celtic brand.

“I’m glad I played my part and I’m happier that people now are doing my job better than I did.

“I’m just a footnote in the grand scheme of things. Brother Walfrid was the visionary who started things and his is a name that should stay in people’s minds.”

Rangers administration: Seeds of club’s destruction sown by Fergus McCann

Scotland on Sunday

THE cast list took on the proportions of a Cecil B DeMille production. Yet BBC Scotland’s investigation into Rangers’ monetary meltdown, The Men Who Sold The Jerseys, made no reference to the man who can be held, at least indirectly, responsible.

Football law-breaking and the collapse of the club’s financial stability seem to be the consequences of Rangers using Employee Benefit Trusts (EBTs). And David Murray’s decision to turn to these risky schemes can be traced to the rebirth of Celtic. Which makes a key player in Rangers’ downfall none other than Fergus McCann.

Simply by getting so much right, McCann caused Murray to send Rangers down a path which has proved patently so wrong. McCann was the antithesis of Murray. The Scots-Canadian detested what he called football’s “jam tomorrow” philosophy of Murray. And, as Rangers rampaged to nine consecutive titles between 1989 and 1997, for all his brilliance in rebuilding Celtic, McCann lost the on-field battle.

By the summer of 1997 – year four of McCann’s five-year plan – Celtic were still stuck in the shadow of Rangers. Murray made sure of that. For much of the 1990s, Rangers had run at a profit. With no challenge from across the city, they needed only the occasional luxury such as Brian Laudrup and Paul Gascoigne, which they could just about afford. However, in order to rack up a historic tenth straight title, Murray decided greater investment was required. A Scottish record close-season spend of almost £15million was sanctioned.

A posse of players, headed up by Italians Lorenzo Amoruso, Marco Negri and Sergio Porrini, each of whom cost around £4m, was added to a proven squad. In contrast, under new head coach Wim Jansen, Celtic reconstructed their entire team with what they brought in from the sale of prized assets Pierre van Hooijdonk, Paolo Di Canio and Jorge Cadete. The modest £650,000 acquisition of Henrik Larsson was mocked for being much trumpeted by general manager Jock Brown.Celtic’s efforts were considered futile. The Daily Record set out three Rangers teams capable of winning the league.

In the end, Walter Smith’s final season brought no silverware to Ibrox as McCann’s mission was accomplished, Celtic winning the title and League Cup. Everything changed. Almost, it seemed, as an act of vengeance, the bullish Murray escalated the arms race and put his club on a path to self-destruction. With cash injections from new investors Dave King and investment firm ENIC totalling £60m, he recruited Dutch manager Dick Advocaat and allowed him to lavish a British record summer spree of £24.5m on players. But, even though Murray’s credit tap from the Bank of Scotland was flowing freely throughout his business empire, he saw the need to make efficiency savings… of the tax variety. For it was in 1998 that discussions began with Paul Baxendale-Walker over such schemes.

Moreover, in that summer, the legacy that McCann would leave Celtic when selling up his stakeholding the following year was cast in bricks in mortar as stadium rebuild was completed. With a 60,000 capacity, it ensured a revenue advantage over Rangers, whose Ibrox home housed 50,000. Only borrowing or fresh investment could allow Rangers to keep pace.

EBTs were a means by which Murray could even up the figures. Ultimately, the £47m paid into them between 2001 and 2010 can be implicated in all sort of ways in the predicament Rangers now find themselves – and the possibility that they could be stripped of 13 trophies won during that period.

EBTs allowed them to retain a spending level to compete with Celtic when the club’s bankers halted the easy access to credit while debts across Murray Group spiralled out of control. It is no coincidence that the zenith of EBT use came in 2007, when Celtic won the title, reached the last 16 of the Champions League and posted a £16m profit. However, these trusts were administered in such a fashion that, a year later, HMRC hit Rangers with a demand for unpaid back taxes of £24m. That is the basis for the Rangers appeal, subject to a first-tier tribunal that has yet to deliver a judgment. It is expected to pass down a harsh one that could land the club with a £50m bill.

Baxendale-Walker says that EBTs were only a “problem [for Rangers] because of how they implemented the structure”.

