Celtic Quick News

Celtic Quick News started in July 2004 with the specific aim of

explaining the club’s accounts. Since shortly after reaching the UEFA

Cup final a year earlier, the media had been peddling what had become

a hoary old question, ‘What happened to the Seville money?’.

What happened to the Seville money wasn’t a secret, it was explained

in the accounts published the previous August. Celtic lost millions

getting to Seville, there was no profit or surplus income, but a lack

of proper analysis of financial matters allowed some in the media to

use a successful period in the club’s history as a stick to beat it

with. I heard the question for what felt like the thousandth time on

the radio travelling home from work and got genuinely angry that

people in a position to explain Celtic’s finances were instead

creating a myth that this information was not freely available on the

Celtic web site (although seldom read).

The site started using Blogger and it’s free servers. I wrote the

first article when going through the publishing process Blogger asked

if I wanted to allow comments on the article. Comments was something

I hadn’t considered but as the default was ‘Yes’ I left it that way.

After three weeks I felt that we had covered the accounts as well as

we could and that it was probably time to end the site but by then the

comments facility had taken on a life of its own. At the time there

was a clear need for this kind of platform. One Saturday morning I

wrote a ‘Hope you enjoyed Celtic Quick News’ article, I had no

intention of running a site long term and it had become a bit of a

hassle, but instead I published a look ahead to that weekend’s game.

For a while I planned to close the site ‘in a couple of weeks’ but it

became addictive.

Nothing about Celtic Quick News was planned. Blogger was free and

suited my lack of software skills. If I was pointed towards an

alternative, which didn’t have a comments facility, I would have used

that instead. Bizarrely, it was a Rangers supporter friend who

suggested I used Blogger.

By Paul Brennan