Sutton is wrong to act as though Celtic’s players should accept all the blame.
Chris Sutton has accused Celtic players of passing the buck and refusing to accept their share of the blame for what has happened over the past few weeks.
And he has a point.
Celtic players do have to take responsibility. These are professional footballers wearing the Celtic shirt, and when they miss chances, lose individual battles, give the ball away cheaply or fail to execute what they have been asked to do, they cannot simply point somewhere else and say it was not their fault.
There is nothing wrong with holding players accountable.
The problem comes when the analysis stops there.
Because if we are going to examine Celtic’s problems honestly, we have to look beyond the eleven players standing on the pitch and ask a much bigger question: who is responsible for putting those players into a system which repeatedly does not work?
That is where my problem with Sutton’s argument begins.
There is coaching to examine, tactics to examine, the formation to examine, the structure of the team to examine, recruitment to examine and squad construction to examine. Sitting above all of that are the pricks of the Celtic board.
So why does so much of the criticism land on the players?
Take the formation. If Celtic repeatedly line up in a system which leaves the midfield disconnected, the defence exposed and the attacking players isolated, then at some point we have to stop saying the players need to do better and start asking whether the system itself is good enough.
Footballers can only operate within the structure they are given.
Of course, great players can sometimes overcome bad structures, and individual brilliance can rescue matches, but you cannot build a functioning football team on the assumption that eleven individuals will solve every tactical problem themselves.
Perhaps Sutton sees players who are not accepting enough responsibility. Fine. But what we are also watching is a Celtic team which has looked disconnected, disorganised and, at times, completely uncertain about what it is supposed to be doing. Those things do not happen simply because eleven footballers suddenly forget how to play football.
There are reasons.
Look at the expensive attacking players Celtic have brought into the club.
As I wrote the other day, Kasper Høgh is an £11 million player. Haissem Hassan is an £8 million player. Camilo Durán is a £6 million player. That is an enormous amount of money invested in three attacking players, and if Celtic cannot find a system in which those players can actually function, then this stops being simply a question of individual performance.
It becomes a football operations problem.
Because what happens if you keep buying players without having a coherent tactical plan for how they are supposed to fit together?
You end up forcing square pegs into round holes.
The players look poor, the supporters become frustrated, the manager gets criticised and the players get criticised. Eventually the club starts buying another group of players to solve a problem created by the structure in the first place.
That is how money gets wasted. That is how clubs end up with contracts they do not know what to do with. And that is how a football team can spend millions and somehow become less coherent rather than more coherent.
So yes, Chris, let us hold the players accountable.
But let us hold everybody accountable.
The players cannot possibly be the only people in this entire football operation who should be answering difficult questions.
What about the coaching staff? What about the tactical preparation? What about the recruitment department? What about the people who decided which players Celtic needed and how those players were supposed to fit together?
And what about the pricks sitting in the boardroom who have allowed this structure to develop? That is where the criticism has to go next.
It also has to be said that the player’s criticism has not emerged from nowhere. If there were no issues with the coaching and the training then we wouldn’t have several players deploying the same complaint.
The problems are real, and so the biggest culprit is not necessarily the Celtic player who misplaces a pass on a Sunday afternoon.
The bigger problem may be the system around him, and that system does not appear overnight. It is created by decisions made over months and years.
Michael Nicholson and Dermot Desmond are not responsible for every misplaced pass, every missed chance or every defensive mistake. But they are responsible for the environment in which Celtic football operates. They are responsible for appointments, structure and strategy. They are responsible for making sure the club has the right people in the right jobs and that those people are working towards the same footballing vision.
When that structure repeatedly fails, somebody above the players has to answer for it. That is not scapegoating. That is accountability.
There is also a danger in making the players the easiest target simply because they are the most visible people in the whole process. We see them. We hear their interviews. We watch them make mistakes, miss chances and lose tackles. What we do not see are every decision made in the boardroom, every recruitment conversation, every tactical discussion at Lennoxtown or every failure of communication behind the scenes.
We only see the final product.