Rangers’ botch is that in order to fulfil the discretionary and loan elements of legal EBTs, they could not lodge payments made to these trusts in the playing contracts forwarded to the SPL and SFA. However, few agents would accept payments to their players that were simply verbal understandings. Hence the fact that, of the 63 Rangers players who are thought to have had EBTs, the BBC claims 53 had side letters detailing payments that were made for contractual fundamentals such as appearances and bonuses. SPL and SFA rules state that all payments made in respect of a player’s playing activities must be included in the contracts lodged with these authorities. Essentially, in seeking to serve, however dubiously, the tax laws, Rangers were not able to serve footballing law.

It is difficult to see how Rangers can now avoid being found to have improperly registered almost half their players between 2001 and 2010. In the past, clubs who have been guilty of this offence have had their results voided. In Rangers’ case, this would mean their title successes of 2003, 2005, 2009 and 2010 would have been won unlawfully, and likewise the Scottish Cup victories of 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2009, and the League Cup triumphs of 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2010.

That would be a bitter blow. But no more bitter than the fact that, were it not for the EBT case hanging over Rangers, Murray would have found a buyer other than a shyster such as Craig Whyte, and the club would have avoided the descent into administration and possible oblivion. That man McCann has an awful lot to answer for.

McCann you believe it?

When Saturday Comes Fanzine
From WSC 116 October 1996.

Celtic’s Fergus McCann has got big ideas. Problem is they’re almost all bad ones, as Gary Oliver explains

In the week scientists went loopy over what they believed to be an organism from Mars, Celtic’s owner and managing director, Fergus McCann, reminded fans that he is Scottish football’s own little green monster – one that remains extremely hostile to its alien environment.

Contributing to a Radio Scotland broadcast on the ramifications of the Bosman ruling, McCann outlined his vision for the Scottish League by expounding the most preposterous concept one is ever likely to hear: “I’d like to see an eight or ten-club league, with interlocking matches against English clubs which count for each league’s results.”

Pardon? “Scottish teams would play each other, let’s say, three times and play each English club once,” McCann elucidated. “By the same fashion, the English clubs would play each other twice and the Scottish team once. You’re adding something to the scene.”

Quite what that something would be, other than offering a gift to satirists, remains undisclosed.

Fergus McCann’s utterances are occasionally whimsical but always profit-driven. Yet initially the slight, aging figure that descended on Glasgow looked an unlikely tycoon: his flat cap and thin moustache (sadly now shorn) evoked a caricature from the Neighbourhood Watch. But it soon became clear that McCann’s philosophy owed more to Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko than Percy Sugden.

There is an obvious temptation to regard McCann and his Ibrox counterpart, David Murray, as having hearts sculpted from the same piece of stone. But whereas Murray’s unmerciful quest for a European league has – for Rangers, anyway – a cold logic, fans are now accustomed to Fergus’ regular flights of fancy; only a few months ago, for example, he urged the Scottish League to admit a club or two from Ireland.

But then Fergus McCann’s credentials have been in question ever since he, the exiled ‘fan’, jetted in from Canada to resume his spat with the club’s old board, ignorant that Celtic were to play a cup semi-final the following evening.

And besides his having a surname other than Kelly or White (the two dynasties who had presided over Celtic’s decline), McCann won supporters’ confidence largely through association with the popular former director Brian Dempsey; yet no sooner had the pair ousted the dynasties than Dempsey fled the scene for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

McCann’s acolytes will no doubt point to Parkhead now being awash with cash following a hugely successful share issue. Yet the club’s current valuation in the City merely confirms that, for McCann, Celtic was an investment of the gilt-edged variety.

His reign has certainly been no exercise in philanthropy: bullish in the afterglow of last year’s Scottish Cup success, Tommy Burns urged the chairman through newspapers to accept the reality of the transfer market and speculate on players: the manager, though, was immediately slapped down and forced into a humiliating retraction.

And McCann, too, has repeatedly fallen foul of authority; his poaching of Kilmarnock’s management team brought a £100,000 fine; he erected a temporary stand, relieving supporters of a six-figure sum, without first applying for planning permission and building warrant; and most recently, McCann himself betrayed the Rioch brothers’ role in Alan Stubbs’ transfer by thanking the unlicensed agents effusively during the press conference.

Understandably, those transgressions caused widespread amusement amongst non-believers. But more offensive has been McCann’s constant dismissal of those he regards as subsidiary junkies. His commentary on Bosman continued, inevitably, in that vein: “I’d like to see this give a jolt to some clubs. They’ve got to get organized on business lines.”

