Celtic stumbles into darkness: Season 2025/26 Part One.

The 2025/26 season was not supposed to happen like this. That is the first truth of it.

When I look back at everything Celtic dragged themselves through across these mad, exhausting, emotionally violent months, I still cannot decide whether I watched a football season or survived a storm.

Maybe it was both. Maybe that is exactly what Celtic became this year: not a sleek machine marching towards trophies, but a wounded giant refusing to die.

That is why this double means something different.

Not cleaner. Not prettier. Not calmer. Different.

Because this was not a season of dominance from start to finish. This was not one of those campaigns where Celtic simply flexed muscles, swatted everybody aside and danced towards silverware in May with a grin and a cigar.

No. This season had blood under the fingernails. It had rage, chaos, fear, politics, betrayal, stubbornness, instinct and survival.

It had smoke in the air for months, and still somehow ended with green-and-white confetti falling from the sky at Hampden.

That is why I cannot speak about this season in cold statistics. I felt this one in my bones. My Ginger Witch senses knew very early that something was wrong. Even in the summer, even with all the excitement surrounding Kieran Tierney returning home, there was a strange energy hanging around Celtic.

Like standing near the sea before a storm breaks.

You smell it before you see it.

Yes, there was romance in Tierney coming back. Of course there was. Celtic supporters adore stories like that because they mean something deeper than football. A boy returning home to Paradise. One of our own.

But football clubs cannot survive on emotion alone, and beneath the headlines, warning signs were everywhere. Nicolas Kuhn gone. Greg Taylor gone. Key players disappearing. Recruitment arriving in fragments rather than as part of a clear vision.

That was the real problem.

Celtic looked like a club reacting rather than preparing.

Even pre-season felt odd. Wins over Sporting CP and Newcastle suggested quality was still there, but defeats to Estrela da Amadora and Ajax exposed uncertainty. Celtic looked unfinished. Talented, yes. Dangerous at times, yes.

But stable? Absolutely not.

My instincts kept screaming the same thing over and over: this squad was not properly built for what was coming.

Then August arrived, and the whole thing exploded.

Domestically, Celtic were still functioning. Wins over St Mirren, Aberdeen and Livingston. A comfortable League Cup victory over Falkirk. On paper, things looked steady enough. But football supporters are not stupid. We know when performances lack conviction. We know when a team is skating over cracks rather than repairing them.

Then came Kairat Almaty.

Honestly, even now I can still feel the sickness from those nights.

Two games. More than 200 minutes of football. Celtic unable to score a single goal. Then penalties. Then elimination. Then humiliation.

That was the moment the entire mood of the season changed forever.

Not because Celtic lost. Celtic have lost in Europe before. We all know pain in Europe. But this felt different because it felt avoidable. Self-inflicted. Like watching somebody ignore every warning sign before driving straight into a wall.

The recruitment strategy immediately came under the spotlight, and rightly so. Supporters were furious because deep down we all knew Celtic had gambled. The board gambled on being good enough. Gambled on domestic superiority carrying over automatically. Gambled on patchwork solutions.

They lost that gamble spectacularly.

The emotional fracture between Brendan Rodgers and the hierarchy widened after Kairat. You could almost hear the tension in every interview. Rodgers looked like a man trying not to say too much publicly while privately boiling with frustration. Supporters sensed it too. Celtic Park became emotionally restless. The atmosphere shifted from expectation to suspicion.

September only deepened the feeling.

Late signings arrived, but even then, it all felt reactive. Scrambling. Firefighting.

Kelechi Iheanacho signing after the window summed up the madness perfectly. A player with pedigree and quality. But injury prone, long spells without football, and so proof Celtic had not solved the striker issue when they actually had time to solve it properly.

That became the entire identity of the first half of the season. Emergency solutions replacing long-term planning.

Yet this is where Celtic become Celtic. The team kept stumbling forward anyway.

That is the thing about this club. Celtic can look utterly dysfunctional administratively while somehow remaining spiritually alive. There is something irrational about it. Something almost supernatural at times. Maybe that is why I love this club the way I do.

October was when the earthquake truly hit.

The defeat at Tynecastle felt terminal. Hearts smelled blood. The title race suddenly looked real, and not in a funny “keep things interesting” way. Real danger. Real vulnerability. Celtic looked emotionally exhausted.

Then Brendan Rodgers resigned.

Dermot Desmond’s statement afterwards was astonishing. Brutal. Public. Personal. The civil war inside Celtic suddenly burst into the open where everybody could see it. Rodgers versus the board. Desmond versus Rodgers. Supporters versus recruitment policy. Everything fractured at once.

Then came one of the strangest twists I have ever witnessed in football.

Martin O’Neill returned. Even writing that still feels surreal.

One of the great Celtic managers arriving back, not as part of a glorious masterplan, but because the building was already on fire and somebody needed to grab the hose. Emergency football management. Pure chaos.

And somehow, somehow, he steadied us.

That is the magic of Martin O’Neill. He understands Celtic emotionally. Not just tactically. Emotionally. He understands that this club is powered by belief as much as systems. He understands that Celtic supporters can forgive imperfection if they see fight, hunger, spirit and defiance.

November was when the season found a heartbeat again.

The League Cup semi-final win over the Ibrox club mattered massively. Feyenoord away mattered massively. That night in Rotterdam deserves far more respect than it will probably receive historically, because it happened in the middle of absolute madness. It was a proper European away performance. Gritty, brave, alive.

O’Neill restored something that had been disappearing for months. Belief.

Not perfection. Not dominance. Belief.

Celtic supporters responded because the relationship between team and support started reconnecting despite all the political poison surrounding the club. The protests were still there. The anger remained justified. But the team themselves started giving supporters emotional reasons to fight alongside them again.

Then December happened, and the chaos returned instantly.

Wilfried Nancy arrived with ideas, philosophy and modern attacking concepts. I understood the appointment in theory. I really did. Celtic wanted another visionary outsider like Ange Postecoglou. But football is not Football Manager.

Timing matters. Context matters. And from the start it smelled bad. We had restored order, only to wilfully upset things all over again with a radical hard turn.

Nancy walked into a dressing room already emotionally fragile, one that had been just finding itself, and he immediately set about changing everything.

Morale evaporated. The results collapsed quickly. Hearts won at Celtic Park. Roma battered Celtic. St Mirren lifted the Premiership Sports Cup. The atmosphere became toxic again. Then Peter Lawwell stepped down alleging abuse and threats from Celtic fans (no wonder Hearts got away with it for a week) which only deepened the sense that the entire institution was shaking from top to bottom.

That month felt cursed. Genuinely cursed.

By the end of December, Celtic looked like a club standing in the dark, holding a flickering match, wondering how much longer it could last.

The season was not dead. But it felt terribly close, and the worst thing was that as January came into view fans absolutely believed that Nancy would get the transfer window to put his own mark on the team. We saw no end in sight.

It was a dreadful, horrible, way to end 2025 … with only a fools hope for 2026.

We had no idea what was just around the corner.

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