When this transfer window closes, some at Celtic have outlived their usefulness.

Sometime over the next week, something has to give. The transfer window will close and this club will face a reckoning with itself. Eventually supporters are going to have to step up and do something about this, but it should never have had to come to that.

There are people inside Celtic Park who have failed and who know they have failed. They cannot possibly be in denial about it because the failure is obvious, clear and absolute. The evidence does not need to be relitigated.

What we suffered on Tuesday night was one of the most grotesque humiliations Celtic supporters have ever witnessed.

To be 4-0 up in a tie with an hour remaining and lose it is almost beyond comprehension. There were failures from the manager, failures from the players and failures from the coaching staff, and those failures are very serious indeed.

Nobody should attempt to play them down. The coaching staff, and the manager in particular, have a lot to answer for because it was their responsibility to manage that game sufficiently well that we did not collapse.

I said in the aftermath that if Martin O’Neill had handed in his notice, nobody would have been in a particular hurry to persuade him to remain in the manager’s chair. The only obvious complication would have been that the people above him would then have got to choose his successor, and I do not think any of us wants them in a position to select another Celtic manager ever again.

Because this is no longer merely about the fact these people have failed repeatedly.

They do not know how to fix it. That is the truth of this.

Celtic relies on blind luck as long as these people remain in charge. There is no underlying strategy here, because no coherent strategy could possibly keep taking us down the same dreadful road.

The problems this team had on Tuesday night have been obvious to many of us for months. We knew what Celtic needed to do to resolve them. The football department knew what had to be done. And it wasn’t done.

That is strategic failure at the very top of Celtic.

Had we signed the defensive midfielder we clearly required, perhaps there would not have been the enormous gap between defence and midfield which LASK exploited without mercy over and over again.

I am very sure the football department identified that area as a priority, but the people responsible for getting deals completed simply failed. We already know from John McGinn’s account how this club conducts transfer business. We have watched numerous examples of the same thing throughout this window.

We tried and failed to bring Kelechi Iheanacho back after allowing his contract option to expire in an act of gross amateurism. We failed to sign Marcelo Saracchi, who the manager wanted, and we still do not have the left-back we have required for months. That was probably one of the easiest deals of the entire summer to get over the line.

Instead, we waited beyond all comprehension for a Chelsea reserve to regain fitness rather than simply moving on to another target, and even now we do not know whether he will eventually sign on the dotted line.

Everything about this window has stunk the house out and it is not going to get better while the same people remain in charge.

The people running Celtic do not have a plan. They do not know how to run a modern football institution. They know how to stay one step ahead of the lumbering shambles across the city. That is not the same thing.

They do not know how to prepare Celtic properly, equip Celtic properly or advance Celtic properly. All we ever hear from them is what this club cannot do.

Celtic can do an awful lot more than they are capable of doing. This club is a far bigger institution than these people are capable of presenting to the world, and it is past time that they recognised that and stepped off the stage.

There is no serious corporate structure in the world which would tolerate failures on the scale these people have inflicted on us. Worse still, they are now going to make the manager and the playing squad pay for those mistakes through reduced transfer spending, reduced ambition and reduced squad depth.

Celtic continues to pay for their mistakes while they continue to reward themselves handsomely for making them. That is untenable.

This does not start and stop with one European humiliation. The pattern has repeated far too many times. Their inability to plan and think ahead has cost Celtic far too much, far too often, and this should be the moment when somebody inside that boardroom finally takes personal responsibility.

Managers fail and pay with their jobs. Players fail and take the abuse from social media and the stands. For directors, there is always somebody else available to pay the price.

A lot of these people should never have got this far. They should not have reached this summer and they should never have been given another opportunity to make more mistakes. They should have walked after the Wilfried Nancy appointment.

They would have argued that they had to appoint another manager. Then they would have argued that they had to back him in January. Then they would have argued that Martin O’Neill had to be supported in the summer.

Perhaps all of that was true. But the summer is almost finished.

When the transfer window shutters come down, these people have no meaningful football function to perform until January. The manager will have been dealt his hand. The coaches will know what they have to work with. The squad will either be ready or it won’t be.

My money is firmly on it not being ready. There will be gaps everywhere. Some of them will be significant. Celtic will have exposed itself to even greater danger.

But when the window closes, there will be no more transfer deals to complete. Unless O’Neill walks, we have our manager for the campaign. The next major football decisions these executives will be asked to make are months away.

I personally do not want a single one of them still in post when January comes around. Otherwise, January will be another wasted opportunity and quite possibly another window in which Celtic sells a major asset before anyone is prepared to spend actual money.

The second this window closes, people should start clearing their desks.

Their final major role, their final objective and their final responsibility of this summer will have been completed. They got us through one last window. Bravo.

Take a damned bow. Then beat it.

If they want to indulge themselves with a little victory lap before they go because Celtic, unlike the club across the city, is not in complete free fall, fine. Let their colleagues applaud them on the way out. Let them tell one another how brilliant they have been. They may even believe it.

But once this window closes, there is no good reason for this institution to continue pretending that these people are up to the job.

Celtic will not collapse without them.

Institutions appoint interim executives all the time while professional head-hunters search for permanent replacements. There are specialist organisations whose entire purpose is finding the best people to fill senior roles.

In the meantime, Celtic has departments. Those departments have experienced staff and department heads. They do not require some Grand High Poo-bah hovering over them every second of every day to ensure that the lights stay on.

The club will continue to function.

That is precisely why the argument that we somehow cannot remove failed executives because the institution would fall apart is nonsense. For once, the people in the upper echelon of this club have to take some actual personal responsibility.