And Celtic’s regeneration is, apparently, the template for all others. “It’s not a matter of complaining that Celtic and Rangers are too big,” he insisted. “Did anyone ask that question two years ago when Celtic almost went out of business? We had nothing two years ago.” Nothing, that is, except for 30,000 absent fans ready to support a winning team, many of them desperate to bankroll the new regime.

McCann has sought to soften his and Celtic’s image with various limp gestures: a campaign of ‘Bhoys Against Bigotry’ consisted of little more than players wearing printed T-shirts for a photocall. And just recently, he has taken to inviting groups of homeless to Celtic Park. All very laudable, but the venom McCann continually directs at Scotland’s smaller clubs marks him as an unlikely egalitarian.

And Scotland’s Glasgow-obsessed media is invariably receptive to McCann’s outpourings; throughout the pre-season, utopians such as David Platt, Ian Wright and Graeme Souness supplied quotes for the tabloids to foment nonsensical debate over whether Rangers and Celtic should quit Scotland for the English Premiership, and if so how they might fare.

But Fergus McCann is unlikely to be around when seismic change eventually occurs; he is already approaching the midpoint of a reign self-restricted to five years. So, should McCann keep his word, he is due to bid Scottish football farewell just before the millennium.

And then we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.

I couldn’t let us go bust … it would’ve been a humiliation

I couldn’t let us go bust … it would’ve been a humiliationThe SunEXCLUSIVE … McCann talks to SunSportBy DAVID FRIELPublished: 29th May 2013145THE club was hours from extinction — hurtling towards financial oblivion.The bank was set to pull the plug and shut the door on stricken Celtic.The problems ran so deep that the easy option was to let them go under.But, for once, businessman Fergus McCann let his heart rule his head.Why? For him, liquidation meant humiliation and that’s something he couldn’t have lived with.So he bailed Celtic out with a big cheque and began rebuilding the club.It’s a decision McCann has NEVER regretted.In a rare interview, he told SunSport: “The balance sheet turned out to be negative — insolvent.“Other liabilities — even a big tax claim regarding Paul Elliott — had to be met.“It would’ve cost less, and left the previous owners with nothing, to go into liquidation.“But it would also be humiliating for Celtic. So we paid all the bills.”McCann is Celtic’s reluctant hero. There is no stand named after him and he’s not immortalised in bronze outside the Parkhead front door.But somewhere down the line, he surely will be.Almost 20 years on from his takeover, McCann’s decision to step in and save Celtic looks increasingly like divine intervention.He will be remembered as one of THE leading characters in the 125-year-old Celtic story.Yet he doesn’t see himself as a saviour — he’s just happy to have helped the club survive.McCann said: “Celtic means the same to me as it does to other fans. I identify with the club and wish to be proud of it.“That’s all. If in my role I helped in some way to make the regular supporter proud then I am more than satisfied.“It was a great privilege to be able to help Celtic.”McCann didn’t need to get involved in the rescue mission.He could have continued to lead the quiet life in Canada where he’d made his fortune.But the Scots businessman hadn’t forgotten his roots.A former social convener of the Croy Celtic Supporters’ Club, he felt compelled to help.For years, the White/Kelly dynasty rejected advances but, with the help of diehard fans and other businessmen, McCann got there in the end.He recalled: “While in Canada I kept in touch with Celtic’s fortunes. After 1988, I saw the club decline.“I felt I could help, and tried to, but got nowhere.“But the more I learned of the size of the problem, the more it became clear that my plan made sense. Fortunately I was able to get backers I could count on, like John Keane, whose role was vital.”When McCann assumed control, Celtic were going nowhere in a fast-changing football world and hadn’t won a trophy in FIVE years.They needed McCann’s wealth, vision and business knowledge — and he came armed with a five-year plan.He put in millions and eventually left with a profit — but he deserved to after risking a fortune to save Celtic.McCann masterminded a hugely successful fans’ share issue and rebuilt Parkhead into a 60,000 all-seater stadium.It took four years for Celtic to wrest the title off Rangers as they stopped 10-in-a-row in 1998 — but it was one of the most pivotal championships.He said: “Although many said that relying on supporters to provide more capital in a share issue was a gamble that wouldn’t succeed, the fans came through with £10million.“It was an exciting time, but a daunting responsibility to take on. I was now responsible to 10,000 shareholders as well.“When I set a target of 52,000 season tickets, the support understood and responded.“And it took a few years for success on the field to occur.“Celtic Park was built with 60,000 seats for a reason — active supporters who make the commitment to be there to fill it instead of watching TV are the strength of the club.”McCann’s approach drew criticism at times and managers Lou Macari, Tommy Burns and Wim Jansen all headed for the exit during his reign.The ‘Three Amigos’ of Jorge Cadete, Paolo Di Canio and Pierre van Hooijdonk also gave him plenty of headaches.In a shameful episode, he was even booed by a section of the Celtic support as he unfurled the title flag in 1998.With Rangers’ David Murray boasting ‘For every fiver Celtic spend, I’ll spend a tenner’. McCann was often urged to take more risks.But the penny has now dropped and McCann is revered in the club’s history.He said: “It was tempting to overspend to compete with others, yes. But I felt strongly that I should never make a deal that I felt was a bad one just to look good at the time.“Bad deals always add up to bad results in the end.”McCann laid the foundations for a bright future at Celtic.When he sold up and bowed out in 1999, the club was unrecognisable from the mess of five years earlier.And had it not been for McCann, the likes of Martin O’Neill, Gordon Strachan and Neil Lennon might not have been able to lead Celtic to glory in recent years.He said: “When I left Scotland I felt I had done what I could and the foundation was there for the board and management to build on.“I have a few regrets, but it is hard to please everyone.“While I asked a lot of Celtic’s supporters — and they came through — the customer is always right.“As I often said: ‘When you pay for a ticket you are entitled to criticise and boo. Just keep buying the tickets’.“My time at Celtic was hectic — long days, plenty of hassle — but very rewarding.“I think I did, mostly, the right things at the right time and learned from my mistakes.”Now in his 70s and living in Boston, McCann runs a successful motor-coach business.But he remains devoted to Celtic and continues to buy four Investor Club season tickets each year. He rarely uses them himself but the club is never far from his thoughts.He said: “I am happy to be just a supporter now.”

