Celtic finances to stay under tight control

Celtic chairman Brian Quinn today gave supporters the news they had been dreading by revealing there would be no pot of gold for manager Martin O’Neill to spend.

The club revealed at its Annual General Meeting today that its debt had fallen to £15m (€21.9m) from the £17.78m (€25.9m) of the previous financial year.

But, despite landing a five-year £25m (€36.4m) sponsorship deal with sportswear giants Nike, O'Neill was told they had to remain stringent in order to wipe out their debt.

O’Neill has only brought in Juninho on a free transfer from Middlesbrough and Henri Camara on loan despite losing Henrik Larsson and other influential stars.

But the Parkhead chairman warned the shareholders and fans at the AGM the club must remain careful for the foreseeable future unless they achieve surprise success in Europe.

“That’s likely to continue unless we do better in European competition than we expect,” said Quinn, who is convinced they will move to England one day.

“But we keep working away at bringing more money into the club and Peter (chief executive Lawwell) can take credit for the Nike deal.

“I don’t like losses but they have come from what happened a couple of years ago when players signed huge contracts and the transfer fees were high.

“That time has passed and we are going to need a bit of time to work through that. People shouldn’t be surprised by the losses and we are continuing to cut the losses.

“We have a big challenge and we will combine the football success with financial stability. It does mean that there will be losses before we come out of them.

“There is no guarantee that if we splash the cash more success will follow.

“There are clubs who have got themselves into serious trouble by spending money and have had to sell their players.

“We have not had to sell players and we have retained the quality of our squad so we are not under pressure. I am not going to put Celtic in a position where we have to sell.”

O’Neill revealed he had spent his summer budget on the acquisition of Camara and Juninho – but was given permission to go over that by approaching Dwight Yorke.

“I used up the budget I got from the board on transfers,” said O’Neill.

“But I did ask to go outside the budget to sign Dwight Yorke because I knew about his ability and knew he had become available.

“The club agreed that I needed a bit of extra help in Europe.”

Lawwell defended his fellow board members by insisting the budget did take into account new contracts for the club’s top senior and young players.

He said: “Martin had a budget and he had some flexibility but he used that.

“We have spent a vast amount of our incomings on the team on the field and secured some of the senior players like Alan Thompson, Chris Sutton and Jackie McNamara and up-and-coming players like Shaun Maloney, David Marshall, John Kennedy and Aiden McGeady.”

For the 10th successive year, Celtic increased turnover by 14% to £69.02m (€100.6m) but operating expenses increased by 19.2% to £64.15m (€93.5m) mainly due to contractual salaries, win bonuses and transfers which is why O’Neill was restricted.

Profit from operations was £4.87m (€7.1m) compared to the £6.73m (€9.8m) of the previous year and their loss after taxation was £7.47m (€10.9m) in contrast to £11.66m (€17m) over 2003.