If O’Neill is willing to go scorched earth, Celtic is not a happy place to be.

Today, we expect a statement from Celtic. Or, at least, we have been told to expect one by Graham Spiers, who wrote that story last night which Paulina talked about this morning, the one in which he discussed the frustrations Martin O’Neill is feeling at the moment.

If, like me, you understand the relationship between Spiers and O’Neill, that is a cause for real concern, and something we need to take seriously.

Because Spiers does know O’Neill. There is a pre-existing relationship there, and Martin is smart enough to know that if he is going to talk about things happening inside the club, it is better to do it in a way that is deniable but still gets attention.

There was no question that this particular article has gotten a lot of attention.

Furthermore, Spiers is better connected than some people would have you believe. He clearly had some inside track on the briefings against Rodgers, and he clearly knew that something was afoot behind the scenes to resolve those matters.

I have always had a reasonably good relationship with Spiers, but I fell out with him over that. In becoming party to Celtic’s briefings against our former manager – and I still have not quite forgiven him for it – he became more propagandist than impartial journalist. While this has some of the same quality to it, in that he is clearly being used to get out one side of the story, the fact that it is O’Neill’s side of the story makes it credible.

That is why, when I read the report, I read it with a good deal of dismay.

The part I found particularly interesting is the contention that O’Neill does not want to fall out with Dermot Desmond because he believes he owes Dermot Desmond a lot for assistance he has been given in his career.

Maybe, but I’ve said before that this is nonsense and if you become convinced that everything you have was given to you by someone else, you essentially become their creature and you are no longer your own man.

Furthermore, and although O’Neill probably does not like to think about it in these terms, there are people who will exploit anything they see as a dependency or a sense of obligation. I strongly suspect that Desmond enjoys having other important people feel as if they owe him favours and some kind of loyalty.

In fact, none of these people owe him anything, and it is detrimental to them if they get caught in his slipstream.

The message that is getting sent is that O’Neill does not need this stuff in his life. He can walk. He can go and pursue a career as a broadcaster. He can probably return to management at some point with some other club.

But he does not need the hassle of being Celtic boss.

He certainly does not need the hassle of overseeing a major and necessary squad rebuild with his hands tied behind his back, and the fact that he has had to advertise this through his friend is alarming, and we should all be alarmed by it.

A clarifying statement today, if it comes, and it has not come so far, would not necessarily fix this problem either, because a clarifying statement on the futures of Maloney and Fotheringham will only increase the suspicion that O’Neill has had to force people’s hands. We are in a perverse place as a football club where the manager and the board are so far apart that the manager believes he has to take that kind of action.

And of course, those who have spent all this time telling us that, because Brendan Rodgers expressed concerns about the internal policies of the club and the speed it took for deals to be made, he is the devil, will have an awful lot of trouble spinning it if O’Neill himself makes those same kinds of comments in public.

Because if there is one thing all of us agree on, it is this: there is no comparison between Rodgers as a person and O’Neill as a person.

There are questions about Rodgers’ conduct. I disagree with a lot of the suppositions others have made about him. I disagree that Rodgers was the devil. I saw the same pattern from his first term repeating itself in the second. I was not willing to give him sufficient benefit of the doubt for the way he left the first time, but the way he left the second time I do excuse and I do sympathise with, and I know who I blame.

But they got away with that because it was Rodgers.

Pre-existing suspicion about Rodgers already existed among people who had read too many books written from biassed points of view, and I know which book it is that has allowed a lot of people to believe they have some special insight on Rodgers which they do not actually have. But the point is that, with Rodgers, there was always some pre-existing suspicion about his motivations and about his ultimate loyalties, with a view that he is loyal first and foremost to himself almost baked in.

There is no pre-existing suspicion about Martin O’Neill’s motivations. There is no pre-existing suspicion about O’Neill at all.

O’Neill came in twice last season and rescued what should have been an impossible situation. He transformed the fortunes of this club in the latter part of the season and secured a double under some of the most incredibly difficult circumstances I have ever seen a Celtic manager work under. He is rightly hailed as a man of the highest integrity and the deepest loyalty to this club as a result.

If these people think they can pull a similar stroke to what they did with Rodgers and blacken his name just to protect themselves, they are dead wrong.

In the court of public opinion, they would not stand a chance. O’Neill has the loyalty of the soldiers, meaning the supporters, and if those in the imperial court want to try to turn people against O’Neill, they are going to find it incredibly hard to do.

All they will do is increase their own exposure and their own difficulties in the effort.

A lot of people will tell you that the only important thing is who wins that battle.

Most of us cannot see past O’Neill, because O’Neill could walk and O’Neill would bring the whole house down. I know that O’Neill does not want to do that any more than Rodgers wanted to do it until Rodgers’ situation became intolerable and he recognised that it was starting to affect the team on the pitch.

O’Neill would be far harder to convince to walk, and so I do not believe that O’Neill will walk. I do not believe there is a real danger of that, although it cannot be completely counted out.

In any sensible environment, you would expect O’Neill to win his internal battle.

But here is the thing, and this is the thing that cannot be denied: in any sensible environment we would not be having internal battles in the first place.

There would not be a situation where the man who sits in the dugout was so at odds with the people above him at the club, on a simple matter such as this, that he felt he had to threaten a scorched-earth strategy to get what he wants.

Any organisation running like that is not running right, and it is the fact of it, more than any possible negative outcome, that concerns me most.

It does not matter to me at this point how this resolves itself. If it resolves itself without O’Neill getting the staff he wants, that is obviously bad. But if it resolves itself with O’Neill now getting the staff he wants after he has had to push the issue to this extreme, that is not exactly brilliant either.

These people should not be arguing over stuff like this.

Matters like this should be resolved easily, quickly and out of the public gaze. The way the original story about Maloney and Fotheringham was drip-fed into the media, and the way in which this has now been put into the public square, is ghastly.

If O’Neill gets his men now at the last minute, with pre-season training due to begin again tomorrow, then fabulous. That is a win for the manager and the backroom team I think we all hoped O’Neill would be working with, minus Gavin Strachan, whose departure is itself a sign of some deeply troubling stuff in the background.

Because, as Paulina says, it comes alongside the departure last season of John Kennedy, and there have been a few others involved in Celtic’s operation over the last few years who have likewise quietly left the building.

But we should not kid ourselves that a resolution of this matter puts us in a good place.

It does not. It leaves a deeply worrying sense of a club completely at odds with itself, with no one really minding the shop, capable of taking decisions in the best interests of Celtic. Whether or not you believe that we are now ruled by a mad king or a squabbling court of incompetence, this is not an organisation that is at peace.

And for this one, you cannot even blame discontent in the stands.

This is feeding the discontent. It has not been caused by it. It is not the boys in the stands, the Celtic Collective, the Green Brigade, or whoever else people want to blame, who have forced the manager into this awful place.

No. This is a situation created entirely inside our own house, entirely by the men allegedly running this institution.

Nobody else can be blamed for it. And it goes without saying that I have limited to no confidence that we will get this fixed while the present leadership is in charge.

Because this is not leadership.

This is corporate vandalism.