And when that final product is poor, it is tempting to blame the people standing on the pitch. But we need to look beyond them and ask who built the machine.
Celtic cannot keep treating every crisis as though it is an isolated problem caused by the latest manager or the latest group of players.
At some point, you have to recognise the pattern.
Managers come and go, players come and go, formations change and recruitment changes. But if the same structural problems keep appearing, perhaps the problem is not simply the people temporarily occupying those positions.
Perhaps the problem is the structure itself.
That is why Sutton is only partly right. Celtic players must take their share of responsibility, absolutely, but they cannot take all of it.
We should expect Celtic footballers to show character, take responsibility and understand what wearing that shirt means. But we should also expect coaches who can organise a football team, a clear tactical identity, recruitment which makes sense and a squad constructed around a coherent footballing philosophy.
Because Celtic’s problems are bigger than eleven players. Until we examine the coaching, the tactics, the recruitment, the football structure and the Board which oversees the entire operation, we are only examining the symptoms.
The players are part of the problem. But they are not the whole problem. And if we stop with them, we have simply stopped asking questions too early.
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I think Celtic just haven’t moved forward with the rest of modern football, they’ve been left behind.
You took me aback James when you asked what the recruitment department are doing. If Celtic have a recruitment department can you please give me the names of its members.
A D.O.F. or Head of Recruitment would ensure that players are signed to fit the profile of Celtic’s playing system (The Celtic Way). This would remove the antiquated method of recruitment that Celtic now deploy. MON identifies his targets, Celtic sign him, then SM and MF try to fit them into their BR hybrid “build from the back” system, which is nigh on impossible to do successfully with not one ounce of physical presence or running power in midfield.
CCV has bravely revealed the disconnect between the board, MON and SM, by simply saying they don’t get instructions on how to play the chosen systems.
There can only be one, or two related reasons that Celtic do not hire a DOR, to save money and/or to avoid interference to DD’s dictatorship.
Look no further for a reason why Celtic are so disjointed. Young players no longer leave Celtic just to further their careers, they leave to get proper coaching.
Sorry Paulina, I just realised that you wrote this article and not James.
I thought it was James because of the suggestions that no-one knew the potential of those players until they left Scotland.
Paulina the players are a disgrace and they have to shoulder a lot of the blame, we’ve all watched or played in games on a park on a Sunday morning and have saw teams see their game plan isn’t working and they’ve changed it themselves without advice from the sidelines and those guys aren’t millionaire players. CCV should never have spoken on air about that either that’s a dressing room issue, we’ve all seen managers throw their players under the bus but this is the players throwing the manager and staff under the bus and that’s not right. We all know the “structure” of the club is a clusterfuck and the board have no discernible plan for taking the club forward, there’s no football department to speak of and the communication with the supporters is non existent and they treat us with contempt, that’s all true too but the players are complicit too. In the two Rangers games they didn’t show any fight, were outthought, outplayed and outfought by a very poor Ibrox side, the same with Ferencvaros, we never won our duels and lost out on every second and third balls. The bottom line is where’s their professional pride? The minute they step over that white line they should have their chests puffed out and realise they’re representing an iconic football club that’s a way of life, a religion, a birthright if you will and if you give everything for the cause you’ll never find a love or adoration like it at any other club in the world, the very least we expect is to leave every ounce of energy out on that pitch after ninety minutes and win lose or draw and you’ll be applauded off at the end of the game. Those last three games we played I saw none of that and that’s unforgivable for any Celtic side, you can talk about about all the other things we know that are wrong at the club but competing is what we expect if you lose whether it be from being beaten by a better side or it’s just not our day in front of goal, the fight has to be there but it’s not and that’s worrying along with everything else that’s wrong at Celtic and overall it’s going to get worse in all areas unless we step into the twenty first century. The players don’t deserve our sympathy, they’re living our dream but they’re not doing enough and at the moment they’re stealing a wage.
Couldn’t agree more, they didn’t try a leg and that makes me wonder if the players have an agenda. MON not being present enough and Maloney/Fozzy in charge… perhaps the players want them out.