Yes, Derek McInnes really could be at risk of losing his job.

Someone asked me last night whether there is a realistic chance that the Ibrox club could sack Derek McInnes already.

I answered about as honestly as I could: yes, of course there is.

They sacked Russell Martin after only 17 games and 123 days in charge, and Celtic sacked Wilfried Nancy after just eight matches. Football clubs do extraordinary things when they believe a season is disappearing in front of them.

Worse for McInnes is that our decision to sack Nancy saved a season which looked dead. Martin O’Neill came back in and Celtic eventually won the league by a point, and that comparison has to be somewhere in the minds of the Ibrox directors now.

It is equally possible, of course, that firing another manager this early sends their entire campaign into free fall, because who credible wants to walk into that job after the transfer window has closed with the club in this state?

But when somebody asks whether it can happen, there is only one honest answer. Yes, there is a realistic chance Derek McInnes could be fired before the end of this month. He might not even survive the weekend.

This is not simply about what happened in the Czech Republic. It is about almost every performance since the start of the season, including the pre-season games, because supporters over there are looking desperately for evidence that something is improving and they cannot see it. They have two wins from seven competitive matches, no league wins and they are already completely out of Europe.

That is what makes the comparison with Celtic interesting.

We have already seen two completely different versions of our own team this past week. One is an attractive, aggressive attacking side which looks as though it could become something genuinely exciting, while the other is a fucking chaotic mess which produced one of the worst European collapses I have ever witnessed.

There is still time for our board to salvage whatever tiny shred remains of its relationship with supporters by putting some of this right.

They gambled again and failed spectacularly, but unless these people are too stupid to see straight, they must know that restitution now has to come in some form, whether that costs Celtic money from the bank account or not.

I am not saying they will do it. They probably won’t.

But the opportunity is there. Celtic have the financial wherewithal and all that is missing is the will. If we strengthen this squad properly in the positions where everyone knows it needs strengthening, there is every chance that this season of calamity across the city becomes considerably worse for them.

The issue for the Ibrox directors is no longer whether sacking another manager damages the club’s reputation. Of course it does. The question is how much damage you allow the manager to inflict before the reputational cost of keeping him becomes greater than the reputational cost of firing him.

That was precisely the calculation Celtic faced with Wilfried Nancy.

We knew firing a manager after eight games would make the club look terrible throughout football. We knew it would stink the place out and that the people who had hired him would have to carry the embarrassment of admitting, barely a month later, that they had made an atrocious mistake.

But that had to be balanced against how bad the appointment had turned out to be, how dreadful the results were, how angry the support had become and how much more damage he would have done if he had stayed.

Celtic ultimately won the title by one point. We did not sack Nancy a moment too soon, because another league defeat and there is every chance Hearts are champions and Derek McInnes is still managing them.

If you are going to save a campaign before it disappears into total free fall, sometimes you have to move early. You do not allow a manager to affect the team so badly that recovery becomes impossible simply because admitting your appointment was wrong is embarrassing.

That is the position the Ibrox hierarchy now has to consider.

BBC Scotland’s post-match analysis highlighted the chaos in McInnes’s response against Jablonec, with repeated changes of shape as he searched unsuccessfully for an answer. Other analysis counted multiple different formations, while former players looking at the game were openly bewildered by what they were watching.

McInnes also made three substitutions at half-time. That is not normal game management. When a manager is ripping up his own starting plan at the interval and repeatedly changing the structure afterwards, it suggests he knows something is horribly wrong but has absolutely no idea how to fix it.

That is the most dangerous position a manager can reach.

Under Ange Postecoglou, Celtic suffered some horrible results before he finally got control of the team and turned everything around. Our defending in some of those early away games was chronic, players were still learning a radically different system and there were moments when it all looked terrifyingly vulnerable.

But the positive signs were there.

The home form became sensational. Celtic were scoring goals for fun, the new players looked as though they were capable of hitting the ground running and you could see the football trying to emerge even when individual results were going against us.

Once the new arrivals bedded in and everybody understood his responsibilities, the whole thing suddenly took flight.

If some of that sounds familiar, it should, because there are elements of it in Celtic’s start to this season. Most of our new players look as though they have settled well and have something significant to offer. The problem is that there are not enough of them and the team is adapting to another major change in playing style.

There were always going to be teething problems.

I did not expect them to be as staggeringly bad or as consequential as what we witnessed against LASK, but you cannot fundamentally alter how a team plays and reasonably expect there to be no adaptation shock whatsoever.

What you can reasonably expect, and what every supporter looks for, is evidence that the direction of travel is correct. With this Celtic side, we have already seen signs that if it clicks and if the necessary players are added, there is potentially something very good here.

