Celtic needs to change more than personnel. It needs to change its thinking.

The term “survivorship bias” comes from the Second World War. It’s one of my favourite stories because of what it says about how we solve problems.

Picture it. Aircraft are coming back from combat over Europe, limping onto runways, torn up by enemy fire. Mechanics and analysts gather around them. The damage is everywhere. Bullet holes riddle the wings. The planes look as though they have flown through hell and only just made it home.

The problem seems simple enough. Look at where the returning aircraft have taken the most punishment and reinforce those areas. Protect the sections that are visibly under attack. It feels obvious because it is obvious. Any normal person standing there with the evidence in front of them would likely say the same thing. The wings are being hit. The body is being hit. Strengthen them. Job done.

Except it didn’t work. There was no reduction in the rate of losses. None at all. Then someone asked the question that changes everything. What about the planes that did not come back? What damage did they take?

That is the moment the whole picture shifts. Suddenly, the damage on the returning aircraft no longer looks like a map to the problem. It looks like a map to survivable damage.

Those planes came home with holes in their wings because holes in their wings did not kill them. The real points of fatal weakness are the ones missing from the evidence. Where are there no holes? The fuselage for a start. What would a direct hit there do?

What became clear is that those aircraft were hit in places so critical they never made it back to be studied at all.

That is one of the most illustrative stories ever told because it is not really about planes. It is about what happens when people ask the wrong question about the evidence right in front of them. It is about how easy it is to draw the obvious conclusion and get everything completely wrong. Intelligence often starts with refusing to accept that the most visible damage is necessarily the most important damage.

Celtic are a club trapped inside the wrong question.

For a long time now, supporters have looked at the latest disaster or embarrassment and done what people naturally do. We identify the men closest to the mess. We point at the chairman, the chief executive, the major shareholder, the manager, the adviser, the latest fixer brought in to steady the ship.

Get rid of him, we say, and the problem goes with him. Remove the face at the top and you remove the disease. Change the personnel and everything changes with it.

It is an understandable instinct. I also think it is too simple now. Because what if Celtic’s problem is no longer merely the people in the big offices? What if the problem is the way the club itself has learned to operate? What if the flaw is not just personal but structural? What if it lives in the policy and the strategy instead?

What if the club has taken on destructive institutional habits?

People at Celtic love words like policy, strategy and model. They use them as if they are talismans. The implication is always the same. There is a plan. There is a system. There is a coherent way of doing things. Whatever short-term chaos supporters think they see, the men in the boardroom are thinking bigger, longer and more rationally than the rest of us.

The problem, we are invited to believe, is not the strategy. The problem is only this or that imperfect execution of it. We never actually get to see the strategy itself. It is like those planes that never come back. It is impossible to inspect directly. But what can we infer from what we do see? What is right in front of our eyes?

What if the operating model of the modern club has become so warped that changing the names attached to it will no longer make any serious difference?

In that case, every time we demand one more head on a spike we are reinforcing the wings. We are staring at the visible damage and missing the deeper design flaw that keeps producing it.

Today there is a story in The Celtic Way about how the new guy we’re hiring to handle “customer relations” has a big job on his hands. That piece ignores so many of the areas supporters actually want this club to focus on. If the writer of that article, or those inside Celtic, think that solves our problems, they are dead wrong.

The people at the top of Celtic have to go. That is a certainty. We do not move on with those people at the helm. But the more you look at this club, the more obvious it becomes that this alone will not do it. It will not end the crisis. We need a real revolution inside Celtic. We need a reset so vast that the club itself will never be the same again.

Because the rot at the top of this house has spread, and it has spread deep. This is not the first institution it has happened to, and if we dare, we can learn from the others.

This is no longer just about restructuring the player-trading model. It is no longer just about rethinking the football department. It is no longer just about who signs the cheques, who conducts the negotiations, who briefs the media or who gets the owner’s ear.

What is needed now is a complete rethink of how this club operates.

There are three ideas that help explain it, and together they tell a story about Celtic that should make every supporter uneasy.

The first is survivorship bias. We’ve gone over that but we’ll circle back soon.

The second is called normalisation of deviance. That is what happens when a departure from sound practice becomes accepted as normal simply because it does not immediately end in catastrophe.

The third is the idea I wrote about last week: to recognise near-misses for what they are. Not proof that the system works. Proof that the system was badly stressed and you only just got away with it.

Those are not three separate concepts. They are one vicious cycle.

Something dysfunctional happens. Celtic survive it. Because Celtic survive it, the people in charge persuade themselves that it cannot have been all that dysfunctional after all.

So, we look at what we think went wrong. We apply the wrong diagnosis. Since no catastrophe followed, we never learn from the mistake.

Behaviour that would once have been unacceptable becomes tolerable. Since it becomes tolerable, it becomes normal. Since it becomes normal, the next deviation is easier to accept. The next warning sign is easier to wave away.

The next near-miss is treated not as evidence of deep structural stress but as evidence of resilience. Survival becomes vindication. Luck becomes policy. The absence of disaster is mistaken for proof of wisdom.

That is how institutions rot. Not in one single outrageous act. They rot through repeated mistakes and through learning the wrong lesson from every escape.

