One of the direst consequences of the Celtic board’s woeful managerial decision will start to hit home as early as next season, when the Scottish co-efficient suffers as a result of our dreadful Europa League campaign.
It’s all too likely that this will cost the country one of its two Champions League places and severely hamper its efforts to get an automatic Group place.
That will be consequential, especially for the team which finishes second.
But worse follows, because our club co-efficient is also going to take an absolute hammering for this year’s awful performances and awesome disgraces.
The simple fact of it is that we will be living with the consequences of this campaign for years.
It is a dreadful indictment of our board of directors that they put domestic considerations ahead of our growth and status as a club on the continent.
Our qualification path in future years will be tougher as a result of this.
Which means that even a top class manager faces a harder task to get through.
It means that when we make the Groups of either the Europa or the Champions League that we will be lower down in the seeding pot. This hurts our chances of ever getting out of those Groups, although it’s worth remembering that seeding itself is no guarantee of either success or failure; we were a Pot One team this year, and it didn’t help us a bit.
When a club like ours thinks small, this is the result.
This is just one example of our second rate thinking and lack of forward planning.
We went for Lennon because the board prioritised winning the ten over our continued ascent as a European club. The problem with this is that had we gone for a top drawer option like Rodgers, and put credibility in Europe front and centre, that there would have been no question about our ability to take on all comers here at home.
The Lennon decision has failed on every level.
The success at home which we took for granted looks like a bust, in the same year our regression in Europe puts us on the cusp of a truly unwanted record, an issue that will be decided tonight and would be an epic humiliation on top of those we’ve suffered already.
And of course, this is a consequences free night for the manager with the board committed to leaving him in post regardless of the result … which to me is just astonishing. The whole club seems upside down right now. There’s no coherence to anything we’re witnessing.
The worst of it is, had we still been close in the title race and in the League Cup, most of us might not even think this was a big deal.
We’re all guilty of short term thinking here, and that’s something we all need to be aware of going forward.
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