Celtic’s pattern of failure: Ferencvaros, 2020.

There’s no disguising it: the defeat to Ferencváros in August 2020 was one of the most shameful European nights in Celtic’s modern history. Not because the Hungarians were some European powerhouse, but because the circumstances exposed every failing of the club in miniature.

It was the pandemic season, so Champions League qualifiers were reduced to single-leg ties. No safety net, no away goals rule, no second chance to put things right. Celtic had 90 minutes at Celtic Park to secure passage. The margins were razor thin and the stakes were massive.

This should have been the moment when the board, after years of repeating mistakes, finally learned their lesson. Instead, they doubled down on the same old errors. And what followed was humiliation, both on and off the pitch.

Going into the game, Odsonne Édouard was unavailable. But even with Édouard missing, Celtic had strikers on the books. Leigh Griffiths was still there, although questions lingered about his fitness and attitude. Albian Ajeti had been signed from West Ham for £5 million, but wasn’t yet ready to start.

We had Patryk Klimala, a January signing, who was still waiting to prove himself. But in point of fact, two out of three of those guys proved how incoherent everything at Celtic was. Ajeti had been signed on the back of a failure that his exposed him as a fraud. Klimala was a “club signing” project punt who Lennon didn’t trust at all … when we sold him John Kennedy admitted that he was a countering attacking player unsuited to Celtic’s attacking style … why in God’s name had we signed him in the first place?

Neil Lennon’s solution? He put Ryan Christie up front. A midfielder, a man who had played in a front three but never as a centre-forward. It was a decision that summed up the muddle at the heart of the club and it had echoed the utter insanity of the previous season when he’d played McGregor at left back. Celtic had bodies, they had options, but the squad wasn’t trusted or coherent enough to use them.

The same fault-lines ran through the transfer window of 2023, the one where Rodgers, in his first campaign back, didn’t trust or want the players the club procured for him. People above the manager making decisions no football minded person would have made.

This was the central failing of the board’s approach. They assembled squads bloated with numbers but lacking in balance, leaving managers with the task of turning square pegs into round holes on nights that would define the season.

Ferencváros were not special. They were organised, compact, and knew exactly how to frustrate. But Celtic dominated the ball, created chances, and still contrived to make a mess of it.

They conceded an early goal, a scrappy effort that immediately set nerves jangling. David Turnbull equalised to settle things down, but Celtic still looked disjointed. Then, on the break, Ferencváros struck again. A late sucker punch put them 2-1 up and Celtic never found a way back.

At full-time, the enormity of the result hit home. Out of the Champions League before the end of August, beaten at Celtic Park by a Hungarian side with a fraction of our budget. It wasn’t just the scoreline. It was the manner of it: Celtic had looked clueless, bereft of ideas, and entirely unprepared.

The board’s decision to trust Lennon with a job of that magnitude had been exposed as utter folly the previous year. They doubled down on their man and the result was one of the greatest unravelling’s in living memory.

What turned this from a bad night into a full-blown crisis was Neil Lennon’s post-match interview. Instead of shielding his players, instead of trying to protect the dressing room, he detonated it and instantly the watching Celtic support could see the season go up in flames.

He said some players didn’t want to be at the club. He accused them of lacking commitment. He all but told them to leave. It was an astonishing act of public self-immolation. Managers sometimes criticise individuals behind closed doors; Lennon did it live on television.

In that one moment he confirmed what fans had feared: the squad was fractured, morale was rotten, and the manager had lost faith in his own dressing room and they in him. It was like watching a man set fire to his house because he couldn’t fix the roof.

The transfer window around that game told its own story. Celtic had signed Ajeti, Klimala was still around, Griffiths was still under contract. Yet the manager didn’t trust any of them to start a Champions League qualifier.

That is the definition of a broken recruitment strategy.

And right on cue, reinforcements were announced after elimination. Shane Duffy arrived on loan from Brighton in September, trumpeted as a big signing, a lifelong Celtic fan coming home. He was supposed to shore up the defence – which we’d badly needed – but his Celtic spell became a nightmare and he left with his reputation in tatters. Regardless, the point was obvious: once again, the cavalry arrived after the battle was lost.

This was the same pattern we’d seen in 2014, 2015, 2018 and 2019. Key players sold or unavailable, replacements too late, a patched-up XI fielded for the most important game of the season, and the inevitable collapse.

The Ferencváros defeat didn’t just knock Celtic out of Europe. It set the tone for what became the catastrophic “ten in a row” season. The cracks in the squad were laid bare, the manager had lost the dressing room, and the supporters had lost faith in the leadership.

From that night, everything unravelled. The defence looked fragile, the forward line unbalanced, the midfield out of sync. Lennon’s relationship with the players never recovered. The atmosphere at Celtic Park soured. What should have been a historic season ended in shambles, with Lennon gone and the Ibrox NewCo strolling to the title.

All of that started with Ferencvaros, on one August night when Celtic once again failed to prepare, failed to strengthen at the right time, and failed to respect the magnitude of a Champions League qualifier.