Celtic must learn from this season. The club across the city will.

I am not finished writing about the Ibrox club and its catastrophic season yet. I’m nowhere near finished with that subject. There is still a lot of ground to cover, and I intend to cover all of it. But I want to propose something right now, and it may seem counterintuitive to frame it this way.

There is a danger for Celtic here. It is obvious, and I hope we are not missing it.

There is a lot of misdiagnosis going on in the media and elsewhere about what has gone wrong at Ibrox this season. But I am certain there will be discussions inside that club which are far more grounded and focused than anything going on in the press or on the fan forums.

It may be that the crazier elements of the support will stamp their feet and demand whatever they think they want in this given moment. It may be that the club will feel pressure to react to that noise.

But I would still bet on professionals and pragmatists winning out eventually.

They have made enormous mistakes. The Americans came in with a mandate for change, with a big plan, and almost everything they have touched has turned to shit. It has been a disaster.

Their European standing has collapsed. Their club has been humiliated at home. They have gone through two managers already, and the third is poised on the brink. They have made signings that make no sense, and their team-building has been mortifyingly awful or hilariously awful, depending on your perspective.

But these are people with their own skin in the game.

That is not really true at Celtic.

We have an executive leadership which does not own shares and has not put a penny of its own money in. They aren’t risking a thing. Dermot Desmond has bought shares and invested, but Desmond is not taking the same kind of day-to-day risk either. He could sell his stake tomorrow and walk away from this.

Celtic are not making annual losses and expecting the executives to personally carry those losses. At Ibrox, a group of investors put up their own cash and bought the club. When the club posts losses, as it almost certainly will again, they will have to meet those losses from their own funds.

That gives you an incentive to learn. It gives you an incentive to correct course, if correcting course is what has to be done.

The danger for Celtic is that they learn the proper lessons from a trophyless season, while we win a double and convince ourselves there is nothing to learn because nothing has really gone wrong. That is the risk.

I don’t want Celtic to finish this season without a trophy.

But I have heard people argue that it might be better if we did, because then there would have to be a reckoning. A real one. Not a deferred one. Not a “we’ll get on with it and hope these people learn” kind of reckoning.

A proper reckoning. The kind that forces people to confront the problems instead of pushing them down the road, where they become the basis of the next crisis and the crisis after that.

I don’t agree that we should want failure. I never will. But I understand the fear behind that argument. The fear is that success will paper over everything.

I think some of us already understand that. I think even a double will not change the focus some of us have on wanting this club reformed and renewed.

But the danger has always been that it will take a full disaster, a trophyless shambles of a campaign, before enough people wake up and realise that we are not where we should be.

Success this season may hide the cracks. It may convince too many people that, because Ibrox continues to cycle through crisis, there is nothing to fear across the city. That would be complacent and stupid.

Even if the central calculation is right, even if they are not going to trouble us for many years because they will continue to cycle through their own endless chaos, we should not rely on that.

Those people have invested their own time and their own money in that project. They will not want it to fail. They will not simply let it fail if they can do something to correct course.

We have to start from the fundamental assumption that they will be stronger next year.

That means we have to be much stronger next year to stay ahead.

There is something else too. Even if our calculation is correct, even if they are weak and will stay weak, is that really a good enough reason for us to stand still?

What do we want to be as a club? Do we want to honour that shirt we released today by reaching for the next rung on the ladder, and then the one after that? Do we want to try to break through the glass ceiling?

Or is it forever going to be good enough to stay one step ahead of a basket-case club that cannot stay on its own two feet for longer than five minutes?

The same inquest that will go on across the city has to happen at Celtic, whether we win or not. They will try to learn lessons from losing. Even if we win, we should be trying to learn the same lessons, because we have done nearly everything wrong this season that it is possible to do.

We don’t even get off the hook for sacking Nancy quickly and bringing O’Neill back, because a strong argument existed for giving O’Neill the job for the full year in the first place.

Nobody questions the hiring of Nancy anymore. Not even those of us who supported it at the time.

But that is what people should do. They should learn from mistakes. It should not matter whether those mistakes cost the title or not.

One of the things we spoke about recently on this site was the danger of clubs ignoring near misses.

They convince themselves that a near miss means the machine is working fine.

The machine is not working fine. A near miss is a warning that the machine is not functioning correctly.

If Celtic win this title this season, it will be the near miss to end them all. If the board concludes that everything is fine at the end of it, that will be the gravest mistake in a long line of grave mistakes.

Ibrox may learn from failure because failure will force them to. Celtic may have to learn in spite of success lest success itself deceive us. That is the danger.

In engineering it’s called normalisation of deviance. It’s a concept identified and named in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster.

Everyone knew the O-rings were potentially dangerous. Yet because flights had returned home safely even in conditions which caused severe degradation to them, people concluded that everything must be okay.

But the degradation was the warning sign and it was ignored until 28 January, 1986.

That is the lesson. And if we ignore it, next season might not be a near miss.

It might be the one that blows this whole thing to bits.

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