The attacking structure can work. What Celtic now have to learn is how to balance it with the defensive side of the game. It hurts like hell to think about the individual and structural failures in Austria, but those failures do not erase everything else we have already seen.

Across the city, I see almost none of that.

Their situation is 100 times worse.

The Jablonec result makes Celtic’s LASK catastrophe look almost like a net positive by comparison, because at least we landed in the Europa League. The Ibrox club did not simply lose to a team it should have beaten; it was outplayed for most of the night by opposition that gave it every opportunity to demonstrate that the expensive rebuilding programme was beginning to work. Instead, it looked clueless.

McInnes watched it happen. He repeatedly attempted to change it and nothing worked.

That is the problem.

This guy currently has no answers.

He has also spent a serious amount of money. The Ibrox club has gone in the space of weeks from chasing the guaranteed income attached to the Europa League, to dropping into the Conference League and finally to having no UEFA league-phase income at all.

The financial damage from that progression is enormous.

Current reporting puts the immediate lost European revenue from the latest failure alone at roughly £8 million to £10 million, and that sits alongside an expensive summer rebuild which has already cost around £24 million.

Domestically, they are already five points behind Celtic. The official SPFL table has Celtic on six points and the Ibrox club on one, with Celtic hosting Falkirk on Saturday before McInnes takes his team to Aberdeen on Sunday.

If Celtic beat Falkirk, that lead becomes eight points before McInnes’s team even kicks a ball at Pittodrie. Tell me again that this man cannot be sacked by the end of the month.

He might be gone by the end of the weekend.

The predicament that would leave the club in is staggering. A replacement would inherit the squad after the transfer window had effectively been completed, would inherit a team which had already got one manager fired and would arrive with no European football to offer as either an attraction or distraction.

The next few league fixtures would throw him almost immediately into the pressure cooker too.

There is an Ibrox home game against Hibs and then the twin battles against the Champions, first at Ibrox and then at Celtic Park on 20 September. A new manager could barely have unpacked his office before finding himself under enormous pressure in the derby. Out of the League Cup and floundering in the title race, it would be the nightmare start to end them all. That is how the madness becomes self-sustaining.

Get the next appointment wrong and the new guy could already be in his own downward spiral before Christmas. Then what? Sack a second manager in the same season and appoint a third? No football club can continue doing that indefinitely.

But that does not mean they won’t do it.

Let me repeat this as loudly and explicitly as possible: the long-term consequences of getting this season wrong are potentially catastrophic for the Ibrox club.

Their European coefficient has already been damaged by the failures of recent seasons, and another campaign ending before the league phase does nothing except worsen their future position.

UEFA seeding is cumulative, so every poor year gradually removes stronger seasons from the five-year calculation and makes future qualifying paths harder rather than easier.

The current projected Conference League coefficient picture already has the Ibrox club around the middle of the play-off seeding range rather than anywhere near the elite end of it. Keep producing seasons like this and eventually the protective seeding disappears.

That is where this becomes much bigger than Derek McInnes losing a game in the Czech Republic. If the club finishes outside the title position and finds itself travelling through the lower reaches of UEFA qualifying again next summer with an increasingly weak coefficient, every round becomes dangerous.

Go out before the league phase for a second successive season and the financial consequences heading deeper into the FSR cycle become vicious.

That is the risk they are playing with now.

That is the long-term damage McInnes can inflict if the directors conclude that keeping him is somehow safer than admitting they made another disastrous appointment.

Hell yes, they can sack him. They might have to.

Everyone knows that club has become almost ungovernable. It is in free fall now, but the truth is that elements of that free fall have been visible for a long time. Last season ended with them outside the top two, this season has begun in all-out meltdown and there is no obvious sign that the slide has stopped.

If they are going to halt it, they have to try while there is still enough season left to save. That may mean accepting the humiliation of another early managerial dismissal. It may mean admitting that the expensive summer rebuild has been handed to the wrong man. It may mean going back into the market for a coach after the playing market has already closed. Every option is terrible.

But that is what happens when a club reaches this point.

You are no longer choosing between good options and bad ones. You are choosing between different categories of disaster. Keeping Derek McInnes could be a disaster. Sacking Derek McInnes could be a disaster.

The only question for the Ibrox directors is which disaster they believe gives them the better chance of stopping the runaway train before it finally hits the wall. Because if they get this decision wrong, what follows will not necessarily be one bad season. It could be a multi-year catastrophe whose consequences extend far beyond the immediate event horizon.

And from there, the only way is not necessarily up.

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