Celtic winning the Lowland League would not be “progress” no matter what some hacks think.

As I keep reminding people, The Celtic Way is not a fan publication, although it tries to pretend to be. It is, in fact, a mainstream media outlet in disguise.

Yesterday, they put out a puff piece on Stephen McManus and his supposed success with the Celtic B team, who currently sit top of the Lowland League—Scotland’s fifth tier. The article dovetails nicely with a piece I put up the other night about how we’re being gaslit over what happened with Ben Doak.

It’s a piece of thoroughly lazy journalism, most of it lifted straight from a Celtic TV interview. McManus has not been a success.

The B team setup is not successful. And winning the Lowland League does not make it a success. The only way the B team setup succeeds is if it regularly graduates players to the first team—that is its job, its function. It is supposed to be the final step before a Youth Academy player makes it into our squad.

It has been a long time since anyone from the academy setup became a regular first-team player at our club. And no one will convince me—no one—that proving yourself in Scottish football’s fifth tier is a credible pathway to doing that.

It is preposterous that this is where we are.

First, I don’t believe that McManus, O’Dea, and the rest are the best we could get. It’s another example of Celtic’s bizarre hiring practices, where we favour connections to the club over actual ability. We should be looking beyond Scotland, at continental coaches, and building a system that teaches core skills the way the Dutch, Spanish, Germans, and French do.

The entire Celtic youth structure needs to be rebuilt, brick by brick. Fortunately, we happen to be sitting on a vast pile of money that would enable us to do it—if we got serious about it. And we should. We should get serious about it right now. But there is a lack of strategic thinking at Celtic. We didn’t even have the foresight to realise we had to replace our star striker before selling him, running the risk of going through the January window without a replacement or being quoted exorbitant prices.

When a club can’t see something like that coming a mile away, it tells you everything you need to know about the quality of leadership at the very top.

It is virtually non-existent. These are people who are very good at counting money but not very good at spending it strategically. They are not very good at thinking strategically. And one of the most obvious flaws in the Celtic Park grand strategy is this: we are never going to produce a single first-team-ready footballer playing in Scotland’s fifth tier. The level of opposition simply isn’t good enough.

To be honest, if we were producing the right calibre of player in the first place, we’d be dominating that league so thoroughly that every other club in it would want to see us gone. Celtic should have the capacity to rise up through the pyramid until we have a team in the Championship as well as the top flight. The fact we’ve yet to even win the Lowland League shows how bad things are.

So maybe this season we’ll finally do it. Maybe we’ll put green and white ribbons on the trophy—although we won’t actually get the trophy, nor official designation as winners, because we’re not allowed to win it. We certainly won’t get any of the benefits of winning it, like promotion to the next level. But I’m not convinced that would represent progress. When you consider how much we spend on the academy compared to the budgets of the other teams in that league—most of them part-timers—we should be winning it, and we should be winning it well, all the time.

Maybe I’m being too harsh.

I don’t think I am, but I’m willing to admit I might have a blind spot here. But on one point, I am absolutely clear: no manager—no matter how good, no matter his philosophy, no matter his football background—is going to turn players competing in the fifth tier of Scottish football into Premiership-level stars.

If McManus, O’Dea, and the rest are part of the problem, they’re only a small part of it. The fact we’re playing in the Lowland League in the first place is the much bigger issue. That is an indictment of our club’s failure to campaign for genuine reforms at the SFA. Because ultimately, it is the SFA who are to blame for the lack of a proper reserve league and therefore, a lack of actual competition for our backup players that might just give them a chance of reaching the top flight.

The SFA exists in its current fashion because the clubs allow it to. It’s that simple. And Celtic is one of those clubs. I accept that we need to find our players competitive games somewhere, but as far as I’m concerned, we’d be far better off sending as many of them out on loan as possible—to a higher level than the Lowland League.

Listen, you could have the best footballer on the planet in your ranks, but if that player had to emerge from our current academy system, he’d be a fraction of what he was capable of being by the time he reached our first team. Playing at that level every week regresses a player. That is a fact. They’re learning nothing. They’re benefiting not one bit. None of them is ever going to be ready because the jump from that level to the one we play at every week is simply too vast.

At some point, we need to start getting real about this.

We need to start taking it seriously, and we need to start thinking outside the box. It’s going to be difficult—of course it’s going to be difficult—but we have to be better than this. One step forward would be lobbying for a proper reserve league—not just the six-team version that currently exists, but a full league. And it should be mandatory for every top-flight club to take part.

We need to completely review our loan system. And I know Darren O’Dea is supposed to be reviewing it, but the fact remains: these players are not doing themselves or us any good playing in this terrible competition.

And for all the self-congratulations in The Celtic Way piece, the reality is this: every single case—whether it’s Rocco Vata, Daniel Kelly, Daniel Cummings, Ben Doak, or whoever—proves the same point. These guys don’t see a pathway to the first team if the only alternative to being in the first-team squad already is playing in the fifth tier, why would they stay?

I know some of them turned down the chance to be in the first-team squad, but they also knew that would mean patience. And they knew that having played in the fifth tier, they were nowhere near ready to play regularly for the first team. And they knew what that would mean—back to the fifth tier they’d go. Or they’d wait for us to find them a loan move somewhere.

And I understand why none of them liked that option. I understand why none of them wanted to stick around. I understand why every single one of them wanted to be playing at a higher level. Because it’s a short career and these guys could have wasted the best development years of it playing blood and thunder football.

I cannot believe this is not blindingly obvious to everyone at our club.

Ultimately, big decisions need to be made at the executive level of the club. How long do we keep pouring money into an academy system that cannot produce a single first-team player?

Until then, people can kid themselves that we’re making progress because we might finally win the meaningless bauble that comes with being the best-funded team in four divisions by eventually topping the fifth tier.

But that is not progress. And we should not let anyone dress it up as such.

Progress is putting players into the first-team squad. Progress is seeing them have a chance of becoming regulars. Right now, we are nowhere close to that. And we are not going to get there doing it like this. Winning the fifth-tier title—if we manage it—should not blind us to that simple fact.

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