The message Celtic sent to our Euro rivals is clear; we do not consider ourselves a serious club.

On the night of the Young Boys game, we were all ecstatic at what it might portend for the years ahead of us. We all rightly believed our club was in its best and strongest position for a very long time. The only questions were about how far we could go and how fast we could get there.

But those at the top of our club had a different perspective. Ultimately, it is their perspective that has won the day here.

You can’t understand what our board of directors is without first understanding what those who run Celtic on a day-to-day basis are not. If you look at their backgrounds, they’re in law and accountancy—the legal and numbers guys. I would feel happier if I thought that some of them were humanities graduates. I would feel better if I thought that some of them possessed a creative spark.

There are some in the Celtic blogosphere who are obsessed with the Moneyball strategy and have a peculiar fascination with two of the clubs that have made Moneyball work best south of the border: Brentford and Brighton. But there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about both of those clubs that a certain Celtic fan site never quite seems to grasp. The guys who own those clubs may be numbers guys, but they made their fortunes in gambling.

Any comparison between our board and theirs is therefore rendered preposterous. There are no risk takers or entrepreneurs on the Celtic board, except for Dermot Desmond. And he delegates far too much responsibility at Celtic. I’ve already written that Desmond would not permit any other company he owns to operate in the slapdash way in which his acolytes run our club. I suspect that he is a very serious individual with a very serious business philosophy, and I don’t believe he would allow rank amateurs in any other segment of his business empire.

There are a number of reasons why this is important to grasp, but for the moment, let’s take the one most pertinent to our standing in Europe.

These people have no imagination for life outside the Glasgow goldfish bowl. This is their comfort zone. And because they direct policy at our club, they’ve made it our club’s comfort zone. They have no real challenger here at home and this has made them arrogant, lazy, and complacent. The measure of these people is found in how they prepare us for the European stage. They are risk-averse and clueless.

Almost every time they are presented with an opportunity to see this club grow beyond the boundaries of this city and this country, they prove that they are not up to the task. Their focus is so narrow, their ambition so limited, that they prepare for failure rather than lay the groundwork for success. Everything they do is based on fear of failure. And this is why this club cannot progress in the manner it should.

I said in an earlier piece that my dislike of these people risks morphing into outright hatred sometimes, and I don’t want to hate them. Because fundamentally, I don’t believe these are bad people.

I don’t believe they are cackling supervillains, deliberately holding us back, although there are things they do that are so jaw-dropping—such obvious acts of self-harm—that I wonder how it can be anything else. And then I remind myself: these are not risk-takers. These are conservative people. They lack imagination. They don’t have a strategic thought in their heads.

They’re just bad at this stuff. They’re just very, very, very bad at this stuff. And they are so arrogant that they don’t even realise they are bad at it. I long ago came to accept that people of such limited imagination will never take this club forward in the manner that we would all like and wish for.

The sale of Kyogo in the aftermath of the Young Boys game was a profoundly shocking development, and yet, at the same time, not in the least bit a shock. In our moments of supreme victory, Celtic fans are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. This board has conditioned us to recognise that after one step forward there are invariably two steps back. We are not allowed too many nice things.

I was stunned that we would do something so profoundly damaging at such an important time, but it didn’t surprise me in the least. Because I know these people so well now. I have been writing about them for so long, and my doubts about them are so vast and deep that nothing they do really surprises me anymore.

There are certain individuals—like the chairman—who I lost all confidence in, never to recover it, when they appointed Neil Lennon for the second time.

They made the announcement on a day that should have been filled with celebration but instead left a large number of our supporters absolutely crushed. And it wasn’t just that they did it and announced it in such an exploitative fashion. It was the way they did it—the circumstances in which they did it—that were about as unprofessional as anything I’ve ever heard a major club do.

In that light, I regard Peter Lawwell’s continued presence at this club as absolutely toxic. I don’t believe we are well served with Michael Nicholson as CEO either. And it’s not clear to me that, with Lawwell as chairman, anyone really believes Nicholson is allowed to operate independently.