Six qualification failures in succession means something is fundamentally wrong. That is multiple managers across a long period of time. That is Celtic repeatedly losing to teams with a fraction of our resources.

The problem is no longer simply that these people keep failing. It is that they are incapable of succeeding because they do not know how to fix what keeps going wrong. They will repeat the same mistakes over and over again. They will convince themselves that they still possess the answers over and over again.

We cannot continue allowing them to do it.

But this is where another group has to enter the conversation, and I intend to keep pressing this point because its responsibility has been ignored for far too long.

The prawn sandwich brigade.

If you are a commercial partner of Celtic, an executive-box holder, a major minority shareholder or one of the blue-chip brigade who has access to these people, what the hell are you doing to make things better?

I have asked ordinary supporters in the stands what they are prepared to do.

Now I am asking them. What are they prepared to do? What are they, the people with direct access, prepared to do? Do they really need your tummies tickled by the likes of Brian Wilson and that sneering CFO of ours? What are the minority shareholders with their plaques on the walls prepared to do to put a stop to this?

What are people such as Chris Trainer prepared to do? What are Lindsell Train prepared to do? What are they standing back watching this for? Because this is not merely about the millions these executives have allowed to slip through Celtic’s fingers.

It is about the complete absence of strategic sense. It is the absence of anything resembling a coherent plan.

Those people swan around Celtic Park as though they are the lords of all creation. They get private access, little cosy sit-downs and I know some of them do not like what they see happening around them. I mean, look at the state of the club.

But they enabled this. They enable it still.

Their continued willingness to enable it, their refusal to use whatever influence they possess in the interests of the club itself, begins to raise very serious questions about what exactly they believe their role at Celtic is.

They cannot watch these people operate and genuinely believe they know what they are doing. They cannot believe there is a coherent plan. They cannot possibly believe that whatever strategy these people would claim to be following makes sense.

Yet they get together every week and lend it credibility. Some of them sneer at protests in the stands. But where is their own solution?

I already know that some of them are unhappy. I have met some of them who are unhappy. There is at least one group which broke away from the official shareholders organisation precisely because it was unhappy.

But the longer their silence continues, the more questions they have to answer. How much are they willing to tolerate? How far are they willing to go? If they really are so damned special, what exactly are they doing with their access and influence?

What are they doing to make things better?

Because if pressure is going to come in a way which truly matters, in a way which stops short of empty stands and protests in the car park every other week, then some of it has to come from them. In fact, they might be crucial.

The prawn sandwich brigade needs to remember that it has responsibilities too. You cannot stand in executive boxes, drink in boardrooms, shake hands with the people who run this club and then pretend you are merely innocent spectators while the place deteriorates around you. At some point, access creates responsibility.

At some point, influence unused becomes complicity.

And at some point you have to decide whether the drinks in the boardroom are worth standing back and watching Celtic rot from the inside.

Nero was not the only one fiddling while Rome burned.

There is not one of them who would allow their own companies to be run like this. Not one. There is not one of them who would let these pygmies anywhere near the executive boardroom of a business they actually owned and depended upon.

Yet they claim to love Celtic. So why would they let these people continue to run this club like this? That is the question those guys should be asking themselves right now.

Not what the Green Brigade is going to do. Not what the guys in the cheap seats are going to do. Not what the bloggers are going to write. What they are going to do.

This board’s time should be almost up. Their last major executive function of this summer will be fulfilled when the transfer window closes. Their job is to support the football department and the manager as best they can.

They are not directors of some Fortune 500 conglomerate.

They are directors of Celtic Football Club.

When they can no longer do anything useful to help the football department and have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to plan for its future, their absence will not create the catastrophe some people imagine.

At least one of them must fall on the sword. Because somebody doing that would restore some credibility. It would restore some confidence that Celtic understands how serious this has become.

Right now the wider football world thinks we are a laughing stock because Tuesday night’s result made us one. It was a travesty and an utter embarrassment to the name of Celtic.

Even if Tuesday had not been their fault, even if they had played no role in it, even if they had supported the manager with everything they had, backed his vision to the nth degree, spent every penny required and given him every possible advantage, the resignation of one of them would still be an act of stability.

Because accountability has to start at the top. If there is no accountability there, that mindset works its way through the organisation. Eventually nobody feels responsible. Eventually nobody believes failure carries a price. Eventually nobody thinks the standards really have to be met. Eventually there are no standards left at all.

In the aftermath of the game yesterday, Martin O’Neill was asked whether he was surprised by the applause the team received when they got off the coach.

I was surprised when I heard they had been cheered. Martin went further than I would have gone. He said they did not deserve to be. He was right.

The importance of him saying that is that O’Neill understands something incredibly basic which appears to have been lost elsewhere inside Celtic.

Failure has to cost you something. It has to carry a price. It has to hurt. That is why, in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday night, O’Neill assumed full responsibility himself. It is high time other people at Celtic started assuming theirs.

They talk endlessly about how much they care about this club. If they care at all, one of them can give us the ultimate demonstration of it sometime over the next few days. Do I expect that? No. But I hope for it.

Because nothing would demonstrate more clearly that Celtic is finally willing to learn and change than seeing responsibility taken where responsibility belongs most. At the top.

And if the executives themselves refuse to do it, then the people sitting beside them in the expensive seats, drinking with them in the boardrooms and enjoying direct access to them need to step up and tell them it’s time to take some responsibility.

They have access. They have money. They have standing. They have relationships. They have to use them. Or what good is any of it?

Because the ordinary support has been asked over and over again what it is prepared to sacrifice to change Celtic. Now it is their turn.

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