It is time for the Celtic board to act against Desmond before it’s too late.

Dermot Desmond, alone on the Celtic board, appears to be the one driving the Robbie Keane decision.

That is what the reporting suggests. Desmond has held talks with Keane, and all the major outlets have reported that Celtic’s largest shareholder has narrowed the shortlist to Keane and Martin O’Neill. Desmond is due to meet both O’Neill and Keane as the managerial process reaches its decisive stage.

So let us be clear about what is happening here.

If Robbie Keane is appointed, this will not be some broad, carefully considered, institution-wide strategic decision. It will not be the product of a modern football department, a rigorous international search, a properly defined recruitment process or a board demonstrating collective imagination.

It will be Dermot Desmond’s call. And everyone else will be expected to live with it.

That is the problem.

Because Desmond does not have to live with it in the way others will. He sits in Ireland, insulated from the daily flak, insulated from the fury, insulated from the supporters outside Celtic Park, insulated from the demonstrations, the banners, the statements, the poisoned atmosphere and the long, cold grind of another civil war inside the club.

The rest of the Celtic board will not be so lucky. They are here. They will have to own this. They will have to sit in the directors’ box. They will have to walk through the front door. They will have to face the meetings, the questions, the protests, the supporter groups and the consequences of a decision which may not even be theirs in any meaningful sense.

That is why anyone inside Celtic Park with a shred of self-preservation should be trying to stop this now. Not tomorrow. Not after the announcement. Not when the banners go up. Now. Because once this appointment is made, there may be no putting the fire out.

I have written already about why Robbie Keane should think very carefully before taking this job. I meant it. He would be the one on the touchline. He would be the one catching the lightning. He would be the one trying to manage a club where a significant part of the support did not want him before he took his first training session.

But this is not only a warning to Keane, who should be smart enough to know this. He is the wrong moral fit for this club, and for the assorted dickheads who have asked me a question on that in the last few days, there’s your answer.

Yes, the Celtic job is a position that should not go to someone who has made questionable personal choices of his sort. Celtic is not just another football club. The morality of the man who takes that job matters because it reflects on all of us who that person is. And working in Israel for a pro-regime club is bad enough; his second job was with a club run by one of the cabinet ministers of Viktor Orban’s government.

I cannot put it more bluntly than this; hiring him would be a moral disgrace.

So this piece is a warning to the board.

If they allow Desmond to push this through, they are strapping themselves in for the nuclear detonation, and they will be well inside the blast radius. The principal shareholder may make the call, but they will carry the consequences.

And what consequences they could be.

There are appointments that disappoint people. There are appointments that split opinion. There are appointments that cause arguments for a few days and then fade once football begins. This is not that. This is not a normal football disagreement about tactics, CVs, style of play or whether someone knows the league.

This has a moral dimension which the board seems determined either to ignore or underestimate. Fan groups have already made their objections plain, with banners and statements targeting both Keane and the Desmond’s.

So, nobody can say they were not warned. Nobody can pretend they did not know. Nobody can stand there later, wide-eyed and wounded, wondering why the reaction was so fierce.

This is the extraordinary thing about Celtic now.

The club spent the last part of the season telling supporters it was listening. It allowed people to believe change was coming. It talked, in that vague corporate way, about lessons learned and relationships to be rebuilt.

Then the season ended. What followed?

Renewed action against Green Brigade members. A managerial shortlist apparently built around familiar names. Shaun Maloney interviewed for a major football-operations role. Now Robbie Keane potentially being pushed by Desmond despite the obvious backlash.

If these people wanted to convince supporters that “listening mode” was a cynical joke, they could hardly have designed a better sequence of events.

This is not listening. This is provocation.

It may not be intended that way. Perhaps that is the truly frightening part. Perhaps these people genuinely do not understand what they are doing. Perhaps they have sat in the same rooms, spoken to the same people, listened to the same advisers and convinced themselves that this will all blow over once the team wins a few games.

That would be a catastrophic misreading of the moment.

Because trust is already broken. The relationship between board and support is already toxic. The Green Brigade situation has already poured petrol on embers that were still glowing. The communication vacuum has already allowed suspicion to harden. The managerial search has already confirmed the suspicion that Celtic are trapped in the same old closed circle. Keane would not arrive into a calm club.

