Sutton is right about Celtic. The complacency starts at the top.

Today Rodgers sat at his pre-match press conference and absolved the Celtic board of any responsibility for the slide in form. That’s Rodgers being a good soldier. In truth, we all know they have a role in this.

Way back at the end of the January window, when it closed and we didn’t replace Kyogo, one of the major concerns a lot of us had was the message that sent—not just to people outside the club, but also to those inside it.

We had Champions League games still to go and a massive qualifier ahead of us, and yet we allowed our main striker to leave without replacing him. It looked like we’d rolled over. I wrote about this at the time, and my colleagues Joe and Eric said the same.

It seemed obvious to me—you’re sending a clear message to your own dressing room, to your players, to your coaches, and to everyone else at the club that you’re willing to downgrade the team. You’re willing to weaken the side, even when it flies in the face of what the manager wants and what he needs.

The moment you do that—cut the manager off at the knees—and the moment you show that your level of ambition doesn’t match his, you also show that this is a club that doesn’t take itself seriously. No one else will either.

And unfortunately, that includes people in your own dressing room.

I’m not going to say that’s the sole reason our form has fallen off a cliff since January—after all, it started with that shocking defeat at Ibrox—but when the people at the top of the club behave like the job is done and act like it’s all wrapped up, that view seeps into the rest of the team. And it’s hard to shift once it sets in.

The people in charge at Celtic sold Kyogo because they believed the job was done in the Champions League, and that there was no further incentive to push any harder. It’s perfectly clear that they had formed the same complacent viewpoint towards our domestic position as well.

That kind of thinking only harms the dressing room. And although it’s the manager’s job to insulate the squad from that sort of talk, if his frustrations are obvious—and they have been—then it becomes a hell of a lot harder to do.

This team is playing like it thinks the job is done, like half of them are already away on holiday. Yes, there are mitigating factors—like the lack of a winter break—but that’s not much of an excuse when you stop and think about it.

So why are we talking about this again today, after all this time?

Because Chris Sutton said much the same thing in his newspaper column this morning. He believes the attitude problem at Celtic doesn’t start in the dressing room—it comes from above, from a lack of vision, from a lack of ambition, and from a board that’s grown complacent and even lazy.

There was no excuse for what happened in January. None. And there never will be one that satisfies me. Because it was active insanity, and you could tell it from the moment the story broke in the papers that we might be willing to let Kyogo go.

My first reaction to that story was to dismiss it out of hand. I said we wouldn’t do something so stupid unless we had his replacement ready to simply unveil. And I was wrong—100% wrong. I just couldn’t believe we’d inflict that sort of wound on ourselves, especially for all the reasons I laid out after the fact.

First of all, you’re advertising your need to every club out there. They all know you’re desperate. They all know you need someone. And they all know you’re cash-rich—because we never stop boasting about it. The moment you make your weakness public like that, you make your life ten times harder.

It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. At the very least, we should have kept him until after the Champions League game against Villa.

It was sheer lunacy to weaken ourselves heading into that tie. Absolutely bonkers. That was the first sign that, as a club, we’d already given up on it. We treated the Young Boys result as “mission accomplished.” And like I said at the time, that’s not the action of a serious football club.

People shouldn’t think that Maeda’s form somehow changes that equation. It doesn’t. They failed the manager. That’s a fact. And Maeda’s subsequent form doesn’t for one second change that.

They forced the manager to change his preferred line-up. They forced him to deploy Maeda in a position he didn’t want to use him in.

The whole point of signing Idah in the first place was to provide cover in the wide areas—cover and competition. If you look at the performances of Nicolas Kuhn, what you’re seeing is a player who knows he walks into the team every week, because there’s no serious threat to his place. That isn’t what Rodgers wanted. He wanted real competition for those roles. So yes, they failed Rodgers. And that’s just a fact.

I’ve barely read an article in the mainstream media that I agreed with more than I did with Sutton’s piece this morning. But I’ll go one step further—I’m also going to call out some of our own fans and sections of our fan media, who were just as complacent after that window.

A lot of them were satisfied that we’d basically swapped Kyogo for Jota. They ignored the manager’s comments—that he was bringing in Jota for cover and competition, and that he expected Kyogo to be replaced.

Not only were too many of our fans complacent about the domestic campaign, but they also effectively wrote off our chances in Europe. And they completely ignored what not signing a striker would do to the manager—and to the message it sent to the squad.

I lost count of the number of times I read, “We’ve got enough to win the league, so what’s the problem?” That’s the problem. That exact attitude is the problem.

When you start thinking, “We’ve got enough, so let’s stop trying to improve,” you invite disaster. And some of us asked the question at the time—what if that is the attitude the players take?

Well, look at the team right now. It’s clearly the attitude some of them have taken. And it’s a bit rich to complain about it when our own fans helped pave the way.

When fans let this board coast, the board believes it can.

Rodgers made his point last weekend. He challenged the players to respond. I expect that they will—but he has to respond too. If that means changing the system or the formation, then so be it. He’s done it before. It wouldn’t be alien to him.

But the real message here should be sent to the people running our club. And Rodgers should be sending it, and we should be sending it too.

No more of this.

This is their last chance to get it right and keep this manager happy. If they fail this summer, he’s gone. And nothing is going to keep him here.