Celtic’s crisis is an accountability crisis.

Here’s the thing: when your organisation is led from somewhere else, when it’s got a ruler who sits hundreds of miles away and who doesn’t have any interest in the day-to-day business, when all he cares about is looking at results on the pitch in domestic games, and he doesn’t care what else is happening just so long as the books balance and the profits remain good, then there needs to be some person or group of people inside the club who pushes for the highest standards and the best outcomes.

Because without that, you don’t have leadership at all.

The problems at Celtic can all be traced to a single source, and it’s not so much Dermot Desmond himself. It’s the absence that Dermot Desmond creates, or allows to exist.

We all know that Michael Nicholson is not a CEO in any meaningful sense. We all know he shouldn’t be anywhere near a job of the magnitude of Celtic. He is simply not up to it. But he is a symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself.

Even Desmond, to an extent, is the symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself.

No one is in charge of Celtic.

If people were in charge at the club, if there was genuine leadership inside the walls, we wouldn’t see this drift. Lines of communication would be clear. Leadership structures would be simple and comprehensible. There would be no mixed messaging. There would be no mixed signals. There would be no confusion as to where ultimate authority resides.

Everyone would know these things. Everything would work in a fashion consistent with what good governance elsewhere looks like.

I’m going to talk about our strengths later on, but this is our principal weakness.

It is perfectly clear that Desmond doesn’t take any kind of day-to-day interest in the club. It is perfectly clear that he delegates that, and since he appears to have a very simple set of KPIs, the only thing that he can really judge these guys on is whether they keep the lights on and the walls up. As long as the club is still making money, what does he care about underlying issues? Maybe he doesn’t think there are underlying issues.

There are a lot of Celtic fans who don’t think there are underlying issues either.

But there are failures everywhere at Celtic when you look for them, and I know a lot of people don’t want to do that. He’s one of them.

All up and down the club there is a culture of evasion.

This is what happens when you don’t have natural leaders. This is what happens when there isn’t a structure in place where everyone understands what everyone has to do and people are held to high standards.

Nobody wants to be held to account.

And that’s the important one.

It’s not so much that no one wants to be held responsible. The reason no one wants to be held responsible is that no one wants to be held accountable.

We have a crisis of credibility because this club is an unaccountable shambles.

Listen, we don’t have a football department.

We have the manager and his coaches, and then we have the executive board of directors.

In between the two, there should be a recognisable football structure.

At Celtic, there is not.

There should be a director of football, or whatever name you want to give him, and his responsibility should be to run the entire football department alongside the manager. He should identify and secure players, spend whatever budget is granted to him by the board in whichever way he sees fit, and there should not be middlemen interfering in that process.

It should not have to depend on a call to Dublin to get the wheels in motion.

Celtic will function better when it functions this way.

But the thing about not having a football department is that the executive leadership, the board of directors, takes all the key decisions involving the football side.

And that means that if we go into Champions League qualifying campaigns undercooked over and over and over again, that’s their responsibility.

Not the manager’s. Not the players’. Theirs.

Now, we have spent a lot of this week beating the living daylights out of the coaching team. They deserve every bit of it, and I’m not going to apologise for any of it.

But the buck stops with the guys on the board because ultimately the responsibility is theirs.

Whatever happened with the coaching staff, we were unable to put in place a proper pre-season plan. Pre-season planning starts way before the players arrive on the training ground, and we started it late because our coaching team wasn’t in place in good time.

That’s down to them.

Signings were not done in a timely fashion.

That’s down to them.

Engels was allowed to leave before we even seriously looked at midfield replacements, and in the end they still didn’t get the type of player that we needed.

That’s down to them.

And this is not an isolated failure.

This is a pattern that repeats over and over and over again, and no one ever pays for it.

No one ever loses their job.

Managers get put under pressure. Managers get stick from the fans. Individual players get turned into scapegoats because they’re being asked to do jobs they should never be asked to do for so much or for so long, even when they clearly no longer have the capability to do those jobs to a high standard.

Everyone at the club has learned the same tactic.

Deflect. No one wants to grab it by the throat.

But even if they did, the culture starts at the top, and the culture of this club is that no one is accountable. How long might they let us slide now that the guy at the top of the football side is Martin O’Neill?

How long would they allow the team to lose points, lose games, lose ground in the league, even if it were obvious that we were in a situation that wasn’t going to be turned around?

How long would they let it drift?

This isn’t Wilfried Nancy, a guy they had just brought in and who didn’t have any buy-in with the supporters. A decision like this would shake the club to its foundations. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be done.

The question is: who’s going to do it?

But more than that, doesn’t it get to the point where you look at the last 16 months and wonder why no one else has paid the price?

Just look at where we’ve been over that time.

A summer transfer window last season which was as chaotic and calamitous and disgusting as this one was, maybe even more so because the attempt to undermine the manager was very clear and very deliberate.

Then there was a smear campaign against the guy.

His resignation saw O’Neill return to the club on a short-term basis.

O’Neill, to his credit and to the credit of his coaching staff, managed to get something more out of the players, but the board itself took the decision to cut that short prior to our three biggest games of the season up until that point.

Then they introduced a complete novice in the middle of the campaign, not simply to come in and steady the ship, but with a dramatic, radical plan to change everything.

Without any prep time. Without any lead-in.

And he lasted eight games.

Sure, he took his pal Tisdale with him. But no executive lost his job over it.

That is a scandal.

We had already suffered a Champions League exit because the executive directors didn’t give the manager the firepower to win the tie, so the sacking of Nancy on top of that should have been a moment where someone was escorted from the premises and their name was taken off a parking space.

Why didn’t that happen?

But to then go crawling back to O’Neill showed the complete absence of a plan.

And that’s the thing. The complete absence of a plan.

By this point, these guys were making it up as they went along.

And they still are.

The decision to appoint O’Neill again in the summer is actually unbelievable in hindsight. Unbelievable.

But then those same people messed him around over the coaching team, denying us any sort of proper pre-season preparation before pre-season got underway, and have now presided over another Champions League exit, this time in even more ignominious fashion.

And still they’re all there.

Because they’re all still there, a question naturally arises.

What would have to happen at Celtic before Michael Nicholson or Chris McKay lost his job? What would it take before one of those two people paid the price for their own mistakes?

Without a football department, this falls on them.

This is down to them.

Everything we’re watching right now happens because of them and their failed leadership.

And because they are untouchable, because they can make mistakes and not pay for them, other people at the club also naturally believe that, with this lack of accountability, they too don’t have to be at their best to get by.

And that’s all Celtic is doing right now.

It’s all Celtic has been doing for months, if not years. Getting by.

One day at a time.

Improvising when things aren’t going their way. But following a plan? Not a chance.

With a strategy underpinning their actions? No way.

With people leading from the front? Absolutely not.

Because leading is something people at Celtic have forgotten how to do.

Nobody can take a major decision without running it by somebody else, and that includes Nicholson himself.

It’s all pass the parcel. It’s all musical chairs, except that no chair ever gets taken away, so no one ever loses their seat.

Before this club can fix itself, there has to be accountability.

Mistakes have to cost something. Because if they don’t, there is no incentive for anyone to learn from them. From the chairman on down.

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