Michael Kelly- still bitter after all these years

Twenty years on from being forced out of Celtic Michael Kelly still hasn’t come to terms with the modern reality of the club.

In an interview with the Herald today the former director boasts of how he sold shares for £300 each to Fergus McCann as the club came close to going out of business.

While other members of the Kelly and White families have kept a low profile since taking the club to the brink Michael has popped up regularly to criticise the way that Celtic has developed into Scotland’s dominant force and regained some of it’s reputation in Europe.

“For all the fuss about a bungling board, it was not the old regime’s inability to run Celtic as a business that irked the fans,” he told The Herald. “It was the lack of performance on the field that caused the unrest.

“Celtic in the late 1980s had to contend with a Rangers team which, though cowboy-built on borrowed sand, proved too strong an outfit for Celtic on the field. The very fans who now laugh at the demise of our rivals were the same people who wanted Celtic to follow the same road.”

 Extract from Kelly’s book Paradise Lost 1995, great forecast from the loser

Part of the reason for the ‘lack of performance’ was the appointments of Liam Brady and Lou Macari who were head hunted by Kelly and his cronies to bring the club success.

On the day he collected his cheque it was almost five years since Celtic had won a trophy, unless Kelly wishes to count the 1991 Tennents Sixes as an honour.

Kelly, a former Labour Party councillor, later described the crowds of supporters campaigning for his removal as mobs from peripheral housing schemes.

As well as being an overwhelming failure as a football club director and politician Kelly ‘enjoyed’ a short lived career as a television presenter with STV as well as failing with his own public relations company.

Continuing his lament against McCann’s takeover he added: “The discontent was exploited by a group who saw the chance to profit from the situation.

“Their plan was to drive down the value of the club by a campaign, which included a boycott, to create even more antipathy towards the directors. This scared the Bank of Scotland into stepping in, forcing the shareholders to sell despite the fact the club’s own plans for recapitalisation were only six weeks from fruition.”

If Kelly had been given a further six hours never mind six weeks Celtic would be in the history books alongside Third Lanark and Rangers (IL).

With farcical plans to relocate to Cambuslang and other pie-in-the sky schemes the fans had wakened up to realise that having the surname of White or Kelly didn’t mean that you were an able football club director.

Whatever the grievances that supporters may have with the corporate image of Celtic today they ought to be grateful that Dr Michael Kelly and his cronies were finally booted out of office in 1994 with his subsequent career illustrating that if it wasn’t for his surname he’s have been scraping a living in a dead end job renting a flat in one of the peripheral housing schemes that his class provided for the bulk of Glasgow’s citizens.