The CSA and The Trust go public as the Celtic fan’s patience snaps.

Every support has a breaking point. There comes a moment when the club people follow has moved so far beyond the boundaries of what they can tolerate that even those who would not normally speak out no longer feel able to remain silent. Celtic reached that point this weekend.

The Celtic Trust and the Celtic Supporters Association have now released separate statements that are highly critical of the club. This happened during the same weekend in which Celtic Park hosted its first pre-season friendly since we won the title, only for the match to be played in front of tens of thousands of empty seats.

Those things are connected. Nobody inside Celtic Park should pretend otherwise.

The Celtic Trust has often been critical of the board of directors. It is, after all, part of the Collective and has been one of its leading organisations from the beginning. But it is highly unusual for the Celtic Supporters Association, which normally tries to maintain cordial relations with the club, to release a statement as damning as this one.

The last time it issued something comparable was when the membership voted to join the Collective and support a joint statement. This time, however, the executive leadership of the association itself has spoken. It is one of the strongest and best statements to emerge from that organisation in a very long time.

Furthermore, I do not believe there is a single word in it with which the average member would disagree. It hits every important point directly, and that should deeply concern the people inside Celtic Park.

The association is not regarded as an organisation that postures, struts or protests merely for the sake of doing so. None of the organisations mentioned here does that, but I am talking specifically about the perception within Celtic. The club has traditionally believed that when it deals with the association, it is dealing with friendly and accommodating faces.

That makes today remarkable, and it makes it necessary.

Supporters will only tolerate so much.

Celtic is engulfed in chaos right now, and nobody knows what to believe or whom to trust. Even the manager’s words are no longer accepted at face value. Martin O’Neill walked on water when last season ended, but his attempts to defend indefensible situations have become so frequent that supporters are stunned by the gap between what they are being told and what they can see with their own eyes.

The contradiction has become overwhelming.

I expect other Celtic supporter organisations will speak out before the day is finished. If they do, this will become another red-letter day for this board of directors and another remarkable achievement to add to its growing collection.

The pressure will fall particularly heavily on Michael Nicholson because he is the chief executive and is paid an exorbitant salary to carry that responsibility. But this is also a warning to Brian Wilson, whom I intend to write about separately, and perhaps even to Martin O’Neill himself.

As I said this morning, Celtic supporters are neither cowards nor fools. You cannot deceive them indefinitely. You cannot say one thing and repeatedly do another without destroying your credibility. At this point, the credibility of the Celtic board is entirely gone.

We all heard the promises at the end of last season. Lessons had supposedly been learned. Things were going to change. Yet what we are witnessing this summer is dysfunction on a whole other level.

If lessons were learned, they were clearly the wrong ones, because the situation is markedly worse than it was at the same stage last year. Back then, Brendan Rodgers was begging for players one day and making increasingly angry demands the next. It was appalling to watch the club mess him around so blatantly.

Somehow, this summer has been even worse.

That is not simply because O’Neill is now the manager being undermined. It is because the dysfunction has spread into every part of the football operation.

First came the chaos surrounding the coaching staff. That was followed by the failure to secure extensions for two players the manager wanted to retain. Then came the failure to sign Marcello Saracchi when Celtic appeared to be pushing on an open door. Finally came the humiliation of O’Neill publicly admitting that he wanted both Saracchi and Kelechi Iheanacho and had left the matter in Michael Nicholson’s hands.

As this website said at the time, those were the worst possible hands in which to leave it.

Now here we are.

Supporters have not been fooled by the feeble justifications and alibis offered for those failures. They are dismayed and disgusted by what they are watching. Above all, they feel that the club is treating them like fools.

The problem is not simply the lack of speed with which Celtic is moving. Nicholson’s comments to the Irish Supporters Association were profoundly disturbing because they suggested that the people running this club no longer understand the scale of the institution for which they are responsible.

It was reminiscent of Wilfried Nancy failing to grasp the size of the job he had accepted. I do not believe the people in Celtic’s executive offices are fully cognisant of the size, power and potential of the organisation they control.

That is astonishing when we are constantly told that these people have Celtic in their blood.

It is a peculiar expression of devotion when they tell us Celtic cannot compete with English Championship clubs, that players do not want to come here and that agents and wages make everything almost impossible.

That attitude now permeates the entire organisation: defeatism, resignation and the belief that there is little point trying too hard because success is unlikely anyway.

It cannot continue.

Martin O’Neill may be prepared to tolerate aspects of it, although I wonder whether his tolerance is quite as high in private as he makes it appear in public. The tolerance of the support is much lower, because we are the people who put into the club what so many others take out.

Every expression of loyalty and love for Celtic from the people in senior positions must be tempered by the fact that Celtic pays their wages and finances their lifestyles. I wonder how different their attitudes would be if they were the ones writing cheques and buying tickets every week.

Their declarations of devotion no longer impress anybody. Most supporters learned long ago to distinguish between words and actions, and the words are no longer enough.

Two of the leading Celtic supporter organisations have now made their positions clear. I expect others will have done the same by the time this article is published.

This season is therefore beginning where the last one ended: with the Collective active, the protest movement growing and the relationship between the supporters and the board deteriorating further.

There was never any realistic prospect that the protest movement would pack up and disappear while certain people remained at the club.

Those people do not get to stay.

It is as simple as that.

Their mandate expired last year when they refused to finance Brendan Rodgers properly and denied the team what it required. That was a decision they took while pursuing their small and vindictive war against the manager. Celtic executives do not recover from deliberately weakening the football operation for reasons of ego and internal politics. But even the harshest critics did not believe this summer would become quite as bad as it has.

These people could have introduced new structures and mechanisms. They could have provided Celtic with one final outstanding service. They could have used the spectacular get-out-of-jail card O’Neill handed them and ensured that this campaign became everything the previous one was not. Instead, it feels as though they have chosen to scorch the earth.

They will not now leave Celtic with dignity. That ship has sailed. The opportunity has gone.

They are going to be forced out.

They have to be.

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