MICHAEL NICHOLSON is Mr Invisible. You rarely hear from him. Wouldn’t know what he thinks about much, really. For a chief executive of an institution such as Celtic, it is quite an achievement to dodge the glare of public attention with such aplomb.
Fail to deliver the squad that manager Brendan Rodgers is very clearly demanding by the end of the month, though, and all that will surely change.
Rodgers fielded questions on Friday over transfer dealings — or the lack of them — at Parkhead ahead of today’s Premiership opener with Kilmarnock and insisted he did not want to be drawn into the ‘negative and toxic energy around signings and everything else’.
Fair enough. It’s hard to listen to the Brodge, though, and not suspect that degree of friction that has marked many pre-seasons during his time at the club is already bubbling somewhere under the surface.
Celtic were rotten last season. They got their act together in the closing weeks of the campaign as Rangers fell to pieces and completed a domestic double, but it was not a good watch.
Celtic chief executive Michael Nicholson is under pressure to deliver quality signings
Goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel has arrived but transfer business has otherwise been slow
Manager Brendan Rodgers has admitted the club need to do better in Europe
Their dealings in the transfer market were a complete mess. Chairman Peter Lawwell’s son Mark eventually bailed out of his role as head of scouting and recruitment in March as Rodgers largely refused to play the gaggle of new players he had brought in last summer.
Five months on, Lawwell jnr has not been replaced. Indeed, from the outside, it is difficult to figure out exactly how the process of identifying, researching and recruiting new talent at the champions actually works.
Mark Cooper, a scout with pedigree in South America and the MLS, arrived in a full-time role a few months ago, but there does not appear to be any established recruitment set-up. There is certainly no sporting director or director of football.
It seems a most unconventional way for a club that purports to be modern and forward-facing to be operating. And that’s where Nicholson comes in.
Celtic’s squad, as it stands, is nowhere near good enough. Nowhere near what a club raking in fortunes through season books, with the guts of £70million in the bank, with £40m due from the Champions League and preparing to sell a £20m-plus asset in Matt O’Riley should be boasting.
At the moment, the group of players available to Rodgers is weaker than it was in May with Adam Idah still to complete a permanent move following a successful loan spell and Kyogo Furuhashi now the only first-team striker in the building.
However you dress it up, that’s not a good place to be with the new season off and running. It is faintly ridiculous. And it’s on Nicholson.
During the club’s pre-season tour of the United States, Rodgers made it perfectly clear that the chief executive and chief financial officer Chris McKay are his go-to guys when it comes to getting deals done.
Following the friendly win over Manchester City in North Carolina, he made a point of mentioning that he’d been involved in a lengthy meeting with them on transfer strategy.
‘Whilst the club is getting on with that, myself and the coaches were really focused on the improvement of this team, physically, tactically and technically,’ he said. In other words, it’s over to them. And if they don’t start getting a move on, it is Nicholson and McKay who should be taking the flak.
There are no deflector shields now. Lawwell jnr is no longer around to get the grief. And Lawwell snr, although still hanging around as chairman, should not be the focus either.
Rodgers has welcomed new signing Paulo Bernardo back after a successful loan spell
Kyogo Furuhashi is currently the only senior striker available to Rodgers
Whilst it is faintly ridiculous he is back in a figurehead position following the failure to clinch 10-In-A-Row three years back, he’s getting on with other stuff these days.
Word from some sources is that the Celtic board do want to splash some of the cash they’ve been hoarding all these years. That they do want to be seen to make some kind of statement, to flex their muscles.
It’s not as simple as that, though. Almost every time Rodgers speaks now, he reiterates the need for quality in new signings rather than the quantity that last term delivered. That, by definition, does not mean a couple of million being scattered around here and there on project players.
At the club’s last annual general meeting, Rodgers was the one who spoke about the need to address Celtic’s utterly embarrassing record in European competition while Nicholson and others were cracking lame jokes about Rangers.
And in recent days, his words, although hardly inflammatory, have made it clear that resting on laurels cannot be accepted — even though the absolute state of their Ibrox (or should that be Hampden?) rivals suggests that Celtic could retain the title by playing 81-year-old Lisbon Lion Jim Craig at full-back rather than just unfurling the flag pre-match today.
The manager wants to do something in Europe. His reputation depends on it. Without hoping to achieve in that arena, you would have to ask why he is back here in Glasgow at all.
And his targets are not unreasonable. The Champions League has a new league phase this term. Celtic are one of 36 teams who will be playing eight games against two sides from each of the four pots.
They need to finish in the top 24 to make the play-off round. It is something a club of their size and stature should be capable of. For too long now, though, Celtic have been a laughing stock in UEFA competition, a punchbag for duff teams from diddy nations –—and a source of shooting practice for too many of the bigger teams they come up against.
And, for too long, the board have given the impression that they don’t care. Just as long as they can finish above Rangers in the table and crack the funnies about them when the shareholders get together for a cup of tea at the AGM.
Nicholson has been part of that board for almost three years now. He’s been in the club for over a decade after initially coming on board as company secretary and head of legal.
Shamefully, the support have largely accepted failure in Europe too. But they shouldn’t. They should listen to what Rodgers has been saying this week. And amid his assertion that everything will be fine as long as new faces are in by the end of the month, his comments about not being able to ‘snooze’ in football felt like something of a warning to those above him in the chain.
‘In Europe, we have to be better. As simple as that,’ he stated. ‘You can’t beat about the bush. You look at where we’re at, we have to be better. In order to be better, you need quality.’
Majority shareholder Dermot Desmond, not so long ago, talked about the importance of European football as ‘a yardstick of football progression’. If that really is the case, Celtic are going backwards at a rate of knots. They need to turn those words into action. And they need to start signing a higher standard of player to do so.
Clearly, going by Rodgers’ account of that pow-wow in North Carolina, Nicholson is the guy entrusted with making that happen, so it’s time for him to start showing why, according to the last set of accounts, he gets paid in excess of £700,000-a-year — or face the music.