Is Celtic finally shaking up the football department? It wouldn’t be before time.

I don’t know enough about Paul Tisdale to say whether or not he’d be a good appointment for the club, should he get a major job in the football operation at Celtic Park, as some outlets were reporting just last night.

And I don’t know much about the role he’s rumoured to be getting since that hasn’t been made public yet. But if we’re shaking up the football operation and bringing in someone to take a broad look at it, I can only conclude that it ties in with what we’ve been saying the club needs on this blog for a while now.

Celtic might win a lot in Scotland, but in many ways, we’re a third-rate operation.

There are issues at every level of the club, from the boardroom right down to the footballing staff. This club needs fresh ideas and a fresh perspective. What it really requires is a serious modernisation effort—a radical overhaul of the football department.

We’ve said for a while that the football operation at Celtic should be separate from the rest of the company. Its budget should be set in stone, covering wages, transfers and all the other expenses that it will have to deal with in the day to day running.

Whatever money it raises should be reinvested back into it. There shouldn’t be a labyrinth of bureaucracy for the manager to navigate just to sign a player. He should be able to go to the head of football operations, outline his target, and work with that person to bring that player in—assuming the target fits within the budget.

The head of football operations should have full autonomy. If that person deems certain staff members inadequate, they should be gone, no matter who they are—coaches, analysts, it doesn’t matter. If they’re part of the football department and not up to scratch, they need to go. There shouldn’t be any “Friends of the Man” kept around if they’re not doing the job.

We should have done this years ago.

We should have brought in a head of football operations a decade ago, tasked them with evaluating every single member of staff in the football division, and then made the necessary changes. We needed a full-scale revolution in coaching, player development, scouting, analytics, sports science and sports psychology.

Celtic needs a complete modernisation.

When we talk about failures at boardroom level, this is one of the biggest. It’s a huge reason why we haven’t progressed in Europe, as this blog pointed out the other day. This is not about individual bosses. This is about something much more fundamental.

Our youth teams play against poor quality competition. Our youth coaching staff isn’t nearly up to par. Our academy doesn’t produce enough good footballers; too few of them are anywhere near the required standard to crack the first team squad. We’re spending an awful lot of money on these areas of the club and getting precious little to show for it.

The head of football operations’ sole job would be to work alongside the manager to make everything run better. It would all be based on merit—whether someone can do the job they’re paid for, whether the academy produces first-team players every few years, whether the scouting department can find a left-back after three years of trying. If they can’t, something’s wrong, and that needs fixing for the club to move forward.

If Tisdale’s being brought in simply to second-guess the manager, that’s a waste of time and will only drag us backwards. It’ll increase the perception that our board has its priorities wrong. But if he’s coming in as a support to the manager, to alleviate some pressure and help things get done more efficiently—especially after the aggravations of the summer window—that’s great.

But if Tisdale’s coming in with a mandate to clean house and reshape the football department, to sharpen the tip of the spear, then it could be the best appointment we’ve made in a long time. It might even give Brendan Rodgers the confidence to stay for the long haul and sign a contract extension.

I guess we’ll find out if an official announcement is made. I guess we’ll find out when we find out what this guy is being brought in to do, if indeed he is being brought in and this isn’t just paper talk. But I have to think that there’s some truth in this. I have to think that this one is real. And if it is real, then it’s certainly interesting.

Right now, there are more questions and there are answers. But we’ll get the answers one way or another. And soon.

I just hope, for once, that the club is asking the right questions and thinking about this the right way. We’ve had too many summers like the last one—too much frustration and anger among the support over things being done in a lopsided fashion.

If this is the club getting serious, then I’m all for it.