Dave Cormack has attempted to lump the two Glasgow SPFL Premiership clubs together in a sinister arms race.
The Pittodrie vice-chairman had a training facility named in his honour last week but went on the defensive to explain away the lack of success for Derek McInnes’ side.
Last season Aberdeen finished in fourth place with chairman Stewart Milne refusing to bloat the wage bill in an effort to keep up with the challenge from Ibrox where they ran up a loss of £11.3m.
That loss is much more than the turnover of most SPFL Premiership clubs but rather than push for Scottish football to introduce Financial Fair Play Cormack decided to bundle together the Ibrox operation with the Celtic model which has turned over profits in successive seasons while also delivering success.
“There is a bit of an arms race between Celtic and Rangers with Rangers coming back up and spending money,” the Pittodrie director told the Daily Record.
“Celtic have upped the ante as well and those are tough things to compete with – and so are we. Some people think we have skimped on the football operations budget to take the money for the training ground.
“That was never the case because we are up significantly on our football wage bill over the last three years. The budgets for both were separated. The most important thing for us is we have a longer-term vision and we have mapped out our goals for the club to be competitive.
“Clearly, even with a £9m wage bill, compared to Celtic’s £60m it dwarves what we do. Although it is better than what some of the other teams have. For us to compete on the pitch our goal has to be to put as much as we can, while being sensible, into the football budget. We want to get into that top 100 in Europe and to be regularly competing for trophies.”
During the last two summer transfer windows Celtic have made a substantial profit on transfers with more than £50m raised by selling Stuart Armstrong, Moussa Dembele and Kieran Tierney.
Aberdeen are currently in fourth place behind Motherwell, last season they finished in the same position behind Kilmarnock.
Perhaps if Cormack looked closer into the vastly different way that the two Glasgow clubs are being run he might be able to improve Aberdeen’s chances of success.