Take your seats for success!

The Sun
FAMOUS FAN … McCann and Burns with the Big YinBy DAVID FRIELPublished: 29th May 20139FERGUS McCANN insists Celtic’s huge fanbase has never been more important as the club tries to compete against cash-rich Euro rivals.The Hoops saviour revealed his frustration at the megabucks TV deals handed out in other countries — while the SPL gets by on a pittance.Parkhead was packed out as Celtic stunned Barcelona and Spartak Moscow this season.But McCann insists the only way Celtic can continue to punch above their weight in Europe is if the fans turn out EVERY week.He said: “The strength of the support is more important now than ever while the club has to operate in a league with unattractive opposition and a tiny TV contract while the bottom club in the English league receives 20 times the income.“Filling Celtic Park against Barcelona or Spartak or Rangers is the easy part.“The part that really counts is consistent support at every game at Celtic Park and that will deliver the top-level matches.“This gives Celtic an advantage that counts.“It makes the park a fortress where any visiting club will face a daunting task.“When I saw the Bayern Munich players celebrating a goalless draw after a European game a few years ago I knew — and the supporters knew — what was possible.”McCann believes the financial gap between Celtic and top European sides will close.But he is adamant fans must always make a contribution to the club — if the Celtic he now sees guided by Peter Lawwell, right, are to stay successful.He said: “Eventually, I believe that environment will change and the huge financial disadvantage compared to big clubs in the major European markets will be overcome.“I am sure the management is doing all it can but, again, success will come if the supporters do their part.“When I was at Celtic — before and since too — if someone told me ‘I am a Celtic supporter’, I’d answer: ‘How? What support do you provide?’“My time at the Croy CSC reminds me of the importance of dedicated support.“The members knew that their role was vital, especially in the hard times.“They had a rule that a bus would always run at the members’ expense, despite their limited funds.“Some games were against poor opposition, standing in bad weather, but being there in numbers was important.“And so it still is today.”

MY 10 IN A ROW; Why Fergus needs a humility check.

Daily Record
DAVID MURRAY has stoked up the passions for Saturday’s Old Firm meeting with a thinly-veiled attack on Celtic owner Fergus McCann.

