Celtic’s B-team farce is over. Let us learn lessons from it.

Last night we learned that the club is scrapping the B team. Another failed experiment. Another years-long waste of everyone’s time and the club’s finite resources. Anyone paying attention could see from the start that this was doomed. This is a mercy killing, but it has come late and it does not repair the damage the club has done along the way.

I’ve been sitting with this for a while, turning it over in my head, and the more I think about it, the less it sits right with me. It is not one single issue. It is how everything connects. The B team. The loans. The squad. The decisions, or the lack of them. It all ties together, and what you are left with is a club that constantly reacts instead of planning properly.

Because let’s be honest about it. The Celtic B team was supposed to be something. The club did not sell it as a side project or a wee experiment that might work. It was supposed to be a proper pathway. A structure. A system that would feed the first team, develop players and protect the future of the club.

But now I look at it and honestly do not know what it is supposed to be anymore. Because whatever the intention was, the reality looks completely different.

There was no clear pathway. There was no clear progression. Instead, we got a strange cycle where players go into the B team, disappear into loans, come back and then hover around the edges with no direction at all. That is where we’ve been. We are now dealing with the consequences of years of that.

That is the bit that really gets me. Football clubs at this level do not just stumble into this by accident. They build it slowly, over time, decision by decision. When you look back at those decisions, and at the people who made them, it becomes even harder to understand how anyone allowed this to continue.

Darren O’Dea was there at the start of it.

He was there when the whole thing took shape, when the structure went in. Fair enough, give someone that responsibility and you expect something to come from it. But what came from it? What did we actually see?

Because I do not remember a steady stream of players stepping up, breaking through and becoming first-team regulars. I remember confusion and inconsistency. I remember players going out on loan and never really coming back into the picture in any meaningful way. Other players vanished into the Lowland League black hole. We ruined many of them.

And yet, when it did not work, when it clearly did not deliver what it was supposed to deliver, nobody held O’Dea to account. The club promoted him. That is the part that sticks. Then later, to hear him describe it as a “shambles” honestly takes some doing. Because you do not get to help build something, watch it fail and then step away from it as though you were never part of the problem.

That is not how accountability should work. Except at Celtic.

Then you move on to Stephen McManus. Another chance. Another reset, maybe.

It should have been another opportunity for the club to look at what was not working and fix it. But nothing really changed. It just felt like more of the same. Players stuck between levels, no real development pipeline and no clear identity to what the B team was supposed to produce.

And again, the outcome was not accountability.

It was not consequences. It was promotion. Into the first-team set-up no less. It is almost unbelievable when you say it out loud, but that is exactly what happened. And it tells you everything about how this club is operating behind the scenes. Because if failure leads to promotion, then what exactly is the standard? What is the benchmark? What are we even measuring success against?

Now we have Johnny Hayes involved, and I cannot help feeling we are just watching the same cycle play out again. Different name. Same story. He has been here for the fag end of total failure, which has now become total collapse. The B team being scrapped, the Lowland League fiasco at an end. What do you bet the club will find a job for him?

The accountability has not materialised so far; there is nothing to suggest that it will manifest itself now. The expectations do not seem to have changed. So why would the outcome change? It will not. Not unless something fundamental shifts in the way this club deals with failure.

But the real damage, the bit that goes beyond frustration and into actual concern, is what this has done to the squad. Because this is no longer just a B team issue. It is spilling into everything. Celtic are loaded down with the detritus of cheap deals and we’re here in part because of a board that likes to think it is made up of football geniuses and because our own player pipeline is producing nothing of value.

So, where are they? What is the plan? Because if you do not have answers to those questions, then all this has been is a waste of everyone’s time. You have pushed problems down the road and hoped they would sort themselves out. Now they are all coming back at once. That is a calamity, and nobody wants to own up to their part in it.

You want an example of how badly this system has failed? Just look at Owen Moffat. He is the last player who came from the B team into the first team squad. How long ago was that? And where is he now? He’s not at Celtic, so that too was a failure.

That is not on him. That is on a system that was supposed to take players like him and turn potential into something real. Instead, it has done the opposite. It has stalled them. Lost them. Left them in limbo. That is why I keep coming back to that word: failure. Because there is no softer way to describe it now.

So, Celtic have reached the point where they need to rebuild the structure. Again. And I keep asking myself: rebuild what, exactly? Because a rebuild needs a foundation. It needs a core. It needs clarity about what you are building and why.

You do not do that by recycling the same old failed staff. You do not promote a structure based on merit when failure carries no consequences.

Right now, I do not see any indication that this will change. I see a system that has not produced what it promised. And I see a club that still has not properly addressed any of its structural issues in any meaningful way. It is pitiful.

That is why, for me, the next step has to be different. It has to be decisive. It has to be ruthless. Because the idea that you can fix this with small tweaks, minor adjustments, another reshuffling of the deck chairs is a joke.

More than anything, what is missing is accountability.

That is the word this blog, James and myself, keep coming back to because it underpins everything else. If nobody is held responsible, nothing changes and if failure gets brushed aside, it repeats. If the same people keep moving into new roles without ever answering for what came before, then you are not building a football club.

You are maintaining a failed cycle. And that is exactly what this feels like. A cycle of failure. One that has been going on for years.

So, when I say the Celtic B team experiment has been a disaster, I do not say it lightly or for effect. I say it because I genuinely cannot see a single part of it that has delivered what it was supposed to deliver. Not the development or the pathway. Not the transition into the first team. Nothing.

And the fact that nobody has really paid a price for that only makes it worse.

That is what makes it linger. Because we are not done with the consequences. We are right in the middle of them. A squad that needs reshaped. A development system that has collapsed in on itself. A B team that has produced more questions than answers.

And a club that, unless it finally faces up to all of this properly, will find itself right back here again. Talking about the same problems. Asking the same questions. Wondering how anyone allowed it to happen. All over again.

When I step back from it all and really look at the bigger picture, it feels like this is what happens when a club loses its grip on accountability.

The B team was meant to be our future, our pathway, something we could trust.

Instead, it has left us with more questions than answers. I do not see a plan. I certainly do not see anyone taking responsibility. All I see is the same cycle, the same faces moving roles and the same mistakes people quietly carry forward.

That is what worries me most.

Not even the failure itself, but the fact that the club has accepted it. Because Celtic should never be a club that accepts this. Not now. Not ever.

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