CORPORATE GREED, CRONY CAPITALISM AND THE CELTIC BOARD
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
Anyone who knows me well will know that, in addition to watching Celtic, another of my hobbies is video games. However, despite having enjoyed both of these hobbies for over 3 decades, I now find myself at a point where I have never felt more disconnected from the leaders of these respected industries.
For most of last season, we saw the Celtic Board almost completely ignore the very reasonable complaints of supporters.
Not only did the Celtic Board ignore complaints, but in many cases, they actively aggravated the situation, via poorly worded responses, ongoing mistreatment of fan groups and so on.
At the time, I also noticed similar trends emerging in the video game industry. Gamers complained about inferior products being sold, higher prices and lack of long-term planning.
Rather than engage with their customers in good faith, game publishers maintained radio silence, whist a tiny yet extremely vocal clique of online bootlickers did their damage control for them. Sounds like a familiar scenario, doesn’t it?
Are the Celtic Board Out of Touch or Just Following Wider Trends?
The twin descents of football and the video games industry into a greed-fueled pit of self-destruction were both brought into sharp focus by two of the biggest news stories beyond Celtic this week.
First, we had the news that Sony wants to corner the video game market by ending production of physical discs. This means, essentially, that, from 2028, anyone who owns a PlayStation console will only be able to buy their games from Sony directly via their digital store at hugely inflated prices.
Then, about 48 hours later, we had FIFA rewriting their own rules in real-time to allow a player who had been red-carded to play in his team’s next match in the World Cup. Rules and precedents be damned, a certain high-profile politician threw a tantrum and FIFA entertained it by clearing the player in question to play for the US national team. Cowardice and financial gain “trumped” fair play and honesty, so to speak.
This was just the latest in a series of scandalous decisions around a World Cup where money has been king and the football has been reduced to a mere sideshow.
The impact is far wider, and the stakes much higher, but the recent conduct of the likes of Sony and FIFA definitely match the MO of last season’s Celtic Board.
Rather than giving customers what they want, the business model instead seems to have shifted to “how little can we give them and how much can we get away with charging them before there’s an all-out rebellion?”
Some would argue that this is simply the latest evolution of late-stage capitalism. Indeed it would be kind of funny in a certain twisted way, if indeed a Celtic Board so notoriously out of touch with ordinary fans, had actually been ahead of industry leaders like FIFA and Sony when it came to fully embracing the economics of Gordon Gekko on steroids.
Morally, it’s reprehensible, but in a business sense, are the Celtic Board merely following corporate trends? We seem now, more than ever before, to live in an age where the idea that “the customer is king” has gone out the window, only to be replaced by “You’ll take whatever we decide to give you, shut up and like it!”
Perhaps its not just the Celtic Board who are in need of an attitude adjustment. Maybe a wider societal shift is what it will take to confine these fundamentally broken economic ideologies to the dustbin of history.
Or am I just reading far too much into it?