He would arrive into a thermonuclear shitstorm.

And if the board thinks the answer is simply to let the manager carry that storm alone, then it is even more contemptible than I thought. Because that is exactly what will not happen.

Desmond will remain above the immediate fallout. The board will offer stiff silence. The manager will be sent out to talk about football, unity, ambition and moving forward. The supporters will not be in the mood for any of it.

Everyone at Celtic Park will feel the heat from this and the demonstrations of last season will be small fry compared to what this guy will get every week, and what they in turn will have to put up with every single week.

I’m going to write about the fans in more detail later, but those inside the club who still care, those who still possess some instinct for institutional survival, need to act before this becomes irreversible.

They need to tell Desmond the truth. They need to tell him this is not a normal appointment. They need to tell him this is not merely unpopular. They need to tell him this risks engulfing the whole club. Because it does.

Celtic have enough problems already.

We need a manager. We need a football structure. We need a sporting director. We need a rebuild. We need Champions League qualification. We need commercial ambition. We need governance reform. We need communication. We need unity.

We do not need an ideological war starting on day one of the new manager’s tenure. What kind of board, looking at that list, decides the missing ingredient is more division? What sort of club is this where the board considers an appointment so completely out of step with the wishes of a large part of the fan-base when they could hire almost any other manager in football and side-step this particular landmine?

What kind of leadership group, after last season, thinks Celtic can afford to begin the summer with another avoidable rupture? What kind of serious football club watches supporters warn them, clearly and repeatedly, that this road leads to fire, and keeps walking down it anyway? That is what I cannot get past.

This is avoidable. That is what makes it so unforgivable.

Nobody is forcing Celtic to appoint Robbie Keane. Nobody is holding a gun to the club’s head. Nobody is saying there are no other coaches in world football. Nobody is saying the only alternatives are Keane or no one. This is a choice.

If it happens, it will happen because the people in charge chose it. And every board member who stays silent while it happens will own it.

Not just Desmond. All of them.

That is what they need to understand. Silence is not neutrality. Going along for the ride is not innocence. Sitting there while someone else drives the club towards a cliff does not absolve you because your hands were not on the wheel.

If you are in that boardroom and you know this is wrong, say so. For God’s sake, shout it from the rooftops. Make it a resignation issue. Threaten to walk away and tell the world why. Tell the whole of Scottish football that the principal shareholder of the club has gone full-on arsonist and intends to burn the whole thing down.

If you understand the scale of the backlash, say so. If you see the damage coming, say so. If you care about Celtic more than you care about staying in the good books of the man who dominates the room, say so.

Because if they do not speak now, they should not expect sympathy later. They will deserve every hard question. Every protest. Every demand for accountability. Every accusation that they saw the danger and lacked the courage to intervene.

This is the moment for someone inside Celtic Park to show a spine.

Someone has to tell Desmond no. Preferably all of them together. They have to tell him that if he makes this decision he owns it because none of them will stand behind it.

Someone has to say that the club is bigger than one man’s preference, bigger than one billionaire’s instincts, bigger than a decision taken from a distance by someone who will not have to stand in front of the people it enrages.

Celtic is not Dermot Desmond’s private plaything.

It is not a family office project. It is not a little Irish appointment bureau where the same familiar names get recycled until the end of time. It is a football club with a global support, a volatile present and a future that requires seriousness.

This is not serious. This is reckless.

And if those around Desmond care about the club, about their own positions, about the fragile unity of the support, or even about basic self-preservation, they need to stop this before it becomes the story of the summer.

Because once it starts, it will not be contained.

The anger will not stay neatly inside one section of the support. It will bleed into everything. Every bad result. Every poor performance. Every transfer delay. Every board statement. Every silence. Every European setback.

It will become the weather. That is what they are risking. A season played under a black cloud unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. A manager starting with half the support already braced against him, and no prospect of turning them around. A board already despised deciding to stress test things until something breaks.

They can still avoid it. They can still step back. They can still choose a manager who does not arrive with this level of baggage, this level of division and this level of immediate fury.

But the clock is ticking. If they let this happen, they should not pretend later that the giant consequences of it were unforeseeable. They are entirely foreseeable.

Stop this. Whatever leverage you have, stop this now.

Before it’s too late.

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