Just two days before the second, and potentially crucial, head-to-head of Scottish football’s big two, Murray has made it abundantly clear he has little time for his opposite number at Parkhead.

He describes McCann as a leader who could have more humility or grace.

As the Rangers owner prepares to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Ibrox reign this weekend, he has spoken exclusively to the Record on his years at the top.

And his blunt comments will crush any hope of the Premier League’s two most powerful influences ever forming a meaningful friendship.

Murray said: “When Fergus came into Scottish football everyone welcomed him, but I’ve never known him publicly to say well done or to congratulate any of the other clubs for anything they have done.

“We are working to different agendas, of course, because I don’t intend going anywhere, but all I’d really say about Fergus is that he’s not as good at giving plaudits as he at taking them.

“Some clubs have done extremely well in building up their grounds during difficult times and the larger clubs should give them some credit for that. There is nothing wrong with saying `well done’ to someone else and it does no harm either to be humble now and then.

“When Hearts beat us in the Scottish Cup final at the end of last season, which meant our season was one of failure, we said well done and again at the Rangers AGM I congratulated Hearts. It isn’t easy to look at failure and accept it, but what’s so wrong about saying well done to others when they have achieved something.

“It isn’t a bad way to live, but I hope that when Fergus goes he is remembered for what he has achieved for his club.”
COPYRIGHT 1998 Scottish Daily Record & Sunday

Glenn Gibbons: No point in McCann/Rangers parallel

The Scotsman

by GLENN GIBBONS

Published on the 15 February
2014

ON THE approach to 4 March, the 20th anniversary of Fergus McCann’s acquisition of Celtic, we will witness a predictable, spreading rash of revisionism among many, from supporters to media, who passed most of his five years in Scotland casting the entrepreneur as a figure of ridicule and who now clamour for his immortalisation in marble or bronze.

This outbreak will be accompanied by an equally unsurprising rush to relate Rangers’ troubles in recent years to those of their great rivals two decades ago and to conclude that what the lurching Ibrox club require above all is a latter-day Fergus McCann.

The first of these two phenomena will be occasionally hilarious as the rewriting of the public and media perception of the Scots-Canadian proliferates; the second of them will be merely laughable.

To draw parallels between the circumstances that drew McCann across the Atlantic from Montreal in 1994 and those which caused Rangers to slither into administration two years ago yesterday is to dwell on a comparison that has no validity.

The would-be rescuer’s confidence in Celtic’s prospects of being restored to health and prosperity two decades ago may be detected in the fact that he attempted to bring his influence to the club several years before, only to be rebuffed by a hopelessly aloof board of directors. McCann had ­clearly recognised the potential for recovery, but it was most tellingly articulated by Len Murray, the ­well-known Glasgow lawyer, during an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders when the financial crisis was at its most dangerous.

Murray told the assembly that the club’s debt stood at around £7 million and that its basic value was £20,000; that is, 20,000 ordinary shares at £1 each. “No company in the history of business,” Murray concluded, “has ­survived liabilities amounting to three hundred and fifty times its ­capital value.”

The lawyer, of course, did not mean that the debt had become unmanageable, but that the club was ludicrously undervalued. This was due to the anachronistic, scandalous regulations of the private limited company, which decreed that shares could only be traded with the blessing of the directors and that board members should have first refusal on any that became available. Most significantly of all, the shares were not allowed to “float” to their true value, as a result of which directors were able to purchase them for around £3 each.

They were, naturally, allowed to soar to their proper price when McCann came buying. Bulk holders such as Michael Kelly, Chris White and David Smith commanded around £300 per share, a form of hardball that left McCann understandably resentful over the disappearance into their pockets of funds that could have been used in the resuscitation of the business.

What mattered most to McCann, however, was that the outdated management of the club had created a mess in which crowds were down to well under 20,000 – in one or two instances, struggling to reach five figures – and that the previous regime had insisted on a limit of only 7,000 season tickets, on the preposterous basis that “season tickets are more trouble than they’re worth”.

It is a measure of the persuasiveness of McCann’s personality and his formal business plan that Dermot Desmond, the Irish money machine who had no previous interest in football, should be so readily recruited as a major investor. The two men were introduced by Robert Lee, then a young professional golfer and now a pundit on Sky Television, who told Desmond that “there’s somebody here I think you should meet”.

