Peter Lawwell is not the answer.

There is a strange idea floating around in some Celtic circles just now, and I understand why it has taken hold. I do not agree with it, but I understand it.

The idea is that Peter Lawwell would never have allowed the club to drift into this current state. The silence would not be this deafening. The transfer business would not be this slow. The leadership vacuum would not be this obvious.

The club would not feel quite so rudderless, quite so reactive, quite so incapable of doing the basic things quickly and properly.

On the surface, it is a seductive argument, because Celtic were not in this mess when Lawwell was chief executive. Things moved differently. The club felt more controlled. There was a clear central figure, and whether people liked him or loathed him, everyone knew where power sat.

But that argument collapses under the lightest critical examination.

Because Celtic fans do not pine for Peter Lawwell.

They pine for competence. They pine for leadership. They pine for a club that knows what it is doing, says what it means and acts with purpose. Confusing that with nostalgia for Lawwell is a serious mistake.

The present dysfunction is real. Nobody can pretend otherwise. It is appalling what has been allowed to happen at this club. It should not be permitted to be this bad. Celtic needs new blood and new thinking, but more than that it needs sanity restored to it.

Celtic look like a club without a functioning command structure. Communication is dreadful. Transfer business takes far too long. Supporters are left trying to interpret silences, rumours, briefings and half-sentences from the manager because the people above him appear to have vanished into the walls. But let us not rewrite history.

The roots of this did not suddenly appear after Lawwell left the chief executive’s chair. Many of the habits which now infuriate supporters were formed, normalised and defended while he was running the club. The present may look worse because the figure at the top is weaker and the silence is more obvious, but the culture itself did not arrive yesterday.

It was built over years, and Lawwell was the architect of it.

The transfer-window problems began on Lawwell’s watch. The under-preparation for Champions League qualifiers began on Lawwell’s watch. The pattern of taking too long, haggling too much, leaving obvious gaps in the squad and hoping everything would somehow work out was not invented by Michael Nicholson. He has inherited it, continued it and in some ways made it worse, but he did not create it from nothing.

Some of the worst transfer windows of the modern era happened while Lawwell was chief executive. Some of the most damaging examples of delay, drift and misjudgement happened under his authority. The high failure rate in recruitment does not sit neatly at one man’s door, but Lawwell was involved in enough of those windows that he cannot be airbrushed out of responsibility.

Supporters remember the good deals.

They remember the bargains. They remember the balance sheet. But they also remember the shambles. They remember the Champions League qualifiers approached with squads that were not ready. They remember key positions left unfilled. They remember managers being asked to make do. They remember the club acting as one more compromise would make little difference. Now it is all we do. But Lawwell was the guy who gave us managed decline. It was started on his watch.

The policy of allowing good players to leave the moment a serious bid came in for them was also embedded during the Lawwell years. Celtic became very good at talking about the model, but too often that model looked like a club preparing the next sale before it had properly built the next team.

Buy cheap. Develop. Sell. Repeat.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trading well. Celtic have to do it. We are not operating in a fantasy economy.

But there is a difference between smart trading and allowing the entire football strategy to become subordinate to transfer profit. The danger comes when the club starts to see every good player primarily as an asset with an exit point, rather than as part of a team with ambitions of its own.

That mentality took root under Lawwell.

So did the habit of signing players managers had not asked for and did not particularly want. That is one of the most corrosive things a football club can do, because it blurs responsibility. If a manager asks for one profile and receives another, who is accountable when the player fails? If recruitment is being driven by boardroom preference, agent opportunity or spreadsheet logic rather than the manager’s actual needs, who owns the mess?

We have seen that movie far too often.

And yes, Brendan Rodgers left the club the first time because of the way Celtic did business. People can dress that up however they like, and Rodgers certainly has his own faults, but the breakdown did not happen in a vacuum. The relationship between manager and hierarchy deteriorated because the manager did not believe the club was matching his ambition or giving him what he believed the team required.

Lawwell was central to that.

