Difficult to make any sort of judgement on these appointments. Think what you (& most clubs actually) look for in a role like this is he knows his strengths & more importantly his limitations, & gets football people & a structure in place to help support that, something which I think you have said has been lacking under Lawwell.
Gunner, as I may have mentioned, I can't remember now, but, I haven't been a fan of the Lawell for over ten years. This isn't a personality clash just business.
My understanding of what a CEO should be about is growing the company. People, and by fuck there are many, who look at Lawells tenure and say, he has done that. Celtic were on a sound financial footing etc. That this has been achieved through shrewd stewardship of the club and developing additional income streams to augment the limited resources available in the Scottish game. And again it seems he has through his strategy.
Here's the problem though, and it resides in the area of Opportunity Cost. This means in economic terms, what was the cost of your choices and what could have been achieved and wasn't through the decisions taken. Our main chance to grow financially, stature wise and in football strength is in the CL. So you would expect any CEO to have qualifying for that their number one objective. If that is achieved then the £40m+ per year would enable us to move up many levels covering a variety of things. If we look at Lawell over the last 12 years, what should be his main objective, he failed 9 out of 12 years. That's 9 x £40m+ lost through, never being prepared. Never accepting that quality costs but the rewards are great. Buying cheap.and hoping it would be enough, year after year, when this approach failed 75% of the time.
So, the Opportunity Cost of a risk averse egotistical ****, was to chase after a fiver blowing down the street, whilst a lorry load of cash passed by. He also took bonuses in years where he failed to qualify, of around £3.2m annually. That's the same amount we earned for winning the treble. So, he takes all of that and fails to secure the £40m and he's a hero?
The new guy needs to look at where the money is and ask, what do we need to do to secure that? Spoiler alert, going cheap, buying punts, not having the players in for the qualifiers, isn't the way to go. If he needs any proof that doesn't work, he should look at our woeful decline over the last few years in qualifying and if he wants to avoid a 75% failure rate like Pistol, he needs to ensure we have the strength on the pitch to negotiate the qualifying rounds.
An added bonus to this will be, the more successful you are in a euro context, the more people and companies want to be associated with your club.
Lawell was a failure. 9 out of 12 failing to secure the biggest pot of cash proves that. We are now skint because of this failure and this day I have been predicting for years has arrived. So, unlike many who will be hailing him, I look at what could have been, the Opportunity Cost, if we didn't have a risk averse shitebag who failed to see the importance of our greatest income generating opportunity 75% of the time.