Celtic’s Successes Have Hidden A Deep Malaise. It Is Time That This Fact Was Confronted.

Regardless of the chorus of derision aimed at Rodgers over the course of this day – much of it deserved, some of it bordering on lunatic and hysterical, and some I suspect motivated in no small part because this is, after all, El Rat – there have been a few people who have echoed what this site has been writing for a very, very long time.

Celtic’s problems start at the top and are now so embedded in every facet of the club’s operation that we should be looking at a major rebuild of the playing squad and the management team in the summer only as the first steps in a much bigger restructuring.

Over the last ten years, we’ve put trophies galore in the cabinet. But underneath all the success there have been systemic issues that we’re not even close to fixing. In order to fix them, you have to recognise them. Then, when you do, you have to tackle them. The willingness to do that has to be present. It is hard to argue that this is the case.

We are surrounded by a culture of denial. We are not the first football club to paralysed like this. In fact, this inertia is rife not only in the sport but in the culture as a whole. Look at the major issues of the day, like global warming. It’s a clear and present danger to our future as a species. It will impact our children and grandchildren. We all know what the solutions are. Yet our political class hesitates and obfuscates and fiddles whilst Rome burns.

In some ways, the global warming debate is a perfect analogy for what is wrong at Celtic. We’ve ignored the obvious issues at our club for years because the weather was warm and the sun was on our backs, not at all unpleasant.

We ignored the occasional superstorm. We even endured the heatwaves with equanimity. It’s only now when the forests are burning and the rains, when they come, are filling the rivers and spilling their banks that we recognise the trouble we’re in.

But for a long time now people have been pointing out that the superstorms just weren’t normal. The Lennon hiring was terrifying to those of us who recognised the amateurish decision-making process at the heart of it. The Shower Scene From Hampden and Lawwell’s egotistical and idiotic statement in the aftermath of it was worse.

Rodgers left the first time in no small part because his player recommendations were ignored and scorned and because the board insisted on shoving on him footballers he didn’t want and had no use for.

Those who want to blame him for this mess are welcome to do it, but stop kidding yourselves that sacking him will fix this.

These are the same issues he had to deal with the last time he was here.

You cannot recognise that and conclude that life inside this club is harmonious. Once you accept that Rodgers would never have voluntarily walked back into that situation, what other conclusion can you draw but that they lied to him, or changed the plan once he accepted the gig? And once you conclude that, can you still blame him for this unravelling?

The club is a collection of disparate pieces, none working with the others to form a collective, functioning construct. Indeed, as this summer revealed – and as Rodgers first term revealed for those who can look beyond the “rat” narrative to root causes – some of those sections are actually working counter to one another.

Instead of meeting the needs of the manager the recruitment department threw a random bunch of players at him … whose interests was that serving? That was more than just an expensive mistake, it has proved to be disastrous and the costs will not only be incurred in the players we’ve squandered the money on but in allowing the biggest Champions League jackpot in history to slip through our fingers and into the coffers at Ibrox.

Our issues do not stop at the managers door. His coaching staff are mostly handovers from previous regimes, built in with the bricks, immovable objects in spite of world football being filled by better quality coaches. To understand how bad our coaching setup is, look at two things; the number of dead ball situations we score from and the number we concede from.

That tells you that the coaching department reeks. And that’s not an issue which has only just arisen, that’s a carryover from when Lennon was appointed to the job for the second time and he imported those issues from the two clubs he’d been at prior to ours, Bolton and Hibs.

If you Google for it you can actually find him giving a raging interview whilst at the English club about how they can’t stop conceding from corners and expressing his bafflement that they hadn’t had that problem before he arrived at the club.

But Lennon’s problems didn’t depart with him. Instead, they remained to haunt us under Ange and now under Rodgers.

What’s the common denominator? The coaching teams never corrected those basic mistakes, and they don’t work on finding solutions to them, and why should they? Kennedy and Strachan are basically un-sackable so there’s no incentive for them to do things differently or better. Rodgers is pissing in the wind surrounded by these guys.

Rodgers hasn’t just been denied his players, he’s working without his most trusting lieutenant and the quality staff he needs. We’re one of the only allegedly major clubs who won’t build a proper coaching department; three first team coaches to cover a thirty-man squad is lamentable. There are so many specialist areas where we don’t have anyone at all.

Celtic has been running a second-rate operation for years now, and it’s no coincidence that things improved briefly when there was no-one called Lawwell in the building second guessing the experienced football manager in the dugout who knew what he needed and wanted and made sure that he got it.

Before blaming Rodgers you have at least the fleeing responsibility to look at the people above him and the way this club is run, and has been run for years whenever these people have wrenched the controls away from the experts.

And ask yourself this; if you were a professional, credentialed and respected in your field, would you want to work with these sub-par individuals looking over your shoulder and checking your homework, with no experience whatsoever or expertise in your area? How great would that working environment be? How comfortable would you feel going to work every day?

Until we focus on the problems at Celtic, the real ones, and the real people responsible for them, we’re not getting out of this mess. These people keep on telling us to look at the success on their watch, but that success was won by the very sort of people they continually contradict and ignore. Their arrogance is why we’re here.

People need to stop feeding it, recognise their role in this and hold them to account.