Celtic’s players are part of this mess and they cannot dodge their responsibilities.

I believe in consequences, and that probably comes through often enough on this site. When I talk about accountability, I am not reaching for a convenient word because it gets clicks. It is something I believe in very deeply.

Actions should have consequences. Failure should have consequences. Refusing to do the job you are being paid to do should have consequences too.

And if it were up to me, there is not a single member of Celtic’s first-team squad who would be treating the next three weeks like some kind of mini-break. Every player who is not away on international duty would be at Lennoxtown working, every coach would be there, and everyone inside the football department would be using every available day to try to fix what we have been watching.

There would be no disappearing off to consider futures. You can consider your future from your office while doing your job.

Because part of what has gone wrong at Celtic is that nobody seems to be accountable for anything anymore, and that does not apply only to the people upstairs.

We have all heard the stories about players being unhappy with the way they are being coached, unhappy with the tactical setup and unhappy with what they are being asked to do. Some of that dissatisfaction appears to have leaked beyond the walls of Lennoxtown already. Carter Vickers and Scales have contradicted the manager publicly.

Look at Callum McGregor lately. He can barely conceal how miserable some of these interviews are becoming. He increasingly looks like a man approaching the end of his rope.

But there is another side to this.

Players being unhappy does not automatically mean the players are right, and it certainly does not give them the right to decide how Celtic should be coached.

We went through a version of this last season when Wilfried Nancy arrived and attempted to change the playing style dramatically. There was resistance to it, and I said at the time: who the fuck are the players to resist the manager?

A football club appoints a manager and gives that manager responsibility for producing a winning team. The players’ job is to follow his instructions.

They may find those instructions difficult. They may dislike the tactical demands. They may be asked to think differently, run harder, learn unfamiliar roles or leave the comfort zones they have occupied for years.

Too bad. That is professional football.

We have all heard the phrase that players can get a manager the sack, but that only becomes possible at clubs where the leadership allows it. Strong football clubs do not regard managers as disposable depending on the mood of the dressing room. They make it very clear that the hierarchy runs in the other direction.

The players answer to the manager. The manager does not answer to the players.

If individuals in the dressing room cannot accept that, then you deal with those individuals. If it becomes necessary to clear out half a dressing room, then that is what you do.

Football history is filled with managers who understood this instinctively.

The first sign that somebody was undermining the authority of the manager, that player was finished, because you cannot build anything with people who do not recognise the legitimacy of the person trying to build it.

There is a Celtic example I have thought about for years.

During Ronny Deila’s time at the club, it was obvious that not every senior player bought into what he was trying to do. There was one particularly infamous touchline confrontation involving Kris Commons, who publicly vented his frustration after being substituted.

Commons was still at Celtic when Brendan Rodgers arrived. He was also only a handful of goals short of joining Celtic’s 100-goal club, yet he never played competitively for Rodgers.

I have always wondered whether Rodgers looked at what had happened under Deila and decided immediately that Commons would not be part of his dressing room. That is supposition on my part, but it makes sense to me because it fits what we know about strong managers.

Whatever Rodgers thought of Commons as a player, he would also have known that a senior professional had publicly challenged the authority of the previous manager in full view of the television cameras.

Had I been walking through the door after Deila, that would have been enough for me too.

Because this is bigger than one player. It is about authority.

Whoever sits in the Celtic dugout deserves the opportunity to run the team according to his own ideas. That does not mean the manager is always right.

Managers get tactics wrong. They pick the wrong players. They make terrible signings. They lose dressing rooms. They fail.

And when they fail badly enough, they get sacked. That is the accountability which comes with the job.

But while they hold that job, it is theirs.

You cannot have a cadre of players deciding that they do not fancy the training methods, do not like the tactical demands or would rather return to something that makes them more comfortable. You cannot build a serious football team like that.

Football management remains one of the last workplaces where an extraordinary degree of authority is concentrated in one person. That is not an accident.

Someone has to decide how the team trains, how it plays, who starts, who sits on the bench and who no longer has a future. Those decisions ultimately determine the manager’s career, so they have to be his decisions.

If Celtic appoints the wrong man, that is Celtic’s mistake to correct. It is not the dressing room’s decision to correct it for them.

And this matters particularly now because I think there is a temptation to hear that players are unhappy and immediately treat that as further evidence against the coaching staff.

Maybe it is. But it could also be evidence against some of the players.

I am not prepared simply to assume that every grievance coming out of that dressing room is justified. Some players may genuinely be badly coached, while others may simply dislike being asked to do things they do not want to do.

Those are very different problems, and the people running Celtic have to be capable of distinguishing between them.

Because the worst possible outcome is a culture where players discover that if they complain loudly enough, resist long enough or perform badly enough, the manager disappears and somebody more agreeable arrives.

Once that happens, you have destroyed authority altogether.

Last night I wrote about the higher loyalty. Everyone serves the institution. The institution does not serve them. That applies to Dermot Desmond. It applies to Michael Nicholson. It applies to Martin O’Neill.

And it applies every bit as much to every player in that dressing room.

When the club appoints a manager, his authority comes with the job. You do not have to like him, enjoy every training session or agree with every tactical instruction. But while he is the Celtic manager, you fucking do what he asks.

And if you cannot do that, if you refuse to do it, or if you think your status at Celtic puts you above that basic obligation, then there is a very simple solution.

Pack your bags and go.

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