Profits always come before tradition in Premiership takeovers

IT'S NOT often that Scottish football steals a march on its English neighbour. But gazing down at the present Premiership vogue for North American investors with an eye for the main chance, Celtic fans can look condescending and murmur "been there, done that".

Admittedly Fergus McCann was not in the same financial league as the Glazers at Manchester United, Randy Lerner at Aston Villa or this week's acquirers of Liverpool, George Gillett and Tom Hicks. Yet McCann's reign at Celtic at the end of the last century was a perfect miniature representation of the unease that occurs when the unrealistic romanticism of British football collides with the brutal realism of free-market capitalism.

It's difficult to see McCann's time at Celtic as anything other than a success from both perspectives. McCann promised to stay no longer than five years and to restore a moribund club's financial equilibrium. In the late 90s he made Celtic Park into one of Britain's most impressive stadiums, and most importantly for the fans, oversaw the end of Rangers' nine-year grasp on the league title. From McCann's point of view, those five years saw his initial investment of 9million more than quadruple. When he left the country in 1999 to preserve his privileged tax status, he had cashed in his chips for 40 million (and saved a few bob by flying economy class to Brussels).

Among Celtic fans though, you will find as many ready to condemn him as to acknowledge their gratitude. Taking a profit was regarded as unseemly, as if taking "football money" out of the game's fantasy finances into the real world was cheating in some way. The other problem was that McCann was not too adept at spouting the usual "I bleed green and white" claptrap that fans expected of their executives. He was a little too single-minded to be worried about PR, and his abrasive and confrontational manner seemed more redolent of Thatcherite business leaders than a football man.

Realistically though, McCann was a pioneer, a determined and astute speculator whose five-year plan was delineated by the awareness that the money briefly on offer in the Scottish game was not going to be around in the 21st century. Indeed that era now looks like a mad gold rush, when Rangers led the way in acquiring expensive players on unrealistic wages (not a folly that McCann was wont to emulate).

As Vladimir Romanov is finding out every bitter day, that sort of profit can no longer be turned in Scotland. But in England, awash with ever-increasing amounts of TV and sponsorship cash, football has become sufficiently big business to attract the interest of far bigger sharks than McCann.

It's interesting to see the amount of opprobrium and disdain that has been levelled at Roman Abramovich in the last three years, when the Russian is actually far closer to the traditional English model of a football club chairman, ie a wealthy businessman indulging his love of the game by buying a plaything that he can show off to his friends.

If the English game is going to be radically changed, the American investors are a far more insidious threat. They cannot be mendacious enough to claim their acquisitions are motivated by much else than astute business acumen. What will be interesting will be the extent to which these new owners identify a club's history and heritage as marketable assets, or whether club identity will be sacrificed for a few (million) bucks.

"Cherished traditions... blah... outstanding historical wealth... blah," featured in the bland takeover speeches at Liverpool this week. But Gillett and Hicks have not paid 174 million to bask in the memory of Ian Rush's goalscoring records or Graeme Souness's unfeasibly tight shorts.

The fans have been markedly less hostile than the Manchester United supporters were at the news of the Glazer takeover. Perhaps this is because they have had time to get used to the idea as the Liverpool board have been hawking the club's fixtures, fittings and Steven Gerrard's contract around the world for several seasons. Sheikhs and Thai prime ministers have come and gone, with the only unwelcome candidate for ownership being a Scouse hotel developer called Steve Morgan. Morgan's problem was that he wanted the bulk of his investment to go into the club and developing a new stadium rather than compensating the existing shareholders with hefty pay-offs at elevated share prices.

If Morgan looked like a white knight in a red scarf, it's not difficult to interpret the actions of the Moores family, who held the controlling interest in the club, as being motivated substantially by profit margins. This week David Moores sold the shares he bought for 12 million for around 88 million. He must have felt like he had won the pools, except that the jackpots paid out by the family firm are considerably more miserly.

This deal won't be the last in the Premiership, at least not while the Sky gravy train continues to unload all that lucre at the Premiership door. What is to be hoped is that it might be the last that needs to be accompanied by the hypocritical and insulting cant about safeguarding traditions.

What fans now have to realise is that the bottom line will always be about turning a profit. Usually that coincides with success on the field and everybody is happy, but when entertainment threatens to clash with the financial margins, there will be only one winner.

Andy Walker, the former Celtic forward, has some piquant observations about his personal encounters with Fergus McCann, who once suggested to the player that he just give him some cash to go away. The Canadian Scot made it fairly clear that he held footballers in contempt, as just another expendable resource, whose emotional loyalty to a club was inexplicable, since it made no business sense. McCann reminds you of that epithet applied to the Sixties footballer Martin Peters. He was ten years ahead of his time.