Parasites and vultures.

Football is a sport filled to the rafters with hangers-on, and a lot of them are not shy about pecking away at a carcass.

We call those creatures vultures, because vultures peck away at the dead or the nearly dead. Even worse are those creatures that live off other living things, sometimes with only modest side-effects, but sometimes weakening them to the point that they die. We call them parasites.

I am not going to accuse any former player at this club of wanting a parasitic relationship with Celtic.

I am only asking that people do not call us vultures.

For Celtic fans and Celtic sites to be labelled vultures is very rich indeed, considering that the club exists, functions and thrives because we pay for everything.

That means that if you played at Celtic at any point in the last thirty years, the fans paid your salary.

I am not asking anyone to kiss our arse for that. I am only asking that people recognise it and give it the respect it deserves. Some people are so full of themselves that they no longer recognise these simple truths.

Celtic is not a house united at the moment, although the fans are certainly doing their best.

The campaign against the board is on hold.

Supporters are getting behind the team. At a time like that, it is not a great idea to attack the supporters, especially when that kind of attack hands lazy headlines to the people who really are working around the clock to undermine this club.

One of the criticisms people level at fan media right now is that a lot of us think we could run this club better than the people on the current board.

Well, if the critics mean that we could run it better than people who have starved it of resources and left us third in what ought to be a one-team league, given our size and strength relative to the teams around us, then yes, some of us probably do think that.

If you mean run it better than Michael Nicholson, I think there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Scotland alone who are better qualified and more capable of running Celtic than him. Hell, I think a rhesus monkey could do part of his job and you would not know the difference except for a sudden uptick in performance.

Celtic fans are not looking to run the club.

We are looking for people competent enough to run the club. None of us thinks we could step in there and do those jobs tomorrow morning. But nor do we think the people currently doing those jobs are doing them very well.

That is not an unfair criticism when you look at the state we are in.

Fans are unhappy for a reason.

We are not unhappy because we are playing brilliantly.

We are not unhappy because we are watching a fully funded team.

Fans are unhappy because we are third in the league with five games to go, and that is the clear consequence of a side that has been asset-stripped.

Here is a question for my fellow Celtic fan media people. Which one of you thinks you should be running Celtic? Which of you advocates spending £20 million on a single player? I ask because I do not know the answer to that question.

If someone out there does know the answer, then please enlighten me.

Is there even one of you who has expressed the view that Celtic should spend £20 million on one player?

Let me ask it another way.

As a blogger, I get to hear the opinions of a wide range of supporters.

People tell you things. They ask you things. They strike up conversations with you everywhere you go.

So, have any of you, at any point, in any setting, ever encountered another Celtic fan arguing that we should spend £20 million on a single player? I know I haven’t.

If people want to offer a critique of fan media, then let it be a critique based on facts and evidence.

Do not give us lazy, arrogant insider supposition, broadcast from the top of some ivory tower.

We are the ones who pay for all of this.

We are neither vultures flocking around a near-dead institution nor parasites sucking the life out of it.

When certain people were at this club, they had high standards, and those standards pushed everyone around them.

I do not know how anyone who personally has high standards can look at the people running this club right now and think they have any standards at all.

When certain people were at this club, they understood accountability.

I do not know how those people can look at the current leadership and think they see any accountability.

When there is no accountability at the top, how are you supposed to encourage it anywhere else at Celtic?

Criticising fans for holding opinions is easy. That takes no great strength. It takes no great courage. It barely even requires rubbing two brain cells together to make sure your argument is coherent.

I will tell you what is much harder.

It is much harder to tell the truth to power.

To point the finger at those who have run this club into the ground this season.

It is much harder to call out the people who have trashed the accumulated goodwill of the most successful domestic period in our history, who have squandered an enormous financial advantage, who have gambled with Champions League qualification, and who have driven one of Celtic’s most successful managers of all time out of the door not once, but twice in the space of a decade.

Much harder to call out the people whose conduct has embarrassed this club again and again and again. That takes real courage.

It takes balls to criticise people who might hold your future in their hands.

But here is the thing.

If you come on board to work for those people, knowing deep down what they are, and you sit watching as they continue to run this club into the ground, then the best that can be said for you is that you are a parasite.

And maybe, one day, if they do enough damage, we may even call you a vulture.

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