The Callum McGregor question is not complicated and Celtic fans know it.

In many ways, the theme of the day has been entitled dickheads talking down to fans because they once played the game. So, it is no surprise that Ryan Stevenson has decided to chip in on the Callum McGregor debate among Celtic supporters in much the same way Scott Brown did, and with every bit as much ignorance.

Brown talks about vultures. Stevenson talks about people being entitled.

But you will not find anyone more entitled than an ex-player in the media who thinks all fans are the same, all prone to knee-jerk reactions and all talking through their backsides. That is entitlement. It is arrogant, elitist and stupid. There are times when I can live with it, because a number of ex-players in the media are intelligent, insightful and worth listening to. Ryan Stevenson is not one of them.

If you are going to be that condescending towards the views of supporters, views which you are either happy to misrepresent or too dim to understand, then you had better be bringing something special to the table.

Ryan Stevenson is not something special. He is about as smart as the proverbial box of rocks. He will forever be the Wilfried Nancy green-shoes guy, the one who was focused on the Frenchman’s footwear when everyone else was focused on his tactics, or lack of them. That is how seriously Stevenson should be taken.

The only reason he is getting this piece at all is because his contribution forms part of a wider discussion about Callum McGregor, and because that contribution exposes the extent of the problem. There are too many ex-professionals and mainstream journalists who think they can speak to what fans are thinking when it is painfully obvious that they have no idea what fans are thinking.

I hate having to keep doing this. I hate being the guy who keeps knocking this rubbish down. But as long as they keep writing it, I will keep correcting it.

Callum McGregor has been an outstanding servant to this club. Nobody credible could deny it. But the idea that he should be beyond criticism is a joke. The idea that we should let him visibly age in the role and lose a little more every year, while continuing to play him out of blind loyalty and admiration for previous campaigns, is a joke as well. No serious football club does that. No serious football club keeps playing a player who is in decline just because he used to be brilliant.

Every serious club knows when it is time to cut the cord.

I will be gutted on the day Callum McGregor is no longer a Celtic player. I will be gutted because he is one of the best players of my lifetime. A little part of my soul will drift away with him. But Stevenson does what all kinds of lazy people in punditry do when they do not have a coherent argument. He reaches for the instant “what if?”

What if there were no McGregor in the team? What if Martin O’Neill were not the manager? Where would Celtic be then?

The answer is simple. I do not know. He does not know either.

What I do know is that McGregor is now in his early thirties. He has lost a yard or two. He knows it himself, which is one reason he gave up Scotland duty.

This team is too slow. The style is boring.

Yes, that criticises the manager as well as some of the players. We are still allowed to say that. Fans can still say the manager gets things wrong, whoever he happens to be. We can still say that a player who is not at his best might be better off out of the side for a while.

If the manager took McGregor out and gave someone else a run, none of us knows exactly what would happen. Ryan Stevenson does not know either. But it is hardly a stretch to say that replacing McGregor with someone fully fit, a little sharper and a little quicker on his feet might speed up the whole team.

If McGregor is playing with an injury, as it appears, that slows him down even further. It means he can never give one hundred per cent.

Yes, he can push through the pain barrier. Yes, he can play through it.

But we should not ask him to do that. We should not expect it either. For a former professional to suggest that our captain should keep playing while hurt is pretty disgusting. There is already far too much of that in the game.

When a player reaches McGregor’s age, we are not talking about risking his long-term career in the same way, but we are talking about risking his long-term health. We do not have the right to do that.

The club should act with more responsibility than that.

The only reason McGregor does not get left out for his own good is this idea that he is too important to the team. What Stevenson and others do not seem to grasp is that part of the frustration many fans feel around McGregor right now comes from genuine concern for his wellbeing.

I do not know how many times some of us have said it.

McGregor plays too many games.

We do not say it because he is not good enough to play them. We say it because the club risks burning him out. These should be a midfielder’s peak years. Instead, the club denies McGregor that by asking too much of him, too often. Saying that is not sacrilege. It shows concern for the damage the club is doing to the man himself. It is also a disgrace that we do not have a player in the squad who can step in and play his role often enough for Callum to sit games out and recover properly.

Even if this were purely about form, the principle would still be the same. Even if this were just about his general level of play, supporters still have the right to voice their displeasure when they watch a player operate below his normal standard and suggest that maybe it is time to drop him. Only a moron would argue otherwise.

Players get dropped all the time. All the time. The armband is not some magical shield. It is part of football.

Teams that keep out-of-form players in the side invite trouble. It does not matter who those players are. It does not matter what service they have given. Underperforming players go to the bench or the stand.

That is how winning teams keep winning.

It is not an original thought. It is not even a controversial one. In fact, across the city, nobody blinks when James Tavernier gets dropped these days. But with Celtic, of course, there is always a different standard. As a result, certain conversations are apparently off limits, especially among supporters.

A discussion about how you deal with a player who is underperforming is about as simple and unsophisticated as football gets. It is a concept anyone can grasp, even if they have only watched the game for five minutes.

In fact, that might even help. If you are watching a team that is not playing well, and you spot certain players who are part of the reason for that, it would not even occur to you that there are people out there who cannot see the logic in replacing them.

You would simply assume that was the obvious thing to do. A non-functioning part comes out, something else goes in.

So how an observation as simple as “this guy is not playing well, maybe it is time to drop him” turns into a sprawling moral debate has always baffled me.

At the centre of the overcomplicated version of that discussion you usually find sentimentality. Sentimentality is one of the dumbest forces in football. It gets in the way when it comes to building a team and maintaining the strength of a squad.

If your star striker has lost a yard of pace and no longer scores as regularly as he once did, sentimentality should play no part in what you do next. You start looking for the next hot striker and transitioning in the next evolution.

You can see the same issue all across this Celtic team.

I have said before that the board is complacent about players like Liam Scales and Tony Ralston because, as long as there are warm bodies there, it does not think there are holes in the squad. But sentimentality plays a role too.

You can look at those players and say Scales has done better than any of us expected, and that is true. You can say Ralston is a good soldier, and that is true as well. But what does any of that matter if your aim is to get better?

The idea that there is no better central defender within Celtic’s budget than Liam Scales is absurd. The idea that there is no better back-up right-back out there than Tony Ralston is absurd too. The only real reason to keep players like that around when you can do better is sentimentality.

This is the most uncomplicated part of team building.

Is that guy the best we can get? No? Then take him out and put someone else in. Is that guy on form right now? Is he playing well? No? Then take him out and put someone else in. I thought that was how football worked.

But when fans dare to ask those questions, the same media, which would not think twice about making the same point, suddenly reacts as though we have overstepped our bounds.

Well bollocks to that.

As fans, our first loyalty is to the institution. It is to the team itself, not the men who make it up. I never thought that was a particularly controversial idea, especially since you see it everywhere in football when clubs build and sustain success.

Yet a concept that seems perfectly obvious to many supporters, that an off-form player drags the whole team down and that replacing him might improve things, somehow gets twisted into fans being entitled or stupid. Then, inevitably, you get idiots asking hypothetical questions they cannot answer any more than we can.

It is an absurd business these people operate in, and it rewards stupidity.

In a meritocratic environment, Ryan Stevenson would not be anywhere near a national newspaper. Perhaps that is the problem. They do not work in a meritocratic environment, so they do not understand how meritocracy works. They do not understand that you have to keep earning your place over and over again.

And yet they accuse us of being entitled. Wow.

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