This Celtic board has no vision for our future. So of course, it trades on the past.

The other night, I put up a piece in which I said that the Ibrox club is falling into the black hole where it is remembered for what it was, or rather what it claims it once was, more than it is respected for what it is now.

It is a subject I touched on briefly in an article that was actually about Danny Röhl, and it is a subject I’m only going to touch on briefly in this piece, because I want to do a proper article on it later. This one is about Celtic.

It hardly needs pointing out that we stand on the brink of losing this title to Hearts. The title we have held for four years. The title we have held fourteen times out of the last fifteen.

While this does not represent a point of no return, the fact that we have subjected ourselves to such momentous risk, where even a third-place finish was a possibility, is shocking to me and to most other Celtic supporters.

Today, the club has released a 60th anniversary shirt to celebrate the achievement of the Lisbon Lions.

We have as our current manager the last guy under whom we made significant, real, genuine progress in Europe. He got us to another European final. Martin’s European results this season were excellent too, and all of this serves to remind us that we are, in fact, a bigger club than our present position suggests.

The reason we are in this position is the poverty of imagination and ambition among those who run this club. They are as guilty of trading on nostalgia as the one across the city. They are as guilty of using the past to justify the constraints, the problems and the failures of the present.

It is one of the most cynical things that cynical people do. They use loyalty, reminiscence and nostalgia for what once was to inspire pride and obedience from people who might otherwise be asking very hard questions now.

I am not against honouring the past.

A 60th anniversary Celtic top celebrating the Lisbon Lions is something I would normally buy without even blinking. I would put down my money, get myself one and wear it with pride, all the way through next season and beyond.

But I won’t do it.

A lot of people who would normally make that same choice won’t do it either.

We are in the midst of the Not Another Penny campaign. An item like this should ordinarily be flying off the shelves. Under normal circumstances, a Lisbon Lions anniversary shirt would sell itself. It is exactly the kind of thing Celtic supporters would instinctively want to own.

That is what makes this moment so difficult.

Because a lot of people who would normally buy it without hesitation are now going to stop and think. They are going to ask themselves whether buying official merchandise right now helps send the message they want to send.

That is not an easy thing. Nobody enjoys being asked to choose between their love of Celtic and their anger at those running it. Nobody should pretend that supporters who buy the shirt love the club less, or that supporters who refuse to buy it love the club more.

That is not the point. The point is that money is one of the few forms of language this board appears to understand.

So, every supporter has to decide what message they want to send.

If you buy the shirt, you are entitled to do that. It celebrates one of the greatest achievements in our history, and no board of directors owns that history. The Lisbon Lions belong to us. They always have.

But the club is also using that history to sell a product at a time when it has still not given supporters a credible vision of the future. That matters. It matters because this board has spent too long leaning on our memories, our loyalty and our emotional attachment while offering far too little in return.

That is the issue. Not the shirt itself nor the Lisbon Lions. Not the supporters who want to honour them. The issue is that Celtic are once again trading on the past while failing to map out a plan for the future.

That is why many of us will not buy it. Not because we feel any less pride in Lisbon. Not because we need reminded what that team means. But because we refuse to let the board use that pride as a shield against scrutiny.

This is how they get away with too much. They know what moves us. They know what we cherish and they know that history, memory and identity are powerful things at this club. Then they commercialise those things, exploit them, and hope sentiment will do the work that strategy and ambition should be doing.

That is wrong. However you dress it up, it is wrong.

It is an insult to ask supporters to celebrate the club’s greatest European achievement while refusing to show us any serious plan for making Celtic credible on that stage again. If you will not present a vision of the future, you have no choice but to trade on the past. In that sense, we are more like the club across the city than I am comfortable admitting.

That is their operating system. It should not be ours.

Every player who wears that shirt will recognise this club’s great and storied history. But those same players will also understand that the people running this club right now do not know how to make us credible again on that stage.

That matters. It makes it hard to keep top players here if we want them to stay. It makes it hard to sell a top-class manager on this club if he knows he will not get proper support. That makes it hard to bring good players here if they know we are not even trying to bang on the glass ceiling, far less shatter it.

I heard Kris Boyd talk about this after the night in Munich. He said Celtic have the prospect of reaching a certain level, but are not able to go any further. He used the analogy of a glass ceiling that night, and once again demonstrated how thick he actually is.

The clue is in the phrase itself.

Glass ceiling.

There is a reason that ceiling is made of glass. It can be shattered. It can be broken through.

If you were talking about a level beyond which we can go no further, you would just call it a ceiling.

Our board thinks of it in those terms. They believe this club has only a certain level of potential it can reach, and that trying to get beyond that is pointless. Brendan Rodgers never believed that. Most of the players in that team in Munich certainly did not believe that.

But they knew those above them at the club did.

We are in a box we built for ourselves.

Of course, we could do better in Europe than we do. Of course, we could be a bigger club in continental terms than we are. The only limiting factor here is the limit of imagination and ambition among those tasked with doing it.

This club has spent the last two years crying about the price we paid for Arne Engels. But that is the kind of price we should be willing to pay for top players with his pedigree. That should be normal business for us.

Yes, the books have to balance. But the fact that we are on the brink of making a mammoth profit on Engels is the real hint of what the policy ought to look like.

If I am being even more honest, I would say the correct policy, everything being equal, would be to keep Engels and build a team around him. A team of similarly talented and similarly credentialed young players.

That would be an even bigger step towards the distant horizon than selling him and reinvesting the money.

Instead, we have people in our own support trying to get excited about appointing the Motherwell manager and signing their frontline. Their team has scored 55 goals this season in the league, as opposed to our 64.

So, the idea that this should now be the level of our ambition and intent is more than a little confusing to me.

Anyone willing to make that argument should at least think hard about what kind of Celtic they are imagining. Because if that is the level we are content to settle for, then we have already accepted the ceiling.

Not the glass one either. The concrete one. The one that is unbreakable and 12 inches thick.

As I said before, it is time for people to decide which version of Celtic they want.

Are we going to be a club that honours the past while pretending to take itself seriously? Or are we going to be a club that actually does take itself seriously? A club that strives to honour yesterday’s glory by being all we can be?

If we are going to be the first, I would prefer that we stop lying to ourselves about it. I would prefer that the people running the club got serious and honest with supporters over what we can expect for the future.

Because I am tired of this club appealing to sentiment. I am tired of this club exploiting loyalty. I am tired of this club weaponising history against the supporters while pretending to chase ambitions it has no real intention of pursuing again.

At least honesty would bring clarity. At least honesty would let supporters make informed decisions about what we are willing to pay for, what we are willing to accept and what kind of future we are willing to help fund.

The Lisbon Lions deserve that honour.

But honouring them properly means more than selling another shirt. It means building a Celtic worthy of the standards they set.

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