Celtic’s coaching department cannot be run by committee.

There is something that has been bothering me for a couple of weeks, and it is only after listening to the podcasts over the past seven days and reading the comments of a lot of our supporters online that it has dawned on me that plenty of other people are seeing the same thing and are equally concerned by it.

Had it just been me, I would have been happy to dismiss this as a classic case of overthinking, of seeing something and reading too much into it. I toyed with writing about it during the week and decided not to.

But the more I discuss it with fellow supporters, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of us are thinking the same thing. And it is a pretty dark thought.

It is not a particularly nice thing to contemplate either, but we almost have an obligation to talk about it because if what we are seeing, or what we think we are seeing, is real, then it is a problem. It is a problem which has to be confronted first by the supporters and then, ultimately, by the club itself.

The question is this: is there actually one person in charge of the coaching team?

Normally, that question should never arise. But it does arise at Celtic.

It arises because of public statements the manager has made. It arises because of things we have seen. It arises because of things we all know about how the coaching setup works. And it arises because old habits and old ways of thinking appear, at times, to be coming into conflict with new ideas and different ways of playing.

At the heart of every major organisation there has to be a central figure who runs the show. At Celtic, because there is no accountability at executive level, because there is no real leadership, because there is strategic drift and because everybody appears secure in their job no matter how often they underperform, you inevitably create a culture where responsibility becomes blurred.

That kind of culture spreads.

Nobody fears failure because nobody ever seems to pay a price for it.

We have an academy system which has underperformed for well over a decade. We have an executive structure which has failed time and time again, and not merely failed but repeated the same mistakes as though the people responsible are incapable of learning any meaningful lessons from them.

It would not be terribly surprising if that lack of coherence eventually bled into the football department too. And there does appear to be a strange disconnect there.

We know Martin O’Neill delegates much of the day-to-day training work to his coaching staff. There is nothing inherently unusual about that. Plenty of managers operate that way. But if the manager is not heavily involved in the coaching detail, then the coaching itself has to be perfectly married to the tactical plan he intends to use on matchday.

That is where the questions begin.

Because we have seen things in Europe, and even in domestic games, which appear to have been missed. Big things. Obvious things. Fundamental things.

We already have enough questions about the fitness of some players to wonder whether everything is being done as well as it should be on the training ground, and perhaps O’Neill needs to take greater ownership of parts of that process.

That would be a concern in itself. But what concerns me much more is that there have been times over the past few weeks when Celtic has looked as though it spent one half playing one style of football and the next half playing another.

O’Neill has made enough public comments about Shaun Maloney’s role to create the impression that Maloney has significant responsibility for the football being worked on during the week, while O’Neill is the wise old head above it, offering direction, judgement and support. There is nothing inherently wrong with that either.

But Maloney’s footballing instincts are very different from O’Neill’s.

Maloney is associated with the modern possession-heavy style which is beloved by coaches all over the world. At its worst, that football slows our tempo to a crawl and, because we are not always properly equipped to break down packed defences, gives those defences far too much time to reorganise.

O’Neill, by contrast, clearly wants the ball moved forward more quickly.

What exactly does “quicker” mean in the modern game? That is not always easy to define. Back around the turn of the millennium, when people talked about playing quicker, they often meant being more direct.

I am still not entirely sure which system Celtic was trying to play in the second half in Linz but we spent a lot of it throwing long balls to Hogh. In short, it did not look like the same system we were playing in the first half.

We were already being exploited before the break, but whatever we attempted to do afterwards was so catastrophically wrong that the mystery of mysteries from that night remains why we did not stop doing it and try something else.

This is not a contest between O’Neill and Maloney. If it were, O’Neill would never have brought Maloney back as his number two.

My concern is almost the opposite. I worry that the relationship may be more collaborative than is healthy when it comes to the fundamental question of how the team is supposed to play. Because cooperation is good. Blurred authority is not.

If one coach wants one type of football and another wants something significantly different, and the team drifts between those ideas, then you risk creating a mishmash instead of a coherent identity. That creates confusion for players.

It makes adaptation harder, and if something is going wrong on the pitch, a player should never have to wonder which person on the touchline holds the definitive answer about what he is supposed to be doing.

The concept of the single figure in charge can be summed up with a hundred different analogies, but one I have always liked comes from House of Cards.

At the end of one season, Frank Underwood has a brutal confrontation with Claire over the idea of a co-presidency. He points towards the Resolute Desk and makes the fundamental point that there is only one chair behind it.

It is brutal precisely because Claire has been immensely influential and powerful in her own right, but she is being confronted with the reality of hierarchy.

Every one of those desks seats one chair, across business, academia, politics and professional sport. There is one person in charge.

A football team is no different. You do not run it by committee.

Always, always, always, somebody has the final say.

Shared responsibility might sound wonderful in a textbook, in a theory seminar or in a management presentation, but in practice it can become messy and complicated very quickly. If authority is unclear, responsibility becomes unclear too.

In any hierarchical organisation, there cannot be confusion about where power lies.

It is one of the reasons Celtic Park must already be a profoundly weird place to work at executive level. You have a man who walks around with the title of chief executive, yet so many major decisions appear to require reference to the man in Ireland. It makes Nicholson a pathetic figure subordinate to the whims of the largest shareholder.

That has to create friction. It has to slow things down. It has to make initiative harder, and it inevitably blurs the question of who is really responsible when something goes wrong.

That absolutely cannot be allowed to exist in the football department.

There ought to be not the slightest doubt about who gives the orders, who picks the tactics, who defines the system and who determines the style. That cannot be a shared job or a shared responsibility. It’s not that kind of job. Instead of one clear and coherent way of playing, you risk ending up with a mishmash of different ideas.

A good opponent, a smart opponent, will see that and exploit it.

We cannot have that.

It is bad enough that there is a widely held view that Celtic’s transfer policy is decided by a committee of people some of whom appear to have no specialist football knowledge and should be nowhere near those decisions.

It is bad enough that this committee then appears to have to report upwards for final approval, slowing everything down, complicating decisions and making it harder for anybody to show initiative and simply get things done.

It is a dreadful way of working.

But confusion in the dressing room or on the touchline about who actually runs the football team would be far more serious. That cannot happen.

It cannot be allowed to happen.

If Celtic is permitting a situation where those lines are blurred, then somebody needs to get a grip of it quickly because that kind of drift will hurt us badly as this season goes on.

And no matter how anybody dresses it up, this cannot be allowed to become Shaun Maloney’s unofficial audition for the manager’s job unless Celtic declares that openly. If that is the plan, tell us the plan.

Clarify the chain of command. Tell us who is responsible for what.

Then supporters can decide whether they support it.

But there cannot be a world where both men get to try their own little experiments one after another, from game to game or, worse, from half to half.

I am not saying that is definitely what is happening, I am saying a growing number of us are worried that it might be, because of an accumulation of if not evidence then certainly some pretty worrying indicators. The fact that so many supporters are even asking the question should concern the club.

Because a football team cannot function properly if nobody outside the building can work out who is actually in charge, and it certainly cannot function properly if the players inside it are left wondering the same thing.

At that level, there has to be one voice.

One tactical authority. One final decision-maker.

One chair behind the desk.

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