Tommy Burns would never have permitted a Celtic culture that disrespected fans.

Back in the sands of time, when Tommy Burns was manager at this club, he instigated a system wherein each player would have to attend a series of fan evenings in the course of the season. This connected the supporters to the club. I don’t know when, or how, that policy came to an end, but we are miles from there right now.

There are moments in football that, on the surface, seem small. A player walking past a young fan without stopping or a shirt not signed. A wave not returned or a simple interaction ignored. Individually, they are easy to dismiss.

Easy to brush off as a bad day, a misunderstanding, a player in a hurry, a moment taken out of context.

But when those moments start to add up, when they become part of a pattern rather than an exception, they stop being small. They start to tell you something.

And right now, they are telling us something about Celtic.

Because this is not just about players and fans. This is about standards. It is about culture. It is about whether a football club understands what it is, who it represents, and what is expected of those who wear the shirt.

At a healthy club, these things are not optional. They are not left to chance. They are set and then they are reinforced. Tommy Burns understood this full well, and most importantly, those at the top of this club understood it too.

Today’s players are equally aware that when they walk out of Lennoxtown, when they leave Celtic Park, when they encounter supporters, especially young supporters, they are representing something bigger than themselves. They do not need to be told twice. They understand it. Or at least they used to. Because when they lowered those standards there was someone there to tell them that and to get those standards back up.

That is leadership. That is what a strong club culture looks like.

It is not just about performances on the pitch. It is about behaviour off it.

This is about the little things that, collectively, define the identity of the club.

When those things slip, it is never just about the incident itself. It is about what has been allowed to slip behind the scenes. Because players do not suddenly stop engaging with supporters for no reason. That does not happen in isolation. That happens in environments where standards are unclear, where expectations are not reinforced, where leadership is either absent or ineffective.

And that is where this becomes a bigger issue.

Right now, Celtic feels like a club where too many of those standards have softened.

You can see it in the football. You can see it in the results. These are the obvious places.

But it’s there in other things; in the sneering of the reprehensible Chris McKay, perhaps the most loathsome person ever to work at this club. You see it in the contempt the whole executive has for the supporters. And now, increasingly, you can see it in moments like these.

The connection between the team and the support has always been one of this club’s defining strengths. It is not a marketing slogan. It is not something the club rolls out for PR purposes. This is real. Generations of supporters built it, and they feel a genuine connection to the players, to the shirt, and to the idea that Celtic stands for something beyond just winning games. This is what Tommy Burns wanted to get across.

When a young fan approaches a player, that is not a minor inconvenience. That is the club, in its purest form, standing in front of you, and how you respond to that matters. Players once knew this. Everyone at Celtic used to know it.

But when people at the very top of the house have open contempt for those who pay their wages (and everyone else’s at the club) how can you expect the real lessons to filter through? How can you expect people further down he line to recognise that responsibility, instinctually, without needing to be reminded of it?

An entire generation of top players came to this club and left completely understanding everything about it through the work Tommy Burns did and the standards he tried to enforce, and those things matters because they reflect the respect you have for the people who fill the stadium, who fund the club and who carry it through good times and bad.

And this isn’t just about Celtic. You can look at some of the most successful teams in modern football and see it clearly. Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United was obsessive about standards, not just in training, not just in matches, but in behaviour.

Players always understood what was expected of them.

Arsène Wenger, for all his focus on style and development, demanded professionalism and respect in every aspect of the club. Pep Guardiola does not just coach tactics. He enforces culture. He sets expectations for how players carry themselves.

These things are not separate from success. They are part of it. Because when standards slip in one area, that drop rarely stays contained.

It spreads and shows up in performances and in decision-making. It shows up at the AGM where executives treat fans with such colossal disregard that they don’t even take their questions.

That is what makes these small moments important.

They are symptoms of the underlying disease which afflicts this whole club right now. They are reminders that something is not quite right at the most fundamental level, that this is not just about results on the park or what is going on with the manager hunt, or with the league table.

No one is saying that every player who misses an interaction is doing so out of arrogance or disrespect.

Footballers are human. They have bad days. They have pressures that most people never see. But a healthy club accounts for that. It puts structures in place and reinforces expectations.

It ensures that the standards do not drop, even when individuals are under strain. That is what leadership does.

And that is what Celtic is missing right now. Not just on the pitch, not just in the dugout, but across the entire club. There is a sense of drift. A sense that too many things are sliding. The focus has narrowed to short-term issues while the broader culture slips into neglect, and when that happens, you start to lose the small things.

The interactions and the respect. The awareness of what it means to represent the club, and more even than results, those things matter. They always have.

Tommy Burns was well aware of it. He would never have permitted this disrespect for fans.

We once had people at every level of Celtic who understood that. We do not have those people at Celtic now, except perhaps in the manager and a handful of players who have been here their whole careers.

The leadership is more interested in what it can leech out of Celtic than what it can put in … and that’s where the rot starts.

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