We threw the title away- Dave King’s u-turn on his Celtic Pack of Cards claim

Dave King has revived his pack of cards comment about Celtic and blamed his former Ibrox colleagues for chucking away last season’s SPFL title.

After losing a title, captain, manager and CEO in 2021 the South African based businessman would have been feeling smug that one of his predictions looked like coming good.

Following a 106 day wait Ange Postecoglou was tipped to be sacked before Christmas as Steven Gerrard prepared to take the Ibrox Tribute Act to the next level.

In May 2018 King told Sky Sports:

We appoint a manager who can win games, with more resources, and we take one league away from Celtic. We only need one league. We don’t need two or three. We need one. Once we take one away, it’s a pack of cards.

A few months into the 21/22 season Gerrard walked out on the club just as King had done, Celtic rebuilt during the season to turn a six point deficit at Christmas into a four point title winning margin and book a return to the group stage of the Champions League.

The ‘South African based businessman’ will be in Liverpool this week to watch his wee team take on his main interest, reflecting on the last few months he told The Sun:

The importance of the Champions League each year is that, in a two-team league, what we can’t afford is Celtic having the Champions League and us not having it.

In the domestic situation, what we cannot afford to have is Celtic getting Champions League money coming in for the next three years and we’re not there.

My concern is always the gap between us and Celtic because my priority is still about winning domestic titles.

We had a great season last year, but it wasn’t a great outcome. When we started the season, we should have won the title last year.

But we threw that title away. I would much rather have won the league title and not got to the Europa League final. If that situation had been managed differently, we should have won that league title.

In their soon to be published accounts the Ibrox club should release the cost of their pay out to Sports Direct after King broke the contract with the sports retailer.