Glasgow, Friday: three miles east of the city centre lies Celtic Park, the stadium where a Scottish sporting institution, Celtic Football Club, have been playing home matches since 1892.
Outside its main entrance are three statues: one of the club’s founder, the Irish priest Brother Walfrid; one of the great winger, Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone; and between them the club’s greatest manager and immortal figure, Jock Stein. On the base of the Stein tribute is one of his most famous quotations: “Football without the fans is nothing.”
On huge banners hanging beside the Jock Stein Stand are reminders of the club’s eight domestic Treble-winning seasons and another Stein quote from 1967, when they became the first British team to win the European Cup (today’s Champions League): “We did it by playing football, pure, beautiful, inventive football.”
Across from this history is the modern football world — the club’s superstore. At Christmas you can buy Celtic baubles to hang from your tree and Celtic crackers to lay on the table, all sold beneath a slogan: ‘You don’t play for Celtic. You live for Celtic.’
On some days this place is known as Parkhead, after the local district; on others as ‘Paradise’. The latter is a nickname from its foundation. Lately the term’s use has dwindled, and Celtic’s latest successor to Stein, Wilfried Nancy, may wonder if he has misheard. Paradise?
Nancy arrived at Celtic from MLS team Columbus Crew only a fortnight ago. In any normal football situation he would be acquainting himself with his new players and surroundings, settling in at the start of a contract running to June 2028. But these are abnormal times in Glasgow and on Thursday morning, Nancy was the subject of a rumour that his time in Scotland’s football capital was up already.
Wilfried Nancy celebrates winning MLS Cup with Columbus Crew in 2023 (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
It was incorrect. That it felt plausible, however, is a sign of Nancy’s precarious situation and of the most bizarre Celtic season in recent memory.
It began in the summer, with manager Brendan Rodgers entering the final year of his three-year deal and the club keen to extend the working relationship.
Rodgers, though, was hesitating. He had seen striker Kyogo Furuhashi sold in January and forward Nicolas Kuhn was soon to depart for Como in Italy’s Serie A. The manager felt Celtic were undercooked as they faced the little-known Kairat Almaty in a Champions League qualification play-off at the end of August. Progress to the league phase was important in terms of finances, future recruitment and self-esteem.
But Celtic were eliminated in a penalty shootout, Rodgers appears to have ignored the club’s contract offer and results as well as performances dipped.
Another striker, Adam Idah, was sold on transfer deadline day at the start of September. On October 19, Celtic lost away to Dundee for the first time in 37 years. Afterwards, Rodgers made his now infamous and inflammatory suggestion that if you are “given the keys to a Honda Civic” you do not “drive it like a Ferrari”.
One week on, Celtic lost again, 3-1 at Hearts, and 24 hours later Rodgers was gone, hurried out as leading shareholder Dermot Desmond attacked his alleged selfishness and for contributing to “a toxic atmosphere around the club”.
There was little outcry over Rodgers’ departure. Fans not wholly convinced by domestic trophies would refer to his defenders’ circulation and re-circulation of the ball as the ‘horseshoe of doom’.
But that did not mean there was Celtic unity. The hierarchy was at odds with a sizeable chunk of the fanbase and in early November banned the Green Brigade supporters’ group from Celtic Park.
From nowhere, 73-year-old Martin O’Neill — Celtic’s manager during a trophy-laden five years at the start of the century — returned to lighten the mood and win some games.
Meanwhile, Celtic spoke to Nancy, but his arrival was delayed by paperwork and when he did come, his name was misspelt in Celtic’s Stock Exchange announcement. At the club’s AGM, angry fans turned up to show symbolic red cards to board members. Long-serving chairman Peter Lawwell intervened to abort proceedings.
If Paradise was not lost, it had been misplaced.
Celtic fans protest against the board during a League Cup tie at Partick Thistle (Alan Harvey/Getty Images)
In Nancy’s first game, league leaders Hearts won at Celtic Park in a miserable downpour. Four days later at the same venue, Roma were 3-0 up at half-time in the Europa League, which was the final score. Three days on, Celtic lost the Scottish League Cup final at Hampden Park to St Mirren, a club with an 8,000-capacity home stadium.
Looking crestfallen — three games, three defeats — the 48-year-old Nancy then had to take his deflated players and the new 3-4-3 system to Dundee United on Wednesday night.
Before kick-off, Lawwell announced he would be leaving the club on December 31, saying in a statement that “abuse and threats from some sources have increased and are now intolerable”. The remaining board then watched as Celtic tore Dundee United apart, created chance after chance and scored once. Had either Furuhashi or Idah been in the team, they would surely have scored more.
