It is high time Celtic got real and stopped relying on the Old Bhoys network.

It will be just like this club, in all the ways that are frustrating, if we decide to replace the departing Darren O’Dea with a Stephen Pressley or Stiliyan Petrov or some other former player who fancies giving coaching a try.

It speaks to a fundamental lack of ambition and a fundamental lack of imagination. Are these really the brightest and the best? Is this really the best we can do?

At every stage of Celtic’s youth development cycle over the last few years, I’ve complained bitterly about the over-reliance on people with a connection to the club. At every stage I’ve been told how wrong I am to do that.

And yet the results bear out my concerns. We are not getting it done at the academy level, and the academy is far too stacked with former Celtic players.

I keep on hearing that these people are qualified. I keep on hearing that they have their coaching badges.

But a public defender has the same law school certificate hanging on his wall as a high-powered attorney. Which one would you want defending you if you were in serious trouble? Having those badges doesn’t really mean a hell of a lot. Any manager out there has those badges. There’s a reason we hired Brendan Rodgers.

It may be unfair to suggest that we’ve turned our academy structure into some sort of retirement home for former players and people with a Celtic connection—but if you look at it, it certainly resembles a retirement home for former players and people with a Celtic connection. And we’re seeing the results of it.

We’re seeing the consequences of it in the number of youth players who leave this club without ever featuring in the first team squad. We’re seeing the results of it in the first team squad we continually have to buy player for, instead of producing our own.

It’s no secret what I think about this. We need to bring in some foreign minds. We need to bring in continental coaches. We need to bring in people who will bring fresh ideas and a fresh perspective. Not this peculiarly Scottish way of doing things—we emphasise all the wrong things here, and you can see the evidence of that in the national team. You can see the evidence of it in the poverty of what Steve Clarke has to work with in half a dozen positions. This country is not producing top players anymore.

Smarter people than I am need to branch out and review where this is going wrong.

My concern has long been that Ibrox is going to get there before we do. That they’re going to realise that this requires sustained investment and a sustained effort in a continental coaching system and they’re going to steal a major march on us.

If there was one area where their American owners could gain an advantage—and really make us look flat-footed—it’s if they put the time and effort into developing youth team coaching and brought in the right type of minds to do it properly. We should be seriously concerned about that.

I don’t know what it is that people find so comforting about former Celtic players in these jobs. I don’t find it comforting at all. I see it as evidence of a general laziness and general fuzzy thinking. I wish to God we would stop doing it.

Just go out and find the best people we can get. How difficult is that? The idea that there were not better people out there than Darren O’Dea is ludicrous. The idea that there aren’t better people out there than Stephen McManus is ludicrous. The idea that there isn’t someone better out there than Chris McCart—who now has a decade of failure behind him—is ludicrous.

We were seriously, at one point, considering bringing Charlie Mulgrew in as one of our academy heads—even though he doesn’t even have his coaching badges yet—simply on the basis that he wants to get them, and on the basis that he’s a former Celtic player who served the club with distinction.

But I’ve always been very unsentimental about this.

Are these people good enough, or are they being rewarded for past loyalty? And who decides whether they’re good enough or not? Those who are being retained certainly aren’t being retained on the basis of results—because the results are terrible.

I’m reminded of the number of times we’ve talked, here and elsewhere, about the need for a fully separated football operation. Something broken off from the PLC and allowed to get on with its own job.

That football operation needs to be run by a football person. Someone who is qualified to hire and fire the best and the brightest. Someone who knows what they’re looking for and how to identify talent. Because it seems to me that we just look for anybody with a Celtic connection who has a coaching certificate and offer them a gig.

Unfair or not, that is the perception we’ve created, and the long list of failed campaigns—and the long list of youth players who have left this club without ever seeing a minute of first team football—bears out the shocking truth that we are doing something wrong here.

In those circumstances, you either persist with doing the wrong thing and keep on getting the same results, or you radically change things and try for a better one. Surely, we’ve arrived at that place now.

So Celtic could restore a lot of my faith in those who run our football operation if they went out this time and simply hired the best person they could find. Someone with fresh ideas. Someone with a different perspective. Someone with a foreign name.

And yes, that is not a cure-all—I recognise that.

But the way we’re doing things here in Scotland is not working, and that should be obvious to even the most blinkered observer. It is high time we broke this pattern. It’s time we stopped using the old bhoys network and built an academy team worthy of this club and its much heralded “ambitions.”