“Peter – your time at Celtic has expired,” Fans Collective tells Lawwell

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The Celtic Star

·20 de novembro de 2025

“Peter – your time at Celtic has expired,” Fans Collective tells Lawwell

On the eve of Celtic’s most contentious AGM in years, the Celtic Fans Collective has turned its attention to a figure whose name has dominated the club’s modern history. Peter Lawwell…

The Celtic Board. Celtic Champions 2025. Dundee United v Celtic, 26 April 2025. Photo Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star).

In a new statement released this morning, the Collective declared that Lawwell’s position as chairman is “no longer tenable,” marking the most direct challenge to his authority since the movement began.

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It lands at a moment when tension between supporters and the board is already stretched paper thin. Over the past few weeks, every pillar of Celtic’s senior leadership has been publicly scrutinised. Non-executive directors have been questioned for their independence and Dermot Desmond has been openly challenged in a manner unprecedented in recent times. And now, the focus turns to the chairman who, for many, personifies the culture supporters are fighting to change.

In their statement, the Collective wrote.

“Peter Lawwell’s position as Chairman is no longer tenable. The Celtic Fans Collective have already called for his removal following a series of deeply unsatisfactory transfer windows, the hoarding of excessive cash with no strategic plan to deploy it and a sustained failure to communicate or engage meaningfully with supporters. These are structural issues and they point directly to leadership that has lost its way.

Before returning as Chairman in 2023, Lawwell served as Celtic’s Chief Executive Officer for over 17 years. No modern organisation would consider this acceptable governance. It is a textbook conflict of interest. Michael Nicholson and Chris McKay served under Lawwell and are now supposedly accountable to him.

Lawwell’s leadership has shaped the culture supporters now recognise all too well – cautious, risk-averse and opposed to structural change. The club has amassed cash while the squad has stagnated and infrastructure has deteriorated.

Celtic needs a chairman who can modernise and ensure independence within the boardroom. We need a culture shift which encourages energy and fresh thinking. Peter Lawwell is not the man to drive this.

Peter – your time at Celtic has expired.”

In another era these words would have been unthinkable. Lawwell, for all the controversy of his long reign as CEO, was regarded by many within the club as the architect of a modernised Celtic. But the support no longer interprets “modernised” in the same way. For a growing number of fans, the legacy of the Lawwell era now looks less like strategic stewardship and more like institutional conservatism, where cash reserves are hoarded, self-congratulation replaces ambition, and the comfort of familiar faces takes precedence over independent governance.

Peter Lawwell, former CEO of Celtic, is seen in attendance prior to the Premier Sports League Cup match between Celtic and Falkirk at Celtic Park on August 15, 2025. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

This escalating sentiment has not emerged in isolation. It sits on top of the Green Brigade ban, the backlash to the club’s inflammatory mid-week “Supporters Update,” and the Celtic Trust’s accusation that the board is trying to manipulate public perception ahead of the AGM by reducing complex matters to a single talking point. The Trust’s claim — that the club’s late-night statement was a diversion tactic designed to turn the AGM into a referendum on the Green Brigade, and thus protect the board from more difficult questions — now feels even more plausible when viewed alongside the Collective’s surge of statements.

Peter Lawwell, Chairman of Celtic, Dermot Desmond, Non-Executive Director of Celtic, and Michael Nicholson, CEO of Celtic, are seen in attendance prior to the Scottish Premiership match between Celtic and theRangers at Celtic Park on March 16, 2025. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

The supporters are no longer directing their frustration towards one individual issue or one individual figure. Instead, the focus has broadened into a forensic challenge of the club’s entire governance structure, and a full-scale questioning of power, accountability and culture at Celtic.

The Collective’s decision to go after Lawwell specifically is also significant for symbolic reasons. Among the board, nobody embodies continuity more. His 17-year tenure as CEO continues to cast a long shadow, with two senior executives — Michael Nicholson and Chris McKay — having served directly under him. To many supporters the chairman’s return in 2023 felt less like renewal and more like regression, a step back into habits and hierarchies the club badly needed to shed.

Sack The Board protest at Rugby Park, Kilmarnock v Celtic, 14 September 2025. Photo Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star)

It also raises the stakes for tomorrow’s AGM in a way the board may not have anticipated. The club may well rely on bloc votes to push through resolutions, but bloc votes cannot shield them from scrutiny in the room. The Celtic Trust has ensured a sizeable presence of fans attending as proxies, many ready with questions the board would prefer not to face. And with emotions already running high after the club’s statement, the Green Brigade’s response and now this direct shot at Lawwell, the atmosphere in the meeting will be very different from the rehearsed calm traditionally associated with a Celtic AGM.

Peter Lawwell is seen during the Premiership match between Celtic and Dundee United at Celtic Park on February 15, 2025. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

The deeper truth behind this moment is becoming impossible to ignore. The Celtic Fans Collective is not a fringe movement or a protest wing. It has become the vehicle for a broader support that, for the first time in many years, appears to be speaking with one voice. The Collective has taken in the disillusioned, the long-time critics, the previously apolitical, and those simply exhausted by years of stagnation dressed up as steady management. Their message is one of structural reform rather than isolated grievance.

When you view today’s statement through that lens, its significance sharpens. The Collective is no longer nibbling at the edges. It is now challenging the foundations.

What comes after a call for the chairman to resign? What comes after several NED’s and the dominant shareholder have been publicly questioned? What comes when supporters conclude that the problem is not one decision, not one incident, and not one figure, but an entrenched system that no longer reflects the club’s values or ambitions?

There is only one answer, and it is one Celtic supporters have rarely dared to entertain, a full-scale overhaul of the boardroom, potentially extending to ownership itself.

Peter Lawwell, Brendan Rodgers and Michael Nicholson. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)

That destination carries risks, uncertainty and enormous complexity. Yet the momentum behind the Collective suggests that the support is, for the first time in a long time, ready to have that conversation. And if the board hoped this AGM would be a quiet formality, the past 48 hours have ensured it will be anything but.

Tomorrow, in the full glare of the support they have underestimated for too long, the board will finally have to defend itself — not behind statements, not behind timing, not behind block votes — but in person, in public, and under pressure.

And for the first time in years, the supporters are prepared.

With the AGM approaching, the Celtic Fans Collective are putting the spotlight on every board member standing for re-election. Next up - Peter Lawwell
– quarta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2025