The chaos at Celtic has poisoned the well for any good people we employ.

You know what one of the worst things is when you are in a situation like the one Celtic finds itself in right now?

There is so much going on, so much bitterness and so much anger that trust and confidence in the whole process has been lost. Completely lost, and perhaps lost forever while the present incumbents remain in charge.

We are going to talk later about the managerial situation and how that will affect whoever gets the job next, whenever and however that happens. But one of the best examples of the wider problem, right here and now, can be found in the two new directors Celtic has added to the board.

I have swept the Celtic sites, podcasts, blogs and everywhere else I can think of for as much information on these two men as I can find, and I have become convinced of three things.

First, they are exactly what they purport to be.

They are good, true Celtic men. They are supporters of this club. They have devoted their time and attention to Celtic for years and put their money into it. They can make a claim that remarkably few people in the upper reaches of this club have been able to make convincingly in recent times: they were supporters first and foremost.

Well-heeled they may be, but supporters nonetheless.

Secondly, they are well known to a lot of people in the Celtic online community, and those people generally speak very highly of them. They talk about their passion and commitment to the club. They talk about them as good people who genuinely want to see Celtic succeed, grow and develop.

In principle, these should be absolutely perfect people for an organisation like ours to have on its board of directors.

Their bona fides appear solid.

Their reputations are good.

Their judgement is supposed to be sound.

They are well credentialled by any reasonable definition.

Here is the third thing I know.

None of that is probably going to matter.

Because there is only one thing a lot of supporters will want to know before making up their minds about them, and it is not their professionalism, their character, their Celtic credentials, their business acumen or their sparkling CVs.

It is that they were appointed by a board dominated by Dermot Desmond, operating within a structure which is widely perceived as serving Dermot Desmond’s interests and existing under his enormous influence.

For a huge part of the support, nothing else about these men will matter until they prove otherwise.

And that is desperately unfair.

These people should be able to establish themselves without carrying the taint of previous executives or automatically being dismissed as creatures of the current regime. They should be able to come in and be judged on their own merits and on what they actually do as non-executive directors.

By normal standards, that is how this should work.

It will not work like that.

Is that fair?

Probably not.

I do not particularly like it either.

But it is the world we now live in, and that world was created by Desmond and by the current board of directors.

Nobody trusts them.

Nobody trusts their judgement.

And because these appointments have their fingerprints on them, the new men immediately inherit some of that distrust.

That is a problem for them.

It is a problem for us.

And it will remain a problem for every person this club goes out and appoints while the present regime remains in place.

What a dreadful position for Celtic to be in.

This board has allowed its own reputation to become so toxic that mere association with it stains and contaminates everyone around it.

They are radioactive.

And there is very little they can do about that now because opinions have hardened and attitudes have become entrenched. You could scrub at this reputation for a month and barely shift it a millimetre.

That is a ghastly place for Celtic to be.

And it will not change while the people responsible for creating that atmosphere remain in charge.

We all know that Desmond is at the heart of the problem, but the public symbol of it is Michael Nicholson.

Nicholson occupies the most important executive role at Celtic, yet supporters struggle to identify where his independent authority begins and ends. He has never established himself as the kind of commanding chief executive you would expect at an organisation of this size.

And people notice that.

They look at the kind of institution which keeps a chief executive so publicly invisible in such an important role and conclude that independent thought, strong leadership and professional authority are not especially valued there.

If those qualities are not required of the chief executive, then what exactly does the job mean at Celtic?

That question matters particularly when we start talking about non-executive directors.

A non-executive director is supposed to scrutinise decision-making.

A non-executive director is supposed to challenge.

A non-executive director is supposed to help ensure that a board is not guided by the whims of a single powerful individual.

Yet this is an institution which has spent years creating the impression that one individual can exercise enormous influence over almost everything.

Why would supporters automatically believe that two new non-executive directors are going to change that?

That is not their fault.

But it is their problem.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who have sat around that boardroom table for years and later tell themselves that they quietly disagreed with the direction Celtic was taking.

Silent opposition is not enough.

If your job is to scrutinise the direction of an organisation, then whispering your reservations behind closed doors while the organisation continues down the same road is not some great act of resistance.

Your job is to prevent bad decisions where possible.

Your job is to challenge them.

Your job is to reverse course when the evidence demands it.

If you cannot do that, what exactly are you there for?

But if these two new directors genuinely are coming in to offer some freshness, some independent thinking and some kind of new start, then I actually feel sorry for them.

Because nobody is going to believe that simply because Celtic says so.

There will have to be a clear, unmistakable demonstration of independence before supporters begin accepting it, and I have no idea where that demonstration is going to come from or what form it could realistically take.

And secondly, if they genuinely believe they are going to come into Celtic and start changing the established way of doing things, they may be in for hardship and heartache.

They could end up with front-row seats to the continuing decline while discovering just how difficult it is to rock the boat from inside.

I genuinely wish them well.

I hope everything their friends and the people who know them in Celtic circles say about them is true.

I hope they are good men and true.

I hope they have Celtic’s best interests at heart.

I simply do not know whether that matters enough anymore.

It should matter.

It should be all that matters.

We should be encouraged that people of good character and genuine Celtic commitment are becoming non-executive directors.

But we have been told similar things about other people who have occupied those seats.

We have been told that they love Celtic.

That they care passionately about the club.

That they are committed to its wellbeing.

And yet here we are.

If all of that passion and commitment had translated into effective governance, we would not be in this mess.

So I am not merely tempering my enthusiasm in this case.

I refuse to have any.

Bitter experience has taught me that if your expectations of Celtic are low enough in the first place, the club can never disappoint you quite as badly.

Hope for the best.

Expect the worst.

That is the bizarre paradox at the centre of Celtic now.

Even when good people come through the door with good intentions, supporters will not automatically believe it.

And even if people are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, they will expect those same people eventually to discover that the existing structure does not welcome anybody who genuinely wants to rock the boat.

These two men may therefore be on a hiding to nothing.

Not because of anything they have done.

Not because of anything they are likely to do.

But because the atmosphere surrounding this club has been poisoned by the people who were already there.

Until those people are gone, everyone who steps into the upper reaches of this organisation will be viewed through the same lens.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest crimes this regime has committed against Celtic.

It has poisoned the well so thoroughly that even when somebody good drinks from it, none of us trusts the water anymore.

Every single person responsible for bringing this club to that point should feel the deepest sense of shame.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.