Celtic needs change and it no longer has the luxury of time.

I want to start this piece by making something absolutely clear. I am sceptical about the various new shareholder initiatives being offer to Celtic fans not because I oppose supporters having a voice and not because I oppose fans building a shareholding, and certainly not because I oppose the principle of supporter influence at boardroom level.

In fact, I support all of those things. Fans should have a voice. They should have representation. Fans owning more of Celtic is a good thing. The more shares supporters hold collectively, the more the club remains in the hands of the people who actually care about it.

That is not the problem. The problem is time.

And right now, time is the one thing Celtic does not have.

One of the more troubling aspects of the current landscape is the fragmentation. We now appear to have multiple organisations attempting to build essentially the same thing: a supporter shareholding strategy designed to influence the club over the long term. I will resist the temptation to reach for the obvious People’s Front of Judea comparisons. It is tempting. It is also not entirely inaccurate.

Because what we are seeing is duplication of effort, competing claims of legitimacy and parallel strategies aimed at the same objective. That is not unity. That is dilution.

If the goal is to build influence, dividing energy across multiple structures is not how you do it. It weakens the collective voice. It confuses supporters. And it slows everything down. And slowing things down brings us back to the real issue. Time.

All of the shareholder initiatives are built around the same basic idea. Accumulate shares. Build influence. Use that influence to push for change. In the long term, that makes sense. Over time, a large enough supporter shareholding could alter the balance of power inside Celtic. But let’s be honest about what that actually is.

It is a five-to-ten-year strategy. It is slow capital politics. The accumulating of gradual influence. It is structural reform over a lengthy period.

That might be valuable. It might even be necessary. But it is not a crisis response.

And Celtic is in a crisis now. Not next summer. Not in five years. Now.

Waiting for a modest minority shareholding to slowly accumulate influence while the club drifts is not a solution to the present situation. It is a long-term aspiration being presented as a fix-everything strategy. That is the fundamental problem I have with it.

One of the mistakes people make when they talk about control of Celtic is that they treat it as purely a structural issue. Who owns what or votes where. Who sits on which committee. What percentage of shares is in so-and-so’s hands.

But power at a football club like Celtic is not just structural. It is political. It depends on atmosphere. On supporter consent. On commercial confidence. It depends on stability.

A board can be legally secure and politically fragile at the same time.

When supporters withdraw trust, the environment changes. Every decision becomes contentious. Every mistake becomes a crisis. Sponsors notice. Partners notice. The wider football world notices.

Legal power does not disappear. But the cost of using it rises dramatically. That is how power actually works in the real world and it is why structural change alone is not enough … and it’s why it’s not even strictly necessary to get real change now.

Last summer changed something fundamental.

The decisions that were taken, the way they were taken and the way supporters were treated created a legitimacy crisis. You can debate the football decisions if you want. You can argue about strategy. But what cannot be denied is that a significant section of the support no longer trusts the current leadership.

That matters. Because Celtic is not just a business. It is an institution built on emotional investment and collective identity. Once trust is broken, authority weakens even if the structure stays the same. That is where we are now.

The issue is no longer simply governance. It is mandate. It is legitimacy. And legitimacy cannot be restored by asking supporters to wait ten years while shares are slowly accumulated. To be blunt, this board is out of it. That’s why this board cannot be permitted to remain in control of the club.

There are three ways power shifts in any organisation.

Through a change in ownership, through governance reform or through pressure. Share accumulation is slow. Board reform through voting is slow. But political pressure is immediate. Boycotts affect revenue. Protests affect perception. Campaigns affect the narrative around the club.

They increase the cost of maintaining the status quo.

That is what creates leverage.

This is why the argument that “shareholding is the only serious strategy” does not hold up. Ownership matters. But influence is not created by ownership alone. Influence comes from legitimacy and confidence.

If maintaining the current approach becomes more damaging than changing it, behaviour changes. That is the reality of how organisations operate.

A lot of people will say that none of this matters because Celtic is ultimately controlled from Ireland. I have never believed that.

Dermot Desmond is the largest shareholder. He is enormously influential. But his power is not absolute. It operates through the people around the boardroom table and through the stability of the environment in which the club operates.

Major shareholders do not want open conflict. They do not want public instability. They do not want prolonged supporter unrest. Because that damages the asset.

Power, in that situation, becomes political. It becomes about managing the environment rather than imposing decisions regardless of consequence. That is why the composition and mindset of the board matters.

You change that environment by changing the people, and if you bring in new folk with new ideas the balance of practical power changes with it.

You do not reduce influence just by buying shares and creating an opposition bloc. Let’s be honest, unless someone buys Desmond out, he’s here to stay. That does not mean that he should continue to run things as he presently does.

This brings us back to the fragmentation problem. Three organisations pursuing similar long-term strategies separately does not strengthen supporter influence. It weakens it.

What changes power quickly is unity of purpose. What creates leverage is coordinated pressure. And what forces attention is a single, organised movement.

That is why any shareholder strategy that exists in isolation, without engagement with wider supporter pressure, is incomplete. And it is why the one organisation of the three that has recognised the need to operate inside the broader fan movement is already closer to reality than the others. Because The Trust understands something fundamental.

Structural change is long term. Pressure is immediate.

Both are needed, and one one cannot replace the other.

The Trust operates within The Collective.

In fact, it has one of the loudest voices within The Collective because people within that organisation recognise that any successful campaign will be a multi-track approach and not a walk down a one-way street.

This is not a choice between share ownership and supporter action.

It is a question of priority and timescale. If you want to reshape Celtic over the next decade, building a supporter shareholding makes sense. If you want to change the direction of the club in the next twelve months, pressure is the only lever that moves quickly enough.

Right now, the danger is not that supporters are trying to do too much. The danger is that we are dividing our energy between parallel structures while the club drifts.

Fragmentation slows everything. Division amongst those seeking change weakens leverage. Competing legitimacy claims confuse the message. And time keeps passing.

Ownership matters. Governance matters. Long-term structural reform matters.

But none of those things, on their own, will change Celtic quickly enough to address the situation we are in. Power at this club is political as much as it is structural. It responds to risk and to pressure.

In some ways it already has. And because Celtic is funded by the fans, it responds to the environment created by supporters.

Buying shares might change Celtic one day. Unity amongst the groups seeking reform can apply the pressure to change Celtic right now.

And right now, now is what matters.