There is a lot of limited thinking at Celtic. Is this whole club in a comfort zone?

If we’re going to accuse the Celtic team of lacking imagination right now, then we might want to think about how the fans are approaching things too. We might also want to consider certain elements of the environment in which we watch our team.

Now, I could write all day about the Scottish sports media – and I sometimes do write all day about the Scottish sports media – but there’s a trait that’s crept in recently which reveals a more glaring lack of imagination than anything happening with the team.

All day long, I could cover bad journalism. There’s plenty of it out there. But I’m still more animated about lazy journalism than I am about just about anything else. And it’s not just that the example I’m about to discuss is both lazy and bad journalism – it’s an example of restricted thinking. I’m talking about the tendency to link us to so many former players and even former managers.

I’ll give you four examples that have come our way just in the last seven days.

There were suggestions that we should try to re-sign Carl Starfelt. There were suggestions that we should try to bring Kyogo back. There were suggestions that we consider reappointing Ange Postecoglou if he becomes available and if Rodgers doesn’t sign a new deal. And there was even one story the other day spelling out a possible route back to Celtic for Matt O’Riley.

That’s four separate stories. And today we got number five – the suggestion that because Odsonne Édouard is struggling right now, we should try to re-sign him.

Where does this come from?

A lot of it is from the mainstream media. A lot of it’s from our own fan media. But why? Where is this strange new obsession with going after so many players from bygone spells coming from? And would any of these guys necessarily make the team better? I think most of us believe Matt O’Riley would be a player who’d improve the squad – but fittingly, that’s probably the most unrealistic of all the stories being talked about here.

There are people who are concerned that Celtic’s transfer policy has been unimaginative of late. I’m one of them. I didn’t think that going for Kieran Tierney and Jota were necessarily bad ideas. Tierney has to prove his fitness, but his quality is undisputed. Jota enhances the team, and so signing the Portuguese back was not exactly something I looked on as a disaster. But I was concerned that, in going for two former players, there might be a message in that about confidence in the scouting department and our ability to find the next big star.

I still have that concern. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable one. The fact that we’ve gone back and brought in two former players – and have a guy in the dugout right now who’s also a former manager we went and got back – suggests that there are people at the club who may be out of ideas.

Now, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that we’re seriously trying to sign Édouard or Kyogo or Matt O’Riley. There’s certainly no vacancy for replacing Brendan Rodgers with Postecoglou, since both of them have jobs at the moment – and although Ange’s does appear to be under threat from recent results, there’s no proof that he’s facing any kind of imminent sacking.

Starfelt is a different story. There is actually a sliver of evidence suggesting that we were trying to sign Carl Starfelt in the summer window and instead went for Trusty when we couldn’t make the move happen. That is a media story – but it’s one from outside Scotland, which seems to have been well-sourced. So, there could be a core of truth in that. I honestly don’t know what to make of it.

Now, I’m not saying there’s no merit in the idea – because there’s clearly merit in the idea. Carl Starfelt is a very good defender. I thought so at the time, and I thought some of the criticism he got was extremely harsh.

There was a good footballer there. We all know what Kyogo can do. We all know what Édouard can do – when he can be bothered and when he’s on form. Matt O’Riley was an outstanding asset, and re-signing him would have almost unanimous support. Likewise, Ange won five trophies in two years.

Part of it is that we’ve been a little spoiled.

We’re not talking about failures here. This isn’t the Celtic Park equivalent of bringing back a former player like Barry Ferguson and sticking him in the dugout hoping it works out. We know what Ange brings – that style of football that was so successful, and in all probability, an eye for a player that proved to be sharp and would bring success all over again. We know that any of these players could come in and do us a job.

But is that really the point?

How much of this is about fear?

We’ve been phenomenally successful for most of the last 15 years. Doubles, trebles, records broken along the way. The Ibrox club has been so demoralised and smashed that it seems like The Banter Years will never end.

When you’re looking back at things that have worked before, there’s a natural tendency to think that if you want sustained success in the future, you go back to what worked in the past. And in the case of Rodgers, it has worked brilliantly. In the case of Jota, it looks like it’ll be a success. So it’s only natural that talk like this would start.

But we shouldn’t fear evolution either. We shouldn’t fear change.

As I said yesterday, I don’t fear the idea of a rebuild in the summer. I don’t fear the idea of going back to the drawing board, selling three or four players, and basically rebuilding the core elements of the team.

But do you defeat the purpose when you go back? When you re-sign a bunch of former players and even talk about a former manager? Is that really evolution – or just a tweaked version of what we already have?

I think the best way to continue achieving success is to continue evolving. And when you consider that in the last five managerial appointments we’ve hired the same two people twice, and that before that, Ronny Deila was hired when he’d been pencilled in as Lennon’s deputy, you start to see that – at least from the boardroom’s perspective – there’s not much thinking outside the box.

Even Ange was brought to the club from the City Group, where we had connections and where Mark Lawwell once worked.

So the current focus on former players probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. And while there’s no clear indication that we’re going to go out and get any of these guys – no real evidence that this is anything more than media speculation – we nevertheless have to acknowledge that there is a failure of imagination here. And that it might not only be the players who have retreated into a comfort zone.

It feels, in some ways, like the whole club is in a comfort zone.

And maybe that’s what we need to shake ourselves out of.