Last Tuesday morning a large white envelope flopped through the letter boxes of hundreds of Celtic supporters here. Inside was a letter from Fergus McCann, the club's now former chairman and managing director, offering those same fans the opportunity to buy into his majority shareholding in Celtic.
It makes for fascinating reading, both in terms of the way in which it marks the end of McCann's extraordinary journey and what it says about the distance that Celtic have travelled since he saved them from bankruptcy just over five years ago.
With an impressive playing staff, ambitious management structure and a stadium that is one of the best in these islands the dire state of the club which McCann took over in 1994 is barely conceivable. With the bankers about to call in their debts Celtic was a matter of hours away from extinction when McCann invested close on £10 million of the personal fortune he had amassed during a working life spent principally in Canada.
With barely a nod to either public or media opinion the at-times irascible McCann set about the business of shaping Celtic in his own image. There have been hiccups along the way, not least in the way that the obdurate chairman determined that every personal battle that he waged could only be resolved in his favour. On the pitch the team's climb towards something approaching respectability was painfully slow. Managerial naivety produced attractive playing sides in the great Celtic tradition but beneath the style there was precious little substance as the club stumbled along in the long shadow cast by Rangers dominance of the decade.
But the Iron Man McCann was not for turning and as a modern stadium rose from the ashes of the crumbling embarrassment that had preceded it there was an upturn in the on-field-fortunes. The holy grail of nine-in-a-row was preserved by the league title won under Wim Jansen in 1997 which prevented a 10 successive championship for Rangers. And the luring back of Kenny Dalglish to the club where he began his career over 30 years ago was proof positive of the new-found attractions of Celtic.
For a large part of his tenure one of McCann's thorniest problems was the nature of his relationship with Celtic's substantial Irish support. His period in charge coincided with the first shoots of political progress here and McCann appeared to make a conscious decision to surf that wave. The most prominent initiative was a Bhoys Against Bigotry campaign which attempted to address widespread negative perceptions of Celtic's culture and atmosphere. This had its most dramatic impact in the west of Scotland and there can be no doubt that it went a long way towards precipitating change in other more reluctant sections of society there.
But for a variety of reasons, it was less well-received across the Irish Sea. McCann was unequivocal in his conviction that sectarian singing and chanting had to be eradicated from among Celtic's support. Rightly or wrongly those same efforts were interpreted as a concerted effort on his part to dilute the club's Irishness and there was concerted opposition to the managing director from Celtic's Irish fan-base.
Many of those same supporters must have grinned wryly as they munched their cornflakes last Tuesday morning and waded through the extensive apologia from the now departed McCann. But however mixed their feelings, they could have little argument with the achievements he outlined. There was now, he wrote, a "commitment from the top level down to continuous improvement on the field throughout the organisation". The club's growth was now being financed by "a businesslike, professional operation" fuelled largely by the income from 53,000 season ticket holders. Celtic, he continued, now had the largest capacity modern football stadium in Britain and was now a major brand name recognised throughout the football world.
The financial terminology and the fact that shares were now being offered to the supporters were two indicators of how much football in general and Celtic in particular have been transformed in just five years.
Instead of the self-serving oligarchy that all but brought Celtic to its knees, Fergus McCann had now opened up the prospect of the majority shareholding in the club being held by its supporters.
McCann has been studiously careful in his avoidance of guarantees as to the longterm future of the club. Like any business which offers shares for public sale, Celtic is always liable to the threat of the same sort of predatory take-overs that dog almost all the top clubs in the English Premiership. But to his credit, the former managing director has done everything within his power to offset the possibility of control being taken by hostile outsiders. There is a preordained pecking order for the sale of his shareholding which determines that they will be offered first to existing shareholders, then to season ticket holders, playing personnel and club staff. It may not exactly be the friendly face of capitalism but compared to the eager greed with which some English clubs have been sold off McCann's plans seem positively benign.
And as the dust starts to settle on his campaign of modernisation of the Celtic's culture and image, it looks like McCann's legacy will turn out to be his guaranteeing of the long-term future of the club as it strives for its place at modern football's top table. The atmosphere at home games has been transformed over the past decade and many of the religious and political songs have disappeared.
Despite all the howling and breast beating none of this has led to any dilution of Celtic's history or tradition.
The "rebel song" element always sat very uneasily with the majority of the club's support. It also placed Celtic on very uncertain moral ground when it tried to represent itself as an ecumenical force in Scottish football. But it survived largely because there was a nervousness about how attempts to confront it would be received. Fergus McCann had no such qualms and his back was more than broad enough to take the inevitable pressure that was directed towards him.
He deserves credit for coming to a realisation that if he was going to equip his club for the financial and playing pressure of modern football life, then it was anachronistic to imagine that the supporters could be allowed to linger in some fanciful, green-tinted twilight of Irish history.
Perhaps McCann's greatest achievement with regard to Celtic's much-quoted "Irish dimension" is that he has prompted a rethink as to what this should mean and what this should entail with a society and a political culture that is constantly evolving and changing.
Many of the old certainties of Northern nationalism have been challenged in the second half of this decade and it seems fitting that one of the most visible outside symbols of that same nationalism should be looking at itself and redefining just exactly what it means.
Like the poor of the Bible, maybe sectarianism in Northern Irish and Scottish sport will always be with us. But that hardly justifies a nominally sporting organisation and business giving that same sectarianism a high-profile platform and launch pad. The money men may point to the financial rabbits that Fergus McCann pulled out of hats as the pre-eminent achievement of his time at the helm of Celtic Football Club. But in the years to come, the club's Irish support may have greater reason to thank him for forcing them to have a long, hard look at themselves.
