This is a Celtic board obsessed by what it can’t do.

There is one criticism of the Celtic board which I almost never hear anywhere, and yet it might be the strongest criticism you can level at them.

I was on the Come On The Hoops podcast last night, and I repeated something I have said many times before. I try not to think of the people who run Celtic as bad people, because mostly they are not. That is not really where the criticism lies.

Where I can criticise them, and where I think the criticism is strongest, is in their incredible selfishness. Because on some level, they must know what their limitations are. They must know that their limitations have now become Celtic’s limitations.

That is the part a lot of people miss.

Any organisation is only as good as the imagination of those who run it. Let me put that another way. Apple became one of the most successful companies in the world because it put its trust in engineers and designers whose responsibility was to create products the world could use, products people did not even know they wanted until they existed.

Without the imagination of those people, there would be no iPhone. There would be no iPad. There would be no iTunes. Those people had the imagination to dream of things that did not exist, and they believed those things could change the world.

That is what good corporate leadership should do. It should imagine. It should create. It should push. It should ask what might be possible.

We do not have corporate executives like that.

We have the worst kind of corporate leadership, and it is not unique to Celtic. These are not uniquely awful people. Bad corporate leadership exists in every field, across every kind of business. But it presents itself in the same way wherever you find it: a lack of imagination.

What we have at Celtic is a board of directors that spends all its time thinking about what Celtic cannot do. We cannot compete with bigger clubs on salaries. We cannot compete with top clubs on transfer fees.

We cannot build a brand-new stand because it would cost too much. We cannot push for real reform at the SFA because nobody else wants it. We cannot change this. We cannot improve that. We cannot reach higher. We cannot think bigger.

On and on it goes.

These people have locked themselves into structural limitations. They have locked themselves into a cycle of “can’t.” And when I accuse them of lacking imagination, when I accuse them of lacking strategic vision, what I am really accusing them of is limiting their thinking to the things we cannot do.

If your whole mindset is built around the things you cannot do, you will never have the imagination to dream of new things you can do. You will never bring about a dramatic shift. You will never change the culture.

And the whole culture of our club is now infused with “can’t.”

These people are scared. That is ultimately the problem. That is where we are as a club. Celtic are run on fear: fear of the things we dare not try, fear of limits, most of which we place on ourselves deliberately, fear of getting it wrong, fear of spending too much, fear of ambition itself.

As I keep saying, we are not here by accident.

That is what some people tend to forget. We are not here because circumstances in the wider game have forced us to behave this way. We are here by choice. People inside our own club have decided that this is how Celtic will operate.

That might be acceptable if the thinking was modern. It might be acceptable if there was creativity. It might be acceptable if new ideas were allowed to breathe every once in a while. But we are a reactive club. We are a scared club.

I do not know exactly how we got this way, but I do know we are stuck in these patterns. I do know we are wedded to this way of doing things. I do know that every transfer window, every strategic decision and every public statement seems to come from the same narrow place: caution first, and then a baby step forward, if at all.

Part of that is bad leadership from Dublin. We have allowed one man far too much control, and he too is reactive in his thinking. He does not appear able to grasp modern football concepts and ideas in the way he should. He has not moved with the times. He also thinks in limiting terms.

That is how someone like Paul Tisdale ever got his claws into the club. This is a guy who allegedly told our corporate investors that he did not believe Celtic were a top European club, and actually scoffed at the idea. A person who thinks that way is of no use to Celtic. He should not have been inside the building.

Now, I am not suggesting that Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay and others do not believe Celtic are a top club. I am sure they do believe that, in some abstract sense. But they certainly have no idea how to get us there, because we are not talking about risk-takers here.

We are talking about administrators. That is all they are. And administrators are ten a penny.

When people ask me how I think our club would look without these guys, or when people demand that I name names who could replace them, I tell those people very simply that replacing them is not the hard part.

Look at the job they do. Look at the way they run the club. It is not difficult to find people whose whole skill set is keeping the lights on. When it comes to commercial contracts, with a fanbase our size, with our passion and with our willingness to spend money, doing those kinds of deals should be the easiest thing in the world for any executive.

The real talent would be not annoying those supporters so much that they launch campaigns like Not Another Penny.

It does not require imagination or any particularly rare skill set to do what these guys do. Any bog-standard executive at a company with income over £50 million could do much of that job. But Celtic require more than that. Celtic deserve more than that.

And that is where the difficulty lies. That is where the problem lies. That is where so many of us have grown frustrated and angry with these people. Because they must know. They must know they are out of ideas. They must know their limited thinking keeps Celtic stuck in the mud. They must know that they are not the people to take this club forward.

And if they know that, then staying becomes selfish.

That is the uncomfortable truth.

It is our imperative to remove them, but first we have to diagnose the cause of the problem properly. You cannot fix what you refuse to name. You cannot solve a problem if you keep describing only its symptoms.

The cause of Celtic’s problem is simple. We have an executive board which is scared all the time of the things it thinks Celtic cannot do.

That mindset is now permeating the whole club. It shapes the way we do business. It shapes the way we approach transfers. It shapes the way we speak about Europe. It shapes the way we think about infrastructure. It has even started to permeate parts of the support itself.

You hear it constantly now. People talk about the limitations we are working under as if they were laws of physics. They are not. Many of these limitations are self-imposed. They are not structural barriers forced on us entirely by outside forces.

We could spend more on players. We could do business better. We could operate at a higher level. We could invest in critical infrastructure that makes money. We could reach for the next rung of the ladder. But we choose not to, because the people running the club do not know how.

They think Celtic are operating as well as Celtic can operate. They are wrong.

That does not make them bad people. But it does make them limited people. It does make them scared people. And it does mean Celtic are not going anywhere under leadership like this.

That is the criticism that does not get made often enough. Not that they are evil. Not that they hate the club. Not that they wake up every morning looking for new ways to sabotage Celtic.

The criticism is worse than that in some ways.

They are small thinkers in charge of a big club.

And because they cannot imagine what Celtic could become, they have convinced themselves that this is as good as Celtic can be. That is unforgivable.

A football club of Celtic’s scale should not be run by people whose first instinct is to retreat into caution. It should not be run by people who see ambition as a threat. It should not be run by people who mistake prudence for vision and balance sheets for strategy.

Celtic need leadership with imagination. Leadership that asks what is possible. Leadership that understands modern football. Leadership that sees infrastructure as opportunity, recruitment as investment and supporters as partners rather than wallets to be emptied and lectures to be endured.

Instead, we have fear. We have limits. We have “can’t.”

And as long as that remains the governing philosophy of this football club, Celtic will keep standing still while convincing themselves they are moving forward.

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