‘Back the team, sack the board’ - Darkest Celtic days to get BBC documentary treatment

Celtic supporters will be able to relive the tale of Fergus McCann swooping in to save the club from financial turmoil on a new BBC documentary ahead of the takeover’s 30th anniversary next year.

The film, titled A View From The Terrace, will air in two parts with the first exploring the series of events that saw Celtic surpass their £5 million overdraft limit and be faced with the real threat of bankruptcy in 1994. That episode will be available to stream on iPlayer from Friday evening and features an exclusive interview with investment analyst David Low, who came up with the idea of trying to ‘buy out’ the Celtic board of the early 1990s.

Low personally approached and pitched the idea to McCann, acting as a broker to push the deal over the line. He remains pals with 82-year-old McCann and was in the room as the 24-hour deadline approached for Celtic to be saved.

The documentary also features the founder of the Celts For Change movement Matt McGlone. Looking back at that period of turmoil, McGlone said: “I put an advert in the newspaper and I said ‘if you care about the welfare of your club, turn up at the City Halls tomorrow night’, and that was Celts For Change.

“We knew that to save the club things had to change. We didn’t have any money, all we could use was the tool of being fans. But the fans had the spirit, the tenacity, the drive, the will to win and to save the club from going under.”

Discussing his role in the deal, Low, told the documentary: “I had two passions in life – one was music, one was Celtic. In the 1980s money had come into the game for the first time. Celtic didn’t have that.

“I was an investment manager, and my job was to ascertain what companies were good to invest in. Fergus McCann was described to me as a slightly eccentric, very determined guy – a Celtic fan from Canada – and I should go and meet him. The only person I met in this whole time that had a plan was Fergus McCann, and the fans pledged support for this plan.”

Low also goes into detail on the ‘game of poker’ in brokering a deal with McCann and how the Canadian dismissed Michael Kelly with a biting goodbye. Celtic had been privately owned by the Kelly and White families for almost a century, which led to many fans feeling it was the board running the club into the ground.

The early 1990s saw disgruntled Celtic fans organising into what would become one of the country’s earliest and biggest grassroots fan-protest groups: first Save Our Celts, then later Celts For Change. The groups recruited huge numbers of fans into their ranks, designed to oust the old board and allow Celtic to move forward into the modern football age.

Jordan Laird, Executive Producer of A View From the Terrace and co-founder of Studio Something, said: “It’s always fascinating to look back at the history of football clubs and find the stories that shaped them, especially when fans are at the heart of the future of their club, we thought it was an incredible story of how basically a group of devoted fans refused to let their club go under.

“Speaking to Matt McGlone really brought the power of fans to the forefront of our minds – it was their pressure that really turned the club around and it’s almost unthinkable what might have been of them when you look at the size of them now, it shows the impact fans can have, whatever a club’s size. As fans, we should always remember that our clubs are ours, and we can do what it takes to make sure they survive.”

A View From The Terrace will run on Friday nights on the BBC Scotland channel for 20 weeks, and on BBC iPlayer.