In a lengthy conversation in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London a couple of years later, Desmond told me that he had taken one look at ­McCann’s business plan and asked him one question: “How much do you want?” When he was told that taking £4m worth of stock in the upcoming share issue would be advisable, ­Desmond asked a second question: “Do you want any more?”

The Irishman added that “it was clear from the start that Fergus would make a success of it. There was no way this was going to fail. I told him that if he wanted any further investment down the line, I would be very happy to oblige”.

McCann not only built a new, 60,000-seat stadium, but finished up with 53,000 season-ticket holders, a miracle of marketing that brought full houses to Celtic Park for opposition teams who would, in the past, have lacked the drawing power of a ­Christmas cracker magnet.

The single most significant difference between the commercial naivety of clueless directors that brought Celtic to its knees and the appalling 
financial excesses of David Murray that led eventually to Rangers’ ­liquidation is that the latter club was left with little or no scope for recovery. Rangers hit the wall when they ­already enjoyed capacity crowds, record season-ticket sales and ­maximum annual turnover.

These details are among a number of reasons why it is impossible to imagine a conversation and a transaction between two possibly life-saving investors in present-day Rangers such as took place between McCann and Desmond 20 years ago.

Far from thriving on new-found revenue streams, Rangers are haemorrhaging money because they have no credit lines, the need to pay for services and supplies on delivery being the most damaging consequence of their previous actions in leaving creditors seriously disadvantaged.

Fergus McCann once agreed that “it would have been cheaper to go into liquidation, but it would not have been the right thing for Celtic to do”. It was a nifty seizure of the moral high ground, but, given his record, he should be credited with the nous also to have realised that, in the long term, administration and liquidation would have been an unacceptably ­expensive business.

Brian Quinn’s praise for Fergus McCann’s legacy By: Kenny McKay on 02 Mar, 2014 12:01 Celticfc.net

FORMER Celtic chairman Brian Quinn believes the legacy of Fergus McCann’s tenure at Celtic is that the club is now one of the best run in Europe. Almost 20 years to the day when Fergus breathed new life into Celtic as his takeover, share issue and stadium rebuild changed the face of the club forever, Quinn was back to reflect on the impact. As a life long Celtic supporter, Quinn jumped at the chance to join the revolution when he became a non-executive Director and vice-chairman of the plc board in March of 1996. He later became chairman. And as the club marked the 20th anniversary of a defining moment in Celtic´s history, the former chairman was warmly welcomed by the Paradise support ahead of the game with Inverness Caley Thistle. He said: “It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact that Fergus had. He transformed the club from one that was behind the game to a club that was up for the game and looking ahead all the time.” Accepting a warm round of applause, Quinn broke off his address to the crowd to reach into his coat pocket to produce something that would come to symbolise McCann’s tenure at the club – the bunnet. He continued: “Among all the achievements that Fergus brought to Celtic, I’d say that possibly the biggest was the share issue. “The share issue gave the supporters the chance to be a tangible part of the club and the ground was built by the supporters so they felt like this was their stadium and I thought that this was very important. “The club is now, in my estimation, one of the best-run clubs in the UK and, in fact, in Europe. It’s efficient, properly managed financially, it´s got a forward plan that looks beyond the current season ahead and it has a long-term view as to where the club wants to go. It is a terrific football club.”
Celtic Football Club – Brian Quinn’s praise for Fergus McCann’s legacy

Fergus McCann: Man of logic, reluctant saviour of Celtic

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/37204507
Aug 2016
By Richard Wilson

BBC Scotland

4 hours ago From the section Football

Fergus McCann with a model of a new Celtic stand
Celtic Park was rebuilt during Fergus McCann’s time in charge

Fergus McCann never did think much of acclaim. He rescued Celtic but refused to consider himself as a savour.

“I’m just one of yesterday’s features,” says the Scottish-born Canadian businessman who had a controlling stake in the club for five years from 1994. “I’m a blip in the background.”

While recalling his five years at Celtic Park, he doesn’t veer off into sentimentality. His attachment to the club is entirely emotional – he tells a story of sitting at the back of a meeting while working for Marconi in Canada in 1967 listening to the European Cup final on the BBC World Service – but McCann’s involvement with the club was “logical”.

He is proud of the way the club is run now, not because of the league titles being accumulated but the clear business sense that prevails.

