The Celtic boss is under no obligation to correct other people’s mistakes.

Some people just won’t see what’s right in front of them. They refuse to acknowledge anything that contradicts the narrative they’ve built in their heads about a given situation. Today, I read a suggestion that our manager has a responsibility and a duty to develop a specific player at our club—Odin Thiago Holm.

I find it ridiculous that anyone could possibly believe that.

No such responsibility exists. None. The suggestion that Brendan Rodgers has somehow slept at the wheel because this player hasn’t progressed up until now and has been left out of our European squad is absurd.

Rodgers has a long track record of making players better.

Just look at the current first-team squad: the players in it look streets ahead of where they were this time last season, thanks to Rodgers.

Matt O’Reilly got his £25 million move to England based on the improvements made under the current boss.

The simple fact is that Holm is a symptom of a transfer “strategy” that has failed. All the big sales we’ve made in the last 18 months—which have netted our club a fortune—are from signings that predate the hiring of Mark Lawwell and the dreadful transfer windows he oversaw. Those windows have not produced a single sale that has netted us a substantial profit. Almost none of the players he signed have been deemed good enough to be regular starters.

If we’re simply looking at Holm through the lens of last summer’s dire window, perhaps there’s a simpler truth: he is just not good enough

He is further evidence that last summer’s recruitment was flawed in every way—an utter failure on every level. He is part of a general calamity, the blame for which lies at the doors of certain people within Celtic Park, and in particular, whomever sanctioned the hiring of Lawwell as head of recruitment.

I know this is difficult for some people to grasp. They struggle to comprehend how the folks they regard as geniuses could have gotten something so spectacularly wrong, but the summer clear-out we’ve just undergone was primarily because so much dross had been accumulated during Lawwell Jr.’s time running our signing policy. His hiring was one of the most suspect, ridiculous, and unprofessional acts ever committed by our institution.

Holm was left out of the European squad because he is not good enough to supplant the players currently in the team.

Nobody wants to hear the argument that, because we play in a “weak league,” we should field inferior players just to turn them into bankable assets. That’s preposterous. That’s someone who’s spent too long drooling over the balance sheet rather than the team sheet, and no manager is going to go along with that—nor should they.

This is the flaw that some people refuse to recognise in any signing policy that doesn’t work according to the manager’s needs. These people can accumulate all the projects they want, but the manager is under no obligation to play them or treat them as ready before he decides they are.

We’ve hired a world-class operator to run the football department, and these sorts of crucial decisions are his to make.

His only obligation is to put a winning team on the pitch—simple as that. Failures above his head are not his problem, and they should not be made his problem. And I’ll go one better: they should not be made our problem as supporters who want to see the best players start for our club.

Rodgers won’t get any credit for fielding inferior footballers and dropping points. Had those above him done their own jobs better and not dumped so much rubbish into our squad, this dilemma would never have arisen.

Holm cost us a lot of money, but that’s on them—the people who sanctioned that signing without considering where he fit into the bigger picture.

Let’s not forget: this is a player who was signed before we even had a manager in the building.

When a club does something as daft as that, it deserves to take the hit, and I have no sympathy for whoever thought they could play Football Manager with our actual squad and cash and now feels frustrated that they don’t get to see the guy in action.

The one thing I know about the window just closed, despite my reservations about how some of it went, is that the manager personally sanctioned every signing and knows exactly what role he wants each of them to play.

This is not some guy wildly swinging at every pitch.

The sooner this club puts a proper structure in place for him to work within—one that keeps the amateurs and armchair experts at bay—the better off we’ll be.

Until then, people should steer clear of things they don’t understand.

The boss decides when a player is ready, and until then, that player will have to keep working hard like everyone else.

If the boss eventually decides he’s never going to be ready, that’s not his fault for failing to bring the guy on.

However, it does suggest that whoever signed him in the first place might have been out of their depth and staggeringly unqualified to make that call… and that raises questions, too, about those above that individual, and who allowed him to act as if he were.