Tom Allison’s exit changes nothing about Celtic’s boardroom rot.

Tom Allison has resigned today as a non-executive director of Celtic and, as usual, the club announcement is full of flowery tributes.

We are told he gave twenty-five years of service to the club. That is one way of putting it. Another is to say that he took twenty-five years of salary and benefits out of the club. It is not entirely clear what Celtic got in return.

A non-executive director is supposed to hold the executive to account. We will come to that in a moment. For now, let me say this. There is precious little evidence that anything like that has happened at Celtic over the past twenty-five years.

We have a statement from the chairman, who points out that Allison has sat on the board for almost as long as he has. Twenty-five years is far too long for any non-executive director to sit on any board.

We also have a statement from Dermot Desmond, now styling himself as the “principal shareholder”, saying that Allison has been an adviser, a counsellor and a man of vision.

Maybe he once was a man of vision. Look at the state of the club now and you will struggle to find much evidence of any great vision at work in recent times.

Completely absent from the statement is anything from our much-mocked chief executive, whose main gift these days seems to be staying out of sight and letting everybody else speak for him. Is there a less serious figure in Scottish football?

Is there a less credible figure in Scottish business? I do not think so. The fact that his name is not even on a statement like this tells you plenty.

People should not think that resignations from the likes of Lawwell or Allison are going to change the game on their own.

Brian Wilson is currently the chairman, but only in an interim capacity. He needs to go as soon as humanly possible, not just from that role but from the board itself.

Anyone who has sat on that board for more than a decade should follow him out the door. This whole club needs gutted.

The entire upper echelon needs major turnover.

The people who replace these men cannot be more Dermot Desmond lackeys. That is why we are in this trouble.

That is a subject for another day. First, let’s look at what a non-executive director is actually supposed to do.

A non-executive director sits on a company board but does not run the business day to day. The role centres on oversight, not management. They look at the bigger picture, question major decisions, hold the people in charge to account and make sure the company runs properly.

That means they involve themselves in strategy, financial oversight, risk, governance and senior appointments.

Most importantly, they bring independent judgement.

They challenge and scrutinise.

They ask difficult questions. Non-executive directors do not sit quietly round the boardroom table and rubber-stamp whatever the chief executive, the chairman or the “principal shareholder” wants.

That is the theory.

In practice, a non-executive director only adds value if he acts independently and does the job properly.

So let’s look at what happened while Tom Allison sat on the board and supposedly held the executive to account.

We hired heads of football, scouting and all the other fiddly bits that should operate independently of the manager while still working alongside him for his benefit. We brought in Mark Lawwell, who lasted less than two years before the club finally showed him the door, not before time. Then came Paul Tisdale, whose appointment now looks like a bad joke that nobody finds funny any longer.

We also appointed Michael Nicholson as chief executive and promoted Chris McKay to chief financial officer. If anyone can explain the merits of either appointment, I am all ears. Someone out there must have an answer. I have been waiting a long time for it.

Those men have run this club like a third-rate organisation. They are invisible except when they turn up at games to sneer at supporters or at social functions to stuff their faces. The club pays them extremely well for helping to run the football side of Celtic into the ground.

Allison also sat on the board that slandered one of our most illustrious managers. That makes it much harder for Celtic to find a credible replacement over the summer. He also sat on the board that waved through the appointment of Nancy, on the say-so, it seems, of Tisdale himself.

The club statement wishing him well talks about transformation and progress over the twenty-five years he has sat on the board.

Again, I am struggling to see it.

Celtic Park has had a facelift. Part of that came because of the Jubilee celebrations and the Queen visiting the stadium during the Commonwealth Games. Other than a nice frontage, though, the place is falling into disrepair. The club has made no major infrastructure upgrade around the ground.

The media still sits outside in a tent for Champions League games, for God’s sake. Do not get me wrong. If the club wants to stick the mainstream media in a tent every week, even one with a leaky canvas, I am not going to cry the blues for them.

Still, let’s be honest. It is not a good look, is it?

Yes, the club has upgraded Lennoxtown. Yes, it has upgraded Barrowfield.

But the B team plays in the Lowland League. The women’s team has been underfunded to the point of scandal. The academy structure, which I wrote about earlier, is a mess and has arguably gone backwards.

So no, I do not have any flowery tribute to pay to Tom Allison.

He leaves as the richest and most powerful club in Scotland sits third in the SPFL, with a seventy-four-year-old manager on a temporary contract, and with its leaders trying to decide whether to accept an invite to Ibrox to rubber-stamp somebody else’s “reform” plans instead of producing a blueprint for change of their own.

I do not know what Tom Allison actually did as a non-executive director of Celtic. I only know this. If he and the other non-executive directors had done their jobs better, this club would not be in such a parlous state.

The actual executives are among the most talentless and directionless men ever to sit in senior positions at Celtic, and all of that happened on his watch. He should leave thoroughly embarrassed by the mess we are in. If he is not embarrassed, then he damn well should be.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that being a director at Celtic is mostly about letting Desmond do whatever he wants. They do not seem to make any meaningful decisions. They just act as a rubber stamp for his will.

I am glad Tom Allison has decided to resign.

Someone who is not getting the job done should resign. Someone who is not making an impact in his role should vacate that role. I do wonder whether he has resigned because he disagrees with the strategic direction of the club and has done for some time, or whether he finally realises that his tenure has largely been a failure.

Some accountability would be nice, for a change.

Of course, we will never know. He has chosen to leave while paying tribute to his fellow board members and boasting about how great the club looks as he heads for the door. That would be funny if it were not so painful for all of us to watch.

If there was a disagreement over the direction of the club, I wish he had said so. I wish he had acknowledged that mistakes had been made instead of giving himself one last congratulatory pat on the back.

It is another one gone and, for that at least, I suppose we should be a little grateful.

But this does not fix a single problem at Celtic.

Others should now be considering their position and handing in their notice. Their conduct has been horrific. Their job performance has been horrific.

Where are they today? Nowhere.

We have got used to that.

Would we even miss these people if they were gone? I would like to find out.

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