Celtic executives dump Martin O’Neill in the Slow Lane

May 2003. Celtic versus Porto. Seville. Extra time. Two of the best club sides in Europe on that pitch that night and nobody who was there or watched it disputes that. We were not inferior, we were not outclassed. We lost to a Derlei goal in extra time against a very good side with a very good manager.

That is the fork in the road.

October 2003. Peter Lawwell arrives at Celtic Park. Notably he does not arrive as chief executive. His title is Executive Director, Head of Operations. Celtic are at pains to stress publicly that no one holds a more prominent role than Martin O’Neill. That football comes first. That everything else exists to support the football department.

O’Neill already knew what he was looking at. Life in the slow lane.

The man who arrived that October 2003 came from Clydeport. A ports and property company. Before that, Scottish Coal. ICI. Hoffman-La-Roche. Lawwell is an accountant. A capable, driven, intelligent accountant. But an accountant. And his own words from the moment he arrived tell you everything about the philosophy he brought through the door. “Everything we do, we look for value.” Not progress, not ambition, not the next step from Seville. Value.

Porto looked at the same fork and went the other way. Backed their manager. Backed their squad. Found the ceiling. Won the Champions League the following May 2004. Then sold, intelligently, from a position of strength.

We got the slow lane.

The narrative that Brendan Rodgers was uniquely at odds with the board, uniquely difficult, uniquely the problem, is one of the most dishonest constructions of recent times. O’Neill left. Strachan ground his way through it. Lennon wore the consequences of decisions made above him. Postecoglou built something remarkable and left with work unfinished.

Rodgers in his first spell watched foundations quietly undermined, then came back on the basis of specific assurances. Better planning. Improved transfer operations. Real structural commitment.

The January 2025 transfer window answered those assurances.

Kyogo sold mid-season. Mid-Champions League campaign. Kühn. Idah. The entire attacking engine of a team that had won the league by Christmas stripped out inside a calendar year. Against Bayern, a performance for the ages from a squad on vapour. Bayern said afterwards they knew they’d got away with one. Their hardest tie of the campaign. Celtic produced that in spite of the board.

Years earlier, when pushed on supporter frustration, Lawwell’s own words remain the most illuminating. “If I’m not here there will be a new me. And he’s not suddenly going to find tens of millions stuffed in the bottom drawer.” Read that again. That is the chairman of Celtic Football Club telling sixty thousand supporters that the ceiling is the ceiling, it has always been the ceiling, and it will remain the ceiling regardless of who sits in his seat.

Now Brian Wilson tells the Celtic Fans Collective that Michael Nicholson’s performance this season has been acceptable. The executives due to attend the meeting don’t show. The nominations process hasn’t changed in twenty-five years. Wilson leaves the room to make a phone call. Sandy Lane, Bahamas.

Lawwell himself is gone. That is a genuine victory for the Collective and for every supporter who held the line. But note how he left. Not with accountability. Not with honest reflection on two decades at the helm. Wrapped in victimhood. Briefing about threats and abuse. One last spin of the legacy on the way out the door. A man who extracted over eighteen million pounds from this club in salary, bonuses and dividends. More than any figure in the club’s history.

O’Neill saw it within two years. Every manager since has lived it.

And now? The man who named the slow lane is back inside it. Seventy-three years old. Blessed Martin. An icon asked to clean up the wreckage of the men who could never do wrong. His legacy and his status offered up as a plaster on a wound twenty-two years in the making.

It has come full circle. Not yet in victory. Just with the quiet, devastating irony of a club that has never once looked in the mirror.

The slow lane. Twenty-two years and counting. And the man who first saw it is still the best they’ve got.