Maeda is scoring for fun. That doesn’t mean those second guessing Rodgers are right.

I have one hope. One thing that I know is possible but dearly hope does not come to pass. And it might seem like a relatively strange thing to some of you, but I hope for it nonetheless.

At some time over the next couple of days, before the Bayern Munich game, someone at Celtic—someone in the upper echelon, someone in the boardroom or executive level—might come across Brendan Rodgers in a hallway.

They certainly wouldn’t sully themselves by visiting Lennoxtown, where I doubt they’d feel very at home, welcome or not. And when they meet, that person may suggest to Brendan Rodgers that Maeda’s goal-scoring proves everything is all right after all.

If Brendan Rodgers tells that person to get out of his face and go back to counting beans, or whatever it is they do on Celtic’s upper executive level, I won’t be surprised. In fact, that’s a much more restrained version of what I’d say to them if I found myself in similar circumstances.

I might also say something to them that would sound strange—like an insult, but it’s actually a comparison. You know what that word is? Viagra.

Ever watched Have I Got News For You?

What a great show that used to be before it lowered itself to the level of letting politicians use it as a platform to get their faces on TV. They even let Boris Johnson sit in as host for a brief and horrible time, contributing to the legend of our own pound-shop Donald Trump. But when Have I Got News For You is on its game—when it’s not a vehicle for people to massage their own egos—it’s still a pretty good show.

And there’s a segment on that show where they show you four pictures, and you have to guess the odd one out. Here’s my version:

Current Daizen Maeda, Valium, Viagra, and nail polish. What’s the odd one out?

The answer is nail polish—it’s the only one that, in its current form, does exactly what it was intended to do. Viagra was supposed to be a treatment for hypertension. Valium was invented, believe it or not, as a dye. And Maeda, in this Celtic team, was supposed to be an inside forward. That Viagra, Valium, and Maeda might all be more marketable and valuable as something else is largely beside the point.

But I keep saying it—Brendan Rodgers did not want to play Maeda as a central striker. He didn’t want to do this. Did he think Maeda could do it? Yes, which is why this is more akin to nail polish than Viagra. He knew there was a dual purpose there.

But let me say this for what I hope (but don’t believe) will be the last time—this is not what the manager wanted him to be doing.

Is he happy that Maeda can score goals in that position? Probably. But he never doubted that for a second. Nor did the rest of us who stood up for the manager on this, who supported what he wanted, rather than what we thought should be done.

Because only his opinion matters on this. And if people are now going to tell Rodgers that they were right and he was wrong just because Maeda is scoring goals, he should tell them to piss off.

I’m personally delighted that Maeda is doing well for the team.

But it’s always been clear that he could play as a central striker if called upon. Rodgers was never going to do that if he had other options. And that doesn’t mean he was wrong not to—just because Maeda has proven good at it. The bottom line here hasn’t changed one bit. The fundamental fact hasn’t changed one bit. The manager wanted another striker and didn’t get one. That’s that.

Nobody has been vindicated here just because Maeda has stepped up. That’s not the position Rodgers wanted him to play. People marketing Viagra as a sex aid are probably delighted it does the job—but that’s not what it was invented for. And the people who originally developed Viagra as a hypertension cure are probably pretty pissed off about how things turned out. Because something that should have been easy to prescribe is now involves jumping through hoops to prove you don’t want it to sell it on the internet. It’s made it that much harder. No pun intended.

Likewise, Rodgers now has to endure people who think that because Maeda has scored a few goals, they were right all along—and if some of those people are on board that might make them think they didn’t need to give the manager the player he asked for.

And do you think that makes them less likely to second-guess his judgment in the future? Of course not.

If you want proof that this is a board of directors that values the balance sheet above the team sheet and has no other God but that don’t listen to me, and don’t even listen to Rodgers. Listen instead to the coach of the women’s champions, Elena Sadiku.

She took the women’s team further than anyone ever has, leading them to a first title. And what’s she saying in the papers today? That her budget is on the level of Hearts and Hibs, while the two teams she’s competing against—Glasgow City and the Ibrox club—have significantly greater resources to work with.

That should shame people at our club. But it doesn’t. Because they don’t care. As long as they’re making a profit, the team can rot from the inside.

How is it possible that the women’s team has a smaller budget than Glasgow City? Do they run a hugely successful men’s football operation, regularly competing for titles and trophies and taking part in the Champions League? No, they don’t. So how do they have a bigger budget than Celtic, a professional club?

I don’t know. It’s even harder to imagine how Elena Sadiku is working with fewer resources than her counterpart at Ibrox, when that entire club is absolutely skint.

If you didn’t see what happened with the men’s team—where the transfer window had to end in profit for the board to be satisfied—you might wonder how the hell this can be the case. But once you understand that the men’s team is treated exactly the same way, even with a manager like Brendan Rodgers, then it’s not hard to believe. In fact, you start to see it as something akin to policy. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And it begs the question: what happens if Elena doesn’t retain her title this year? Will she get more money next season? No, they’ll sack her. Or she’ll walk, because she knows she’ll never get the support she needs.

And if she does win with fewer resources, what exactly do you think will change then? I’ll tell you—nothing. She might even end up with less next season. Because, as I’ve said before, this board may just be a bunch of gamers.

The gamer in me recognises that there’s an instinct in this board to gamble—to always try to do more with less, to test what’s possible and what’s not. I wrote about this earlier in the campaign, I think during the summer, and it got a lot of reaction. Some people wondered if I was being serious or if it was some kind of elaborate joke. But I was deadly serious. I recognised the pattern.

Every gamer who beats a game tries to make it harder the next time—to see if they can do it again under tougher conditions. It might sound ridiculous, but this mentality has also been part of corporate strategy for decades.

If your company can succeed with a smaller workforce while increasing their workload, the next step isn’t to improve their conditions, raise their pay, or reduce their hours. It’s to see just how far you can push things before they start to break. Because everything before that is a cost-saving and a bigger profit.

So when I see Daizen Maeda scoring a hat-trick right now, I don’t automatically think that it’s brilliant for him, brilliant for the club, and brilliant for the manager. I recognise all of those things, and I’m glad that he’s done it.

But I see people in the boardroom rubbing their hands together, thinking this proves they were right to deny the manager his resources. That he didn’t need the players he asked for. Because, after all, isn’t the team doing just fine without them?

And this is why I bristle every time I hear that argument. We’re in good shape. We’re doing well. As if we couldn’t be in better shape and doing even better.

I was a Maeda fan before it was popular, so I can say I love this guy. I think he’s an irreplaceable player at this club. And when the manager says he wants to play him out wide, I trust that, because that’s where we’ve seen the best football he’s played for Celtic. And when the manager expressly says he does not want him playing through the middle, I trust that, too—because the manager is much smarter at this stuff than I am.

But a lot of people think they’re smarter than the manager, and I have no problem with that if they’re just posting on blogs and forums. But I do have a problem with it when I think some of those people might be running the club. And I do worry that this might be the basis on which they decide whether to back Rodgers or not—because they think they know better than he does.

And I know I’m going to be unpopular for saying this. I know I’ll get stick for it. But someone has to stand up for Rodgers here. And I don’t see a whole lot of support for him out there—just people substituting his judgment for their own. People saying, but the team is doing this, the team is doing that, so he didn’t need another player.

Maybe some of these people are qualified to run this team. Maybe they’re qualified to step into his shoes and do his job. I doubt it. But I know this for sure—not a single one of the people holding an executive position at Celtic is qualified to do his job, or has any business trying to tell him how it should be done.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images