Celtic's Biggest Competitive Risk

The arrival of a card shark?

This is the third in a three-part review of where Celtic currently reside from a strategic perspective, with player trading benchmarking, derby dynamics, and now an updated domestic threat assessment.

Only the first of these three were premeditated, as I usually update my benchmarking of Celtic’s player trading after each window closes. The next two have been organic and driven by recent events.

There are a relatively small number of clubs who have been on the cutting edge of analytics, but the most interesting to me have been those that have emerged from patriarchal ownership with track records in professional gambling: Matthew Benham at Brentford/Midtjylland and Tony Bloom at Brighton/Union Saint-Gilloise.

Successful professional gamblers have to deal with ever-evolving challenges. Conditions are constantly changing with other participants competing to also gain an edge(s), often times with counterparties like mega-resourced gambling companies who work tirelessly to stack the odds against them.

A requirement to be successful long term is to be very smart, very competitive, and very flexible intellectually. Complacency is a surefire recipe for success vanishing - either from other ruthlessly smart pros or the ‘House.’ In a sense, only the paranoid survive and thrive.

As I covered in the player trading piece last week, the analytics arms race in football began to accelerate about a decade ago. That is when data began to become ubiquitous, and a small group of clubs began to embrace more advanced analytics.

The pathway to relative success comes from extracting signals from all the noise, but then having the culture and institutional will power to act on that information. Like a highly skilled poker player who sits down at a fresh table against unknown opponents, acclimation, assessment, and adjustment are par for the course, with the human element also very important.

This ilk of competitor is a different animal when it comes to a sport dominated by entrenched culture and preconceptions.

Why is any of this germane to Celtic?

We now have a club on our doorstep who has begun some relationship with the more advanced analytics used by Bloom, and made available to select clubs via Jamestown Analytics. I believe many within Scottish football, including our own fanbase, are badly underestimating the risks should Hearts formalize a more strategic long term relationship with Bloom and cede operational control to his model.

I touched upon this some in last last week’s column, but want to flush out the recent history in Belgium a little more. The story in Denmark via Benham/Midtjylland is adjacent and also worthwhile to explore, but the Bloom connection makes Union Saint-Gilloise (USG) a direct analog.

USG was acquired by Bloom in May 2018 when in the Belgian 2nd division, after having been promoted from the 3rd tier in 2015. Belgium has run various league structures at different levels, with opening and closing tournaments more common in South America, as well as what is now a playoff system in the top division that halves points totals after 30 games in advance of the final 10-game playoff round.

USG came in 2nd and 3rd in the 2018-2019 opening and closing tournaments and therefore failed to qualify for the promotion playoff. They again failed to gain promotion after the Covid-shortened 2019-2020 season.

However, in 2020-2021 there was no playoff system implemented in the 2nd division, so it was a straight 28-game campaign, with USG winning the league by 18 points and winning promotion for the first time in 48 years.

Entering the Belgian top flight (First Division A now called Jupiler Pro League) for the 2021-2022 season, they entered with the following structural fundamentals:

USG spent just €1.16 million on a single transfer, who they just sold this season for more than 10x’s that amount, with seven loans and four free transfers. Of the loans, three were from Brighton, including Kaoru Mitoma.

By the 34th round of league fixtures prior to that season’s split into their playoff system, the ‘big clubs’ listed were as follows:

Now, I am not going to try and summarize all the different chopping and changing their pyramid did around the Covid era, including expanding the size of leagues, tweaking playoff systems, etc. Let me just summarize that they are on the more complicated side of things, and particularly relative to Scotland.

Central to their playoff system is the halving of points from the ‘regular season,’ which is why I am showing the ‘regular season’ points total. Indeed, over the past 4 regular seasons, including through the first 26 of 2024-2025, here is the running points tally:

I threw in the right column calculation as a relatable proxy for the points accumulation rate for USG and what it would look like in a 38-game Scottish Premiership season length.

What we know about tournament football, and it is similar in North American sports with playoff systems, is that the best teams during league play, or regular seasons, frequently do not win the playoffs. In knockout ties, single games, or shortened playoff series like in NHL, NBA, and MLB, variance and all sorts of factors can impact short term results.

