Dom McKay joined a virtual Fans Forum yesterday to outline his ideas and plans for the club.
The 42-year-old joined Celtic last month from the SRU and will formally takeover from Peter Lawwell as CEO on July 1.
Life in the goldfish bowl of Glasgow football will be very different to what he has been used to inside Murrayfield with Celtic in need of a complete overhaul at every level.
Tomorrow there will be a title presentation at Ibrox, throughout the Fans Forum McKay addressed that club as the Noisy Neighbours.
That term first came into football in 2009 when Alex Ferguson used it in reference to Manchester City. Ferguson kept United in front in the City until 2013 but since he retired the balance of power has switched to the Etihad. This season City have won back the EPL title and will face Chelsea in the Final of the Champions League.
McKay has still to face the media in his Celtic role, when he gets round to that he’ll be under pressure to explain how he intends to turn the tables on Celtic’s noisy neighbours after Celtic’s first title loss in a decade.
Paul John Dykes was present on the Fans Forum and reported back on it to ACSOM this afternoon.
36 minutes
A few of the other things that I found quite amusing, Dominic McKay continually called Rangers the Noisy Neighbours, he didn’t name them, he just called them the Noisy Neighbours all the way through it and also, he said that Celtic were leading the way in getting fans back into stadiums. He also pointed out that he had been part of the SRU in relation to the Test Events so he’s at the forefront of getting fans back into stadiums as well.
28 minutes
The thing with the Dominic McKay input; very, very interesting but I’ll come around to that. The opening salvo from Brian Wilson was that we had to look at the positives from this season.
And the kind of words and language that was being used by the fans in the Virtual Room were of disbelief. Kevin Graham (an ACSOM presenter) said that he was flabbergasted by some of the things that were being said. We had to look at the positives, we had to look at what Neil Lennon and Peter Lawwell and the Quadruple Treble winners had given to Celtic fans, so that was the opening salvo.
To be honest, I think that quite a lot of people in the room were on the backfoot straight away. A couple of people I’ve got to say, I’m not going to say that there were more people that were plants than in Dobbies Garden Centre, but there was a couple of people in there who basically said ‘I will be buying my six Season Tickets next season even if I don’t go to the games. I’ll pay the full price and you should all do the same’.
When you are obviously listening to that sort of thing you are thinking ‘that isn’t reasonable, everybody is in different circumstances, financially, workwise and everything else’. We need some kind of assurances and I think that was the big issue last night and not many assurances were given.