Events in Croatia may help Celtic. But we’d be far better off if we decided to help ourselves.

Last night, Celtic’s Champions League prospects got dented a little. Not a lot—just a little. In fact, over the course of this weekend, they actually improved significantly. Not enough to settle things, but enough that a win for Reijka in their final game of the season in the Croatian league —a home match at that —will put us into the qualifying round for that competition as a seeded team.

It seemed like a bit of a forlorn hope a few weeks ago. Now it’s a reality. If they win their home game, that’s it. It’s on a knife edge. They could have wrapped it up this weekend—they failed to—but it’s on a knife edge and they have a good chance. Which means we have a good chance. But in reality, our future in the Champions League isn’t in their hands. It’s still, as it always was, in our own.

Whatever happens in the game over there—whatever the outcome is, and whether we’re seeded or not—the job we have to do remains the same. Nobody at Celtic Park should be assuming that a seeded position means automatic entry into the groups. It’s still a game that we have to prepare for in every sense of the word. That means deals for players have to be done in timely fashion, including deals for those who want to leave, and extended contracts for those wishing to stay.

It would be nice if the manager’s future were sorted out at the same time, but we don’t hold out much hope of that.

That’s probably going to be mid-season before we have any clear indication either way on whether Rodgers will be here beyond this term. But he’ll decide early. He’ll decide in the summer based on how the transfer business goes.

We made a level one critical mistake in January. We’re very fortunate it didn’t cost us something, but we made it nonetheless. It’s obvious that we made it. Everyone knows we made it. No one’s really denying it.

The decision to let Kyogo leave before we had signed a striker to replace him was off-the-charts nuts. All of us assumed there was a plan. All of us assumed that plan would swiftly kick into action. All of us assumed that all the legwork must be done already and that it was just a matter of getting a deal over the line.

And none of that turned out to be true.

So we inflicted needless damage on ourselves. It hasn’t done us any real harm, but it was a ridiculous, stupid, incomprehensible decision which, in another time and place, would have been very, very costly. The fact that we did that fills a lot of people with deep suspicion about the summer ahead—and no little alarm at the possibility we might do something very similar, if not worse.

They all say that failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Like one of those crazy American Doomsday Preppers, the mantra here should be that it’s too late to start preparing after the lights have gone out. Once sea levels are rising and floodwaters are inundating your city, laying in 30 days of supplies becomes essentially impossible. Preparation is the stuff that’s done beforehand. It’s the stuff that’s done before the emergency. It’s what I’ve said before: Noah built the Ark before the rain.

Because otherwise there would have been no point.

If we get to that Champions League qualifier unprepared, if we’re still short of players in three or four positions, we shouldn’t wait for the outcome of that game before we start making demands that heads roll. Rodgers won’t wait for the outcome before deciding his own future; he’ll be off the moment the season ends.

It would be nice if we’re seeded—but that’s no guarantee of going through. It just makes the path to going through a little easier to navigate. But in some ways, I hope we get the harder path. I hope that it’s clear that hard yards need to be put in, and that the hard work needs to be done.

Complacency is a major trait at this club, and it’s one we would all like to see eliminated. We know who the guilty parties are. We’ve always known their names. They are as well known to us as anyone in the starting eleven.

The Green Brigade even put one of them on a banner at the weekend—Michael Nicholson finally getting the scrutiny he deserves.

There are a lot of people who’ve long told me that in aiming at others on the board, I’ve missed a real target. Well, not anymore. Our CEO has to cop some of the flak here.

Listen to the manager speak—Rodgers is pretty clear that Nicholson is not his go-to guy. He prefers to work around Nicholson and around Lawwell, and go straight to Dermot Desmond. That may or may not be a great idea, but it’s what he’s chosen to do. And if it generates results, who can blame him?

We don’t have a proper football management structure. In some ways, that’s worked out okay, because Ange ran his own show. Brendan runs his own show. And the trophies continue to flow.

But it’s high time that the football department worked with its own budget and was separated completely from the rest of the Celtic operation. The football department should not be answerable to anyone else. The money that is set aside for the manager’s budget every year should be his to spend as he sees fit. Any additional sales he makes—that money should also be his to spend how he likes.

We have one game left in this campaign. We know what the stakes are. We know that another domestic treble is the perfect way to end this season and a perfect vindication of the decision to bring Rodgers back. It’ll be five trophies out of six, and we’ll be overwhelming favourites going into the next campaign.

It would take an act of almost unmatched self-harm for this to unravel. But we are more than capable of such an act of self-harm—and that bothers me.

It bothers a lot of other fans too.

So when the summer business starts—and it should start the day after the cup final is won—we’d better be on top of it.

Now we can look to Croatia, and to the title winners over there, and we can from there start making some assumptions about who we’re likely to face in the Champions League. But the simple fact is this: if we do our job right, we should beat whoever is in front of us. If we do our job wrong, it won’t matter whether we’re seeded or not. We’ll be needlessly putting ourselves in harm’s way.

And that will have knock-on consequences for our club for years, regardless of the result. We have been warned.