That cannot be dismissed just because the current set-up is now giving everyone a headache. The fact Nicholson looks lost does not turn Lawwell into a visionary. The fact the present feels weak does not make the past strong.

We are where we are now because this is the road Lawwell put us on.

There is also the matter of managerial appointments. Lawwell hired Neil Lennon and later gave Ronny Deila the job when Deila had originally been lined up to come in as Lennon’s assistant. Those decisions shaped entire eras of the club. Some worked for a while, some did not, but they were not the product of some bold, modern football structure. They were classic Celtic improvisation, dressed up afterwards as strategy.

And Lawwell was chairman when Wilfried Nancy was hired. If anyone wants to argue that the present leadership structure is confused, then fine, but Lawwell is not standing outside that structure. He was part of it for twenty years.

He is not some ghost from a more competent age looking in with horror. He is in the building. He had influence at every step in the road. He has fingerprints on this. He had 20 years to help put in place the kind of modern football structure we lack. The absence of one can be traced right to his door.

The biggest black mark against the whole “Lawwell would have sorted this” theory is Michael Nicholson himself. Lawwell was instrumental in Nicholson becoming his successor. Nobody should ignore that. If Nicholson is now being criticised as slow, silent, limited, unimaginative and unsuited to the scale of the job, then people have to ask how he got there and who helped put him there.

If a leader leaves behind a weak successor and a weak structure, that is part of the leader’s legacy. You do not get to take credit for the years when the machine seemed to function and then wash your hands of what happened after the machinery broke down. You shaped the culture and helped choose the people who would run and maintain it.

Then there are relations with the supporters, and this is where the nostalgia becomes especially difficult to stomach. The fan media policy came in only after Lawwell left as chief executive. Under him, relations with supporters were often cold, distant and arrogant. The club treated fans as customers when it suited them and nuisances when they asked difficult questions. The arrogance was not imagined. Supporters saw it countless times.

They felt it in the way the club communicated, or failed to communicate. They felt it in the contemptuous nature of certain decisions. They felt it when the board behaved as if supporter anger was something to be managed, not understood.

That did not start last summer. That was part of the culture for years.

So yes, the current situation is bad.

It is chaotic. It is stonily silent. It is lacking leadership. It feels as though nobody is prepared to step forward and explain the plan, assuming there is one. It feels as though Martin O’Neill is being left to front up while others hide behind him. It feels as though basic decisions are taking too long and that Celtic are once again drifting through a crucial window with too much uncertainty and too little visible urgency.

But the answer to that is not Peter Lawwell nostalgia.

The old regime helped create the problem.

A serious modern football club would have clear lines of responsibility. It would have a proper recruitment structure. It would have a sporting vision. It would communicate honestly with supporters. It would plan ahead. It would not repeatedly enter key moments underprepared and then ask everyone to applaud financial caution after football opportunities were wasted.

Supporters are not pining for Lawwell.

They want evidence that someone inside Celtic Park knows how to run a football club with ambition, clarity and modern thinking. I would refute the suggestion that he ticked any of those boxes either, but he knew how to build relationships and to exercise soft power. We looked professional at least, even if we were still hesitant, unambitious and arrogant.

Fans want leadership that does not hide; to be fair to him, he was never afraid to sit down with the media even if the club did not always tells us everything we needed to know.

Fans are pining for recruitment that does not feel like pulling teeth. Again, Lawwell was not genius in that area; Nicholson just makes him look like one.

Fans want that treats Europe as an opportunity to show the continent what we can do, rather than simply something that brings in a lot of money. Lawwell is of no benefit to us in that regard; that policy was also birthed on his watch.

The dysfunction of the present should be condemned, but it should not be used to rehabilitate the past. Lawwell was not an innocent bystander to the culture Celtic now inhabit. He helped shape it. He helped normalise it. He helped staff it. And through his role in Nicholson’s succession, he helped carry it into the present.

If Celtic are broken now, then we should ask who is failing to fix it. But we should also ask who helped design the system that keeps breaking in the same way. Because this club does not need to go backwards to find leadership. It needs to go forwards and find better leadership than any of this.

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