Look at Brendan Rodgers and you can see the whole process in miniature.

When Rodgers walked the first time, Celtic had a choice.

The club could tell itself that he was simply ambitious and restless, a manager who would always leave if the right offer came along. Or it could tell itself that its own lack of ambition, its own strategic inertia and its own unwillingness to meet the demands of a serious modern manager had played a major part in pushing him out.

Those were the available lessons. There was no mystery.

If the board believed the first explanation, then bringing him back was absurd. Why reappoint a manager whose nature you already understand and whose previous exit has already shown you exactly how he behaves when a better opportunity comes along?

If the board believed the second explanation, then bringing him back without changing the underlying conditions was equally absurd. Why rerun the same experiment under the same conditions and act shocked when the result looks familiar? If you believe you failed him once, then you either change the structure around him the second time or accept that the second marriage is built on the same poison as the first.

Either way, the second Rodgers appointment only makes sense if Celtic learned nothing useful from the first.

Look at how it ended. An almost identical outcome.

Rodgers made no secret of his frustration over the speed of transfer business. He spoke publicly about players not coming in quickly enough. He made it clear that he was not the man personally concluding those deals. He was, in effect, telling anyone prepared to listen that the machinery around him was not operating as he wanted it to operate.

That should have been treated as a warning that the system was under stress. Instead, the manager found himself on the receiving end of leaks and attacks for the sin of saying aloud what everyone else could already see.

Then, when he walked, Desmond launched that astonishing rant against him. Rodgers was accused, in effect, of poisoning the atmosphere, dividing opinion, working his ticket and behaving selfishly.

Fine. Let us take that seriously for a moment.

If that was really what Rodgers had become, if he had become that corrosive and that impossible, then why was he still there until he chose to go? Why had the board tolerated this supposedly intolerable situation? Why was there no decisive intervention before the resignation threat landed?

There is only one alternative. The statement was a vindictive piece of score-settling from a furious major shareholder trying to rewrite the story after the fact.

Either way, Celtic do not come out of it looking coherent.

Either they tolerated an impossible manager for too long or they attacked a departing manager with a skewed version of events that does not fit the story they themselves had spent many months telling right up until the end.

In either case, the problem is not just personality. It is governance. It is process. It is a club telling two incompatible stories at once.

Neil Lennon tells the same story in a different key.

Nobody at Celtic could possibly claim to have been surprised by Lennon’s failings the second time around. The board knew exactly what they were getting. They knew his strengths. They knew his flaws. They knew how he worked. They knew the type of atmosphere and coaching ecosystem he tended to create. They knew the social and professional patterns that marked his first spell. None of this was hidden. None of it was obscure.

Yet they brought him back anyway.

More than that, they did not even bring him back in circumstances that suggested total trust in his judgement. John Kennedy was central to the structure from the start. Lennon never got to assemble his own backroom team that second time. The set-up was shaped around internal control. Command was clearly not being handed to Lennon as a blank slate.

That makes the contradiction sharper, not softer.

If you trust the manager completely, why build the structure that way? If you do not trust him completely, why appoint him at all? Once again Celtic reached back for the familiar, and once again they did so in a way that suggested they had learned nothing useful from the previous cycle.

That is the point. Rodgers and Lennon are not the same man. Their temperaments, methods and failings differ sharply. But the underlying pattern is identical. Celtic revisited known risks and called it sound judgement. Celtic rehired men whose fracture points were already on the record and then reacted with surprise when the fractures reopened.

It was a gross institutional failure.

Then there is John Kennedy, whose departure should have terrified everyone.

A man with twenty-seven years in the building does not walk away lightly. A figure who had lived through managers, eras, boardroom battles, and restructures of every kind does not suddenly decide that enough is enough for trivial reasons. That kind of departure is a warning event of the highest order.

A healthy institution would ask hard questions at that point.

What changed? What had he seen? What had he lost faith in? Why had a man with roots that deep decided the future lay elsewhere?

A complacent institution absorbs the departure into the background noise. The club keeps moving. The stadium still fills. Matches still get played. Seasons still happen. Therefore, the departure cannot really have mattered all that much.

That is survivorship bias again. The institution survives the loss of a major figure and mistakes that survival for proof that he was not all that essential in the first place.

But survival proves nothing beyond survival. Sometimes it is luck. Sometimes disaster is simply waiting around the next corner.

The same broad pattern is there in the Tisdale and Wilfried Nancy chapter too. There is no need to rely on every backstage rumour to see the shape of it.

Influence appears to have shifted. Kennedy’s authority waned. Tisdale’s authority rose. Nancy arrived under his watch and with his support. Rodgers, by all appearances, became increasingly alienated from the broader structure before he left, and Kennedy departed right after him. Still, Tisdale retained outsized influence until Nancy went and it became impossible for even this board to leave him in place.

By that point, however, the damage had already been done.

Whatever exact personal quarrels or power struggles sat behind it, the outcome tells its own story. Too much influence appears to have been concentrated in the wrong place. Established football figures were marginalised. The manager’s authority appears to have been compromised. The club acted too late.

