Celtic B’s woes continue. When does this club get serious about the academy structure?

Today, the media is running a story about how our B team threw away a two-goal lead to draw 3-3 in its latest match.

And without wanting to launch into yet another rant about another area of the club where it’s Amateur Hour, we do need to keep talking about the crisis in the academy—because that crisis is very real, and it’s very damaging to Celtic. It is also a constant drain on club resources and, frankly, the money could be better spent.

I look at the first team squad and, yes, it pleases me that there are academy-produced players in it—but Tony Ralston and Stephen Welsh are the two most recent graduates, and neither of them is a starting XI player.

Not even close. We have Tierney, we have Forrest, we have McGregor—but all of them made their debuts well over a decade ago. Since then, we have not graduated a single player who has become a first-team regular.

We are the biggest club in this country by a mile. We have more resources than any other club in this country by a mile. Celtic is a cultural icon. We should be hoovering up every young talent in Scotland.

We should be developing our own players on a steady conveyor belt, like the top clubs in Europe do, and doing it without even the slightest difficulty. Any kid out there with a modicum of talent should be passing through our doors. And that should be an attractive prospect—for the kids and their parents alike.

Now, let me be hopeful for a moment. We’ve appointed Shaun Maloney as pathway manager, and Maloney has enormous experience across the game.

Not quite enough experience for me to ever endorse him as a future Celtic first team manager—a decision which, if taken, should spark riots in the streets—but in this role? I think he’ll do just fine.

In fact, I think he’ll turn out to be one of the best decisions Celtic has made in a long time. Because already, you can see signs of change.

We’ve signed more of our academy players to long-term deals than at any time I can remember. We’ve sent more of them out on loan for first-team experience than I’ve seen in years. And they will benefit from that. Finally, it looks like something coherent is going on. Finally, it looks like there are big ideas being brought to bear on solving a very big problem.

Maloney on one hand and Adrian Asghar on the other—two outstanding appointments. Two guys who should be driving the bus. But all around them? It’s the same old rubbish. And I have no problem calling it that.

Celtic’s academy structure has been stuffed full of people who, frankly, wouldn’t get a better job anywhere else. People like Chris McCart. People like Stephen McManus. They’ve been at the club far too long.

I had a look through the backroom team in the academy earlier today and it’s bloated with guys whose only experience is from other Scottish clubs. Some of them have been at Celtic Park for nearly 20 years. Tell me—what good is that doing us?

Because by any acceptable measure, the academy system at Celtic has failed. It’s been failing for nearly a decade. And if the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then we are most definitely insane.

This is the reason we have to go out, year after year, and buy players—we do not produce our own. I know there are people who’ll claim it’s because the pathway doesn’t exist, or that the chances haven’t been given to young players.

Rubbish. I’m sorry, but if the kids in the system were good enough to play for the first team, they’d be there. No club—and certainly not this one, as we’ve seen in this window—spends money on new players if it doesn’t have to.

The sad truth is the players in our academy just aren’t good enough.

And that’s not a failure on the part of the kids. Some of them undoubtedly do have talent. Enough, perhaps, to make it as professionals. Enough, perhaps, to one day pull on the Celtic shirt. But that talent is not being utilised properly.

The failure is with our coaching. We are not teaching the core skills as we should be. As a result, we are bleeding out. And I know this is not a problem exclusive to Celtic—Scottish football’s entire youth structure has failed. It has failed utterly.

And that is a gross failure of leadership at the very top of the game.

But we cannot fix the game.

We can only fix what’s on our own doorstep. And when I look around at the academy setups elsewhere, I don’t exactly see a hotbed of innovation there either. Which makes it all the more critical that we stop hiring from the same shallow pool—the same narrow, parochial, out-of-date set of connections and cronies.

Not just Scottish-based coaches, but guys with links to Celtic—as if that’s more important than having the actual skills required.

Nepotism and cronyism are the order of the day at Celtic. The club is filled with the Friends of The Man. That’s not good enough. Especially not in the academy. That is exactly where we should be building a centre of excellence.

It’s one of the few areas where we can genuinely compete with Europe’s elite clubs, if we’re willing to spend the right money and adopt the right strategy. But “strategic” and “plan” are not words you’ll find in the Celtic Park lexicon. We are run by accountants and lawyers—not football people. And they haven’t got the first clue how to fix this.

One of the things you’ll notice straight away when you look at our academy structure is how bloated it is. It needs streamlined. It needs modernised. It needs a complete overhaul. That means anyone who’s had a job in that department since the early 2000s should probably be looking for one somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean they’re all bad at what they do. But it does mean that none of them have any fresh ideas left. And very few of them are likely to be up to date with what a club our size actually needs in the modern game.

You want to see a real sign of life? You won’t find it at Celtic. You’ll find it elsewhere. There are American owners at the club across the city. There are American owners at Aberdeen. Tony Bloom and his people are at Hearts.

There’s transatlantic interest at Motherwell, Hibs, and Dundee United too. And some of the people now running those clubs are modern thinkers. It’s going to take cross-club agreement that the current system is broken. And it’s going to take a group of those outside-the-box thinkers to come up with real solutions.

Normally, I’d be demanding that Celtic lead that charge.

But we’re not going to. The people running our club aren’t going to. That’s just one more responsibility they’ve abrogated. And you know what? It no longer bothers me where the solution comes from—so long as it comes.

We need to do something. Whether it’s a return to a proper reserve league or something else, we need serious change. And that means the B team experiment in the Lowland League should be brought to an end as soon as is humanly possible.

But more than that, we need to start judging every part of the academy system on merit. Who’s getting the job done? Who’s not? If the current metrics still hand out pass marks to people like Stephen McManus, when it’s not at all clear what good he does us, then maybe it’s the metrics that need changing.

The issues at Celtic go way beyond failed signings and transfer windows that drag on endlessly. The rot is set deep. It starts at the top, with an executive utterly clueless about how to run a modern football club.

They can run a business. They can turn a profit. That much is clear. But we’re not just a business. We’re a football club. The objective is to be better on the pitch. And we lack the proper structure to make that happen. I no longer believe the people running the club even care, never mind know how to build that structure.

But this cannot go on. Watching the B team floundering about in the Lowland League is every bit as depressing as watching this transfer window unfold. It’s just another symptom of the malaise that has this club in a death grip.

And eventually, something has to give.