It certainly doesn’t impress me that he has never once spoken to the media. Whereas I once thought it was because he was more low-key than his predecessor and content for others to be the frontmen at the club—the managers—I am more and more convinced that the reason he doesn’t appear in front of the media is that he would be destroyed by even a modest interviewer from our notoriously dire press corps. Anyone with a shred of experience or who had done even a token amount of preperation would show him up as nothing but an empty suit.

I hope that the journalist who wrote that howling, sycophantic article proposing him as chancellor just a week ago feels absolutely mortified reading it back this morning because that article was one of the most abysmal I have read in a long time. And when you consider that I have to crawl through this garbage every single day, that is a major statement. And I mean every word of it.

The worst thing about that article was that it tried to paint these people as progressive, forward-thinking, and ambitious. Well they’re nothing of the sort, and we all know that they’re nothing of the sort.

The sale of Kyogo prior to the Aston Villa game telegraphed two things to all and sundry—neither of them good. The first is that we didn’t consider the game important, despite coefficient points, table position, the possibility of an easier draw with an away tie first, and nearly £2 million in prize money.

The second is a corollary to the first. Because it’s not just that they didn’t regard that game as important—it’s that they wrote off its importance because they didn’t believe we had a realistic chance to win it. And I can’t conclude anything other than that. Because if they thought we had a chance against Villa, they would not have sold our best player before that game took place.

They settled for just being in the next round. They had no interest, beyond that, in how we could position ourselves to succeed in that phase of the tournament. They wrote it off before we even got a chance to find out.

Their failure to properly strengthen the squad for the challenge ahead against Bayern Munich sends the same message: they do not believe there was anything they could have done to tip the odds in our favour. They have accepted the inevitability of defeat and have made that plain—not only to our opponents but to the manager and the players he needs to motivate for those games.

And the message to the fans is equally clear. The club does not believe that tie is winnable, and it has no interest in trying. At the same time, they are charging premium prices for the home leg. It is brazenly dishonest for this club to pretend that game is important when they have already written it off.

I said this window was not a disaster but that it invited disaster. It not only failed to shield us from that possibility, but it actually made disaster more likely.

The message we have sent is that we do not take ourselves seriously on the European stage. That message is profoundly damaging in so many ways that it almost breaks my heart to go over them.

It tells the fans not to dream, not to hope that any of our ambitions will ever be realised while these people are in charge. It tells the manager that he is wasting his time here, wasting his time even trying to change the culture and mindset under which this club operates. His reputation and accomplishments do not matter to those people at all. There are of no consequences to them. They think that all our success flows from them anyone, and they are not listening to a word he says.

It sends the same message to the players, especially those who came here believing we were an ambitious, progressive, forward-thinking club. In reality, we see them merely as saleable assets. We do not care what value they bring to the team as footballers. We’re only interested in what we can one day get for them in future transfer fees. We have no real intention to grow, improve, or compete seriously on the European stage.

That limits their own horizons to the game right here in Scotland. It means we’ll never convince some of them to stay beyond their deals and it makes attracting their replacements harder … perversely this actually helps the club sell “the strategy” that some inside its walls clearly yearn to return to.

Not only does this mean Rodgers is almost certain to leave at the end of his contract, but it also makes finding a replacement of even remotely similar calibre virtually impossible. It means we’ll be shopping for the kind of manager who will come in, work under these conditions, and never challenge the board in any way, shape, or form.

And to my mind, that is not the CV you would look for if you were trying to bring in a genuine winner. That this imperils our future prospects for success barely needs to be said out loud. Another Lennon type appointment is precisely what we should expect.

All of this is to say that the bright future in front of us at full-time in the Young Boys game has been snatched away in a matter of weeks, shown up as nothing but an illusion. It was never really there to begin with, not under these people.

I have no hope for that future while the current directors remain in charge of Celtic. I have no confidence whatsoever in their so-called leadership, their vision, or their ambition—because I don’t believe they have vision, and I don’t believe they have ambition either.

The environmental writer Edward Abbey, in A Voice Crying Out from the Wilderness, wrote: “The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” And I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes, it is the duty of those who love a football club to protect it from its board members. If the necessity of that hasn’t dawned on enough of us yet, I sometimes wonder what it’s going to take.

The disaster, probably. But by then, it will be too late.

Photo by ANDY BUCHANAN / AFP) (Photo by ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP via Getty Images