“It’s so easy for the club to be criticised, as they so often are,” he says. “You can buy short-term success at great cost.
Fergus McCann and Tom Boyd unfurl the championship flag in 1998
Fergus McCann and Tom Boyd unfurled the championship flag in 1998

“You go back to the previous coach [Martin O’Neill], who brought in three players at £6m a pop, aged 28.

“They did well, they got to [the Uefa Cup final in] Seville, fine. But look at the balance sheet – the players are gone, the salaries are way up, we didn’t make any money.”

The assessment is typical of McCann: hard-headed, rational.
Act 1: Rescue

McCann spent two years talking to the Celtic board about trying to help the club as it struggled financially in the early 1990s. The response was generally “when will you be returning to Montreal, Mr McCann?”.

So he regrouped, found some willing allies and set about trying to oust some of the board members and instigate “radical change”. With Celtic only hours from bankruptcy and fans campaigning against the board, he made his move, flying to Scotland to pay off the club’s debts and begin the process of taking over.

“I didn’t have a plan to come to Celtic Park and run the club for five years,” he says. “But it ended up being the formula that had to be applied to make it work.

“Staying out of bankruptcy was expensive. That would have been the easiest way, as you have seen in the case of the other club in Glasgow [Rangers].

“I was doing what I thought was logical. I was not donating money – I was investing and I expected to get my money back. I didn’t expect to make a lot of money. I did, but that’s the way it happened.

“But it was not coming in as a saviour. I had a responsibility to the supporters to make sure their money wasn’t wasted.

“I put two thirds of my money [he spent £9.5m] into the club. It was the correct thing to do.”
Act 2: Building foundations

McCann never courted publicity or popularity. He surrounded himself with smart executives, directors and advisors, and spent five years trying to balance the club’s ambition with the reality of its situation and financial imperatives.

He oversaw the rebuilding of Celtic Park, funded in part by a share issue, but also the strengthening of the club’s foundations so that a similar period of turmoil could never happen again. There were obstacles along the way, though, as he found as he sought a successor to the manager, Lou Macari.

“I was under a lot of pressure to get Tommy Burns in, from board members and others I listened to,” McCann says. “I suppose, looking back, maybe I should just have held firm and got the Dutch coach we were looking at at the time.

“I hired Tommy Burns, not because he was the best qualified candidate but because the fans would give him time. That was the asset he had.
Tommy Burns and Fergus McCann
Tommy Burns was not Fergus McCann’s preferred choice as manager

“When I came in and Tommy Burns applies for the job, I go to meet him. But I got fined [£100,000] for the approach. The previous highest fine for a similar situation was £5k.

“Tommy Burns’ salary with one year to go at Kilmarnock was £40k. I felt [the fine] was vindictive and unnecessary and excessive.

“[Celtic] are not entirely surrounded by friends. The Scottish environment is such that there has been some prejudice against immigrants.

“Celtic is seen as having a big Catholic population among its support. Celtic supporters understand that Celtic is a symbol of their dealing with that by not being second to anyone.”
Act 3: Moving on

McCann sold up in 1999, making a healthy profit. He returned to Canada and a life away from the public eye.

He was booed by some Celtic fans when he unfurled the league title flag that summer but has since returned to glorious acclaim from supporters who have a different perspective now on his application of sound business principles ahead of rampant ambition.

McCann continues to follow Celtic, to understand their place in the game but also to hold views that would radicalise, and enrage, parts of Scottish football.

“All the small clubs hate Celtic and Rangers, who basically feed them,” he says. “It comes down to human nature, but it also speaks to the structure in Scottish football.
Rangers chairman David Murray and Fergus McCann
Fergus McCann believes Scotland’s other clubs dislike Celtic and Rangers

“A lot of things have changed in 30 years: television habits, media, salaries, worldwide brands, Champions League, all these new things. In Scotland, not much has changed.

“They fiddle around with deck chairs, but you have still got 42 supposed-to-be-professional clubs in a population of five million.

“There are five million people in Greater Manchester, who have only got two clubs. There are five million in Boston, who only have one club.

“Don’t forget your dwindling potential audience. I watched a game, Celtic against Kilmarnock, 6,000 people, with close to 5,000 Celtic fans. What are Kilmarnock bringing to the game?

“They should maybe talk about British football. Celtic can take its place in British football. That’s maybe where they belong.”

Listen to the full interview on BBC Radio S