Celtic’s 1-0 half-time advantage was a 2-1 deficit just after the hour, and it stayed that way. Celtic had lost at Dundee United for the first time since 2014; they are six points adrift of Hearts, albeit with a game in hand.
Not since 1978 had a Celtic manager overseen four consecutive defeats. Most were shocked to discover the previous occasion came under Stein. As Alan Pattullo put it in The Scotsman newspaper on Thursday: “Emulating Jock Stein would have been a dream for Wilfried Nancy.”
Just not like this.
As Nancy walked along the touchline after the final whistle, Celtic’s travelling fans — mainly supportive of Nancy hitherto — chanted that old, traditional Scottish greeting: “Nancy, get tae f**k”.
Paradise.
Beyond Celtic and also within the support base, there was and is sympathy for Nancy.
The near-invisibility of Major League Soccer in Britain means his success or otherwise there is taken on trust. But he is seen as a measured man thrust into a hostile environment and on Scotland’s east coast in midweek he had the slumped demeanour of someone who has just realised he is on the wrong train.
Nancy is the first Celtic manager since the 1970s to lose four games in a row (Craig Williamson/Getty Images)
When he spoke to reporters in Dundee, Nancy added to the air of uncertain geography by saying he was aware of the intensity and demands of Scottish football because, as a player, he had almost signed for Carlisle United. Given Carlisle is in England, 10 miles south of the border, even his sympathisers were unimpressed.
Thus ‘Carlisle’ joins ‘toxic’ and ‘Honda Civic’ in this season’s unwanted Celtic roll-call.
As it stands, though, on Sunday Nancy will select his fifth Celtic starting XI for the Scottish Premiership game at home to Aberdeen. An issue for Nancy and for those who checked his CV, interviewed him and appointed him is whether, win, lose or draw, he is past the point of recovery. That sounds premature, reactionary, but Celtic have not lost five times in a row since 1953. When every match becomes a referendum on a coach’s suitability, it is approaching unsustainable.
Were Celtic not splintering, there might have been a co-ordinated call to rally behind Nancy and his team on Sunday. “Let him cook,” said Nancy’s former colleague at MLS team Montreal, Thierry Henry, this week. It’s an optimistic plea.
But Celtic are split.
There will be tarpaulin over seats in the section formerly occupied by the Green Brigade, whose ban is ongoing, for the Aberdeen game. They are now part of the Celtic Fans Collective (CFC), who do not represent every Celtic supporter but are far from some fringe grouping.
The club, including chief executive Michael Nicholson, met with the Collective in early October, but there was little sense of agreement at the end of the meeting and, since then, the gap between the two parties has only widened as language has hardened.
“We will not bow,” said a Collective statement last month, “as we believe that having a Celtic Football Club that we can be proud to support, reflects our social values and sporting ambition, is worth fighting for.”
Peter Lawwell during the recent Europa League home defeat against Roma (Andrew Milligan/Getty Images)
There is an acceptance from match-going Celtic supporters that audiences far from this quarter of Glasgow will not fully understand how 13 Scottish titles in the past 14 years, six Scottish Cups in the last nine years and wins in eight of the last 12 Scottish League Cups is not total success. But Celtic Football Club’s barometer is Europe, not Scotland, where Rangers, their arch-rivals from across the city, have been mainly absent as a force since formal liquidation in 2012.
CFC’s nagging concern is about unfulfilled potential and members make a comparison with clubs such as Bayern Munich, saying their sense of achievement is not judged by how they get on against Mainz or Freiburg in the Bundesliga, but how far they advance in European competition. They note Celtic have not won a knockout tie in Europe since 2004, when O’Neill was in charge first time around.
Solvent and with millions in the bank, the board’s counter is that, unlike their most near and dear neighbours have been, Celtic are not in financial peril and never will be while they remain. So there is a stand-off around the statue of Jock Stein. O’Neill has described it as “sad”. It is attritional and on matchdays — for those who live Celtic — it has been dispiriting.
But football without these fans is happening.
The Jock Stein statue outside Paradise (Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Next past Stein are Aberdeen, who have not won at Parkhead since 2018. On a couple of recent occasions they have departed having lost 6-0, and they were beaten away in Europe on Thursday to finish 35th of 36 clubs in the third-tier UEFA Conference League.
But they have not faced Nancy’s 3-4-3 Celtic. They have not faced a Celtic squad unused to being second. They have not faced such harmful Parkhead disunity, where calls for patience blow away in the wind.
Winning on Sunday feels essential for Celtic and for Nancy.
It would buy all involved some time and should ensure he is still there for the next home game in a fortnight. That’s against Rangers.