That is the pattern once more. A deviation from sound governance is tolerated because the institution is still moving. Because the institution is still moving, the people in charge persuade themselves the deviation cannot have been fatal. By the time they finally act, the cost has already been paid.

This is why I keep coming back to the idea of near-misses.

Near-misses are not proof that the system works. They are proof that the system was badly stressed and you only just got away with it.

That is as true in football as it is anywhere else.

A poor transfer window that does not cost the title is not evidence of sound planning. A board-manager rupture that does not immediately wreck the season is not evidence of resilience. A twenty-seven-year football man leaving without the entire institution collapsing overnight is not evidence that his importance was exaggerated.

Every one of these things is a warning. Each one of them is the system saying, in the loudest voice possible short of total disaster, that something fundamental is wrong. A serious club studies those moments. It takes them apart. It asks what nearly failed, why it nearly failed and what has to change so the system is never put under that strain again.

Celtic too often do something else. Celtic treat survival itself as the lesson.

The title was still won, therefore the planning cannot have been that bad. The club still made money, therefore the strategy cannot have been that flawed. The system still functioned, therefore the internal damage cannot have been that serious.

One more narrow escape is folded into the mythology of competence and another warning sign is buried beneath the comfortable story that the men at the top still know what they are doing.

That is why I think the focus on individual personnel, however understandable, is no longer enough.

Remove one chairman and what then? Replace one chief executive and what then? Get rid of one adviser, one manager, one trusted lieutenant, one boardroom relic, and what then? If the underlying policy remains the same, if the same assumptions remain unchallenged, if the same complacent reading of evidence remains in place, then all the club has really done is change the cast while leaving the script untouched.

That is the deeper problem now.

The names at the top matter. Of course they do.

But the bigger issue is that the system has become self-protective. It absorbs criticism without acknowledgement. It rationalises failure because it does not recognise failure for what it is. It mistakes near-misses for proof of durability.

It is not sound. It is merely sheltered. That is a very different thing.

Celtic are so much bigger and richer than most of the domestic competition that the club can survive things that would cripple others. It can absorb poor appointments, failed structures, clumsy communication, delayed recruitment, internal warfare and supporter fury and still keep moving. It is even possible still to win.

That we’re still in this title race is not vindication of Celtic. It is a damning indictment of our title rivals and of Scottish football itself. I fear, and I’m not alone, that winning this league would convince people inside the club that nothing is really wrong.

Sometimes an unhealthy club can still post healthy numbers. Sometimes it can still point to the trophy count and ask what all the fuss is about.

But those are the returning aircraft. So, the club patches the bullet holes in the wings and never stops to wonder what a hit to the fuselage would do.

Every sign of damage the club has been able to survive feeds the perception that perhaps we are too big to fail.

But what standards have been eroded? What fatal weaknesses are hidden by the fact that the club remains strong enough to land on the runway at the end of each season? What structural flaws are now so embedded in the strategy that the people entrusted with running the place no longer even recognise them as flaws?

That is where the real fear should be.

Because this is not ultimately a piece about Rodgers, Lennon, Kennedy, Tisdale or Nancy, important though all of them are. It is not even a piece about the board, although the board has done incalculable damage to this club.

This is a piece about the culture they have fostered at Celtic. A culture of complacency, arrogance, shortcuts, cheap options, ignored warning signs and misunderstood near-misses.

It is about a way of governing Celtic that keeps producing instability under different names and in different forms. It is about a policy that has become so self-justifying that every escape reinforces it and every near-disaster strengthens its grip.

That is why no cosmetic restructuring will be enough now.

We have appointed Rodgers twice. Lennon twice. Martin O’Neill is in his third stint, 20 years after his first. We have a temporary manager. A temporary chairman. Six loanees in the team. In recent years, we hired our most successful manager from outside the system on a whim at the last possible second. He built a successful team anyway, and the club responded by reducing his authority and handing it to someone else.

This is not just one bad season. This is five failed Champions League qualification campaigns in a row where we have had to play games to get there. This is decades without a knockout-stage win in Europe at any level. This is the club still paying for players the same meagre sums it paid twenty years ago, even though football’s inflationary cycle means you cannot even stand still at that level.

This is not just about tinkering with the player-trading model. It is not just about changing the manager. It is not just about adjusting a department here or replacing a few faces there. It is about a complete rethink of how this club operates.

It is about how it distributes authority. How it responds to warning signs. How it evaluates success. How it judges risk and defines ambition. How it distinguishes genuine stability from the mere postponement of consequences.

The easiest lie in football is that one more change at the top will put everything right. One more chairman. A new chief executive. A brand-new face in the manager’s office. One more fixer. One more trusted man in the room.

But if the strategy itself is wrong, if the operating model is wrong, if the policy rests on misreading warning signs and on survivor bias when we are the biggest team in this country by a mile, then one more change at the top will only buy the same broken system a little more time.

We could ditch the whole board. We could even see off Dermot Desmond. But if the people who came in still believed this system was fit for purpose, they would repeat the same mistakes and we would be back in crisis before we knew it.

Celtic need a complete reboot. The underlying structure is rotten.

We need to rip up the floorboards here, not patch up the ceiling.

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