Indeed, USG have failed to win a full league season yet in the Belgium top flight, finishing 2nd, 3rd, and 2nd in the relevant seasons, out of first place by 4, 1 and 1 points, respectively.

However, they have had the highest points total in all three seasons during the regular seasons, finishing second on goal difference to Genk in 2022-2023. USG has been involved in European group stage football each season, and currently down 2-0 to Ajax in the Europa League first round knockout after the first leg.

As a result of their player trading and involvement in European football, revenues have grown to be approximately €68 million, which is still well below the ‘big club’ brethren:

USG have not had a player on loan from Brighton over the past two seasons, though they did loan a single player to Scotland this January: Elton Kabangu to Hearts

Analytical Conclusions:

With different leagues and different teams come different competitive dynamics, player profiles, and complexity….challenges that may be well suited to those who are smart, flexible, and competitive.

The circumstances for Hearts in Scotland are different than those faced by USG in Belgium, and certainly Brighton in England. It appears that Bloom deployed a very different model to facilitate the ascension of USG in Belgium, and I suspect, if empowered, would do similarly at Hearts in Scotland.

Perhaps it would mean loan players from Brighton and/or USG, smart lower-cost signings, and/or free transfers, which were all part of him helping to ‘launch’ both of those clubs to varying degrees. But if, and it remains an admittedly HUGE “IF,” Hearts as a club are smart enough to embrace Bloom’s way of operating, then I see the competitive dynamics in Scotland as his easiest challenge yet, on a relative basis.

Brighton in England needs no explanation given the mounds of money and clubs like Liverpool and Arsenal within the realm of modernity, but Belgium was a far more difficult landscape for Bloom.

The league is relatively flat from a competitive situation, without mega clubs like Celtic. The opening up in revenue between Club Brugge and the next tier of clubs is similar to what I laid out in Serbia with Red Star/Partizan, and has become endemic within European football.

But within that next tier is a bunch of decent clubs with considerable resources, all of which pose challenges week in and week out. Away days for USG to Antwerp, Genk, Gent, Anderlecht, and Club Brugge, in total, are probably more challenging than what Hearts face at Aberdeen, Hibs, Rangers, and Celtic.

In contrast, Hearts have a relatively clear shot at Rangers, and then even possibly Celtic….only without a pesky playoff system. Rangers are a basket case and Celtic de factor run by a partriarchal major shareholder whose footballing sensibilities appear to be frozen in time from decades ago.

Hearts have a larger economic footprint and far easier pathway to securing revenues from Europe versus what USG faced, all within a league equivalent to a land of the blind where a ‘one-eyed man’ has been king for 20+ years.

The financial dominance Celtic enjoy is largely of no use if this battle does emerge, unless the club were to depart massively from the post-McCann legacy. Celtic are likely to continue operating on an Europa League baseline-budgeting process for FSR purposes, and I have seen virtually no signs that football operations will be modernized to even approach the level of a Club Brugge, let alone how Bloom operates.

So is the risk of Bloom ‘taking over’ football operations at Hearts significant? This was a quote by Hearts’ CEO Andrew McKinlay in the Edinburgh News in December 2024:

When you look around, there's various examples in Europe, not just Jamestown but others, but Jamestown are probably the real gold standard of this example and they've shown that by what they've done at other clubs and Union is probably the best one for people to go away and look at when they took over. Not only were they not in one of the top teams in Belgium, they were in the second tier and by season three or four they were challenging for the title.

If it wasn't for the quite weird Belgian system, which I'm sure some of you know about where you half your points, we think we're crazy in Scotland, so where you half your points after the split, Union would have won the league. So that's the game, I genuinely, and I think I said earlier on, finishing second, I want to do that on the basis that we've been good, not on the basis that maybe one of the other teams above us have been bad. And then genuinely, and that's not going to happen overnight, but genuinely I think with the use of their technology, using our finances wisely, being as smart as we can be, I genuinely think we could challenge in Scotland.

Perhaps it will all fall apart, but if not, a legit card shark may be sitting down at the Scottish Premiership table.