Celtic has fallen prey to the “near miss fallacy.”

On the podcast the other night, we discussed those Celtic fans who believe there will be some sudden awakening across the support as to the state this club is in, if we fail to win the title and perhaps fail to win the Scottish Cup and finish third.

I find myself wondering why it takes a complete meltdown for people to open their eyes.

My contention is simple: if they haven’t opened their eyes already, they’re not going to.

There’s a concept in disaster management called the “near-miss fallacy.”

It’s simple enough on the surface. When something almost goes catastrophically wrong, when disaster is narrowly avoided, people often take comfort in the outcome. They say the system worked. They say it held up and that everything is fine.

That’s not what near misses are. Near misses are warnings.

They signal that the system does not work and that instability exists somewhere. They tell you, in the clearest possible terms, that something is broken, that something is failing, and that if nothing changes, it is only a matter of time before the inevitable happens.

Complex systems do not collapse without warning. They signal it in flashing red lights, and if those warnings are ignored, dismissed or explained away, what follows is not bad luck. It is inevitability.

That is where Celtic are right now.

This season has not been one sudden collapse. It has not been one bad result or one bad run. It has been a series of near misses, a sequence of warnings that have been there from the very start.

Think about how many times we have “got away with it.” Late winners that masked poor performances. Scrappy victories where we created little but still took three points. Games where individual moments of quality bailed out a system that wasn’t functioning properly. Matches where we dominated possession but produced nothing of substance, yet still convinced ourselves that control meant progress.

Those were not signs of strength. They were warning signs, every one of them. Each one told us the same thing: the system was not working. The structure was flawed. The team lacked cohesion, identity and purpose.

Instead of recognising those moments for what they were, we treated them as reassurance. We told ourselves we would find a way.

That is the near-miss fallacy in action.

The truth was always sitting there in plain sight.

It showed in the way we played. Slow, predictable, rigid. You could see it in the lack of movement, the absence of urgency, the constant recycling of possession without penetration. It showed in the recruitment, where short-term thinking replaced clear planning and obvious gaps remained unaddressed.

You could also see it in the messaging from the club, which stayed calm and reassuring even as the evidence mounted that something was very wrong.

The problems did not begin this season. Last season ran far closer than it should have. Rodgers’ first season in charge followed a similar pattern. Both campaigns tightened because we dropped standards. We failed to strengthen the side properly in that first summer. The January signings looked disjointed, but to Rodgers’ credit he got enough out of Nicolas Kühn and Adam Idah to get us over the line.

Even then, the warning signs were obvious. Those title races stayed close despite the Ibrox club being in free fall for large parts of that period. Performances papered over cracks. Results arrived despite the team not playing well. They were near misses, and the club ignored them.

This is what happens when leadership neglects the act of leading.

The focus shifts from solving problems to managing perception. Maintaining the appearance of control becomes more important than actually having it.

The warnings were there.

They were there at Ibrox when we produced nothing of note. They were there at St Mirren when we scraped through. We saw them in every game where we had the ball but did nothing with it. They were there in every performance where the structure looked broken and nothing changed.

They have also been there summer after summer in recent years, when major problems went unfixed and we almost paid the price. Each one was a flashing red light. Each one was ignored.

Eventually, the margin for error disappears and the luck runs out. The system breaks, and that is what we are watching now. System failure.

When it happens, people talk about results. They talk about defeats, dropped points, the moments where it all came undone. Rarely do they look at the underlying issues, but that is where the story starts. It starts with the warnings. It starts with every near miss that was treated as proof that everything was fine.

We were not fine. We were failing in slow motion, and the most damning thing of all is this: it did not have to end this way. All we had to do was acknowledge the warnings, correct the course and learn from our mistakes.

What a mess we’re in. What a failure on absolutely every level.

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