Celtic seem devoid of ambition and direction. Where do they go from here?

This is how life is for Celtic now: the club’s social media team places a message on X and it opens the sluice gates to a tirade from their own supporters. At midday on Thursday, they posted “@ScottishCup action awaits as we face Auchinleck Talbot at Rugby Park” with a picture of the stadium and a graphic promoting Sunday’s tie against non-League opponents.

Innocuous? Informative? Among the first replies were: “CAN WE SIGN SOME PLAYERS HOLY CHRIST.” “Sign a bloody striker.” “Charlatan scumbags.” “Don’t tweet til you sign a striker.” “Just sign players we know when the next match is.” “I f***ing hate this club. The board have taken all the enjoyment out of it.” “I hope we lose.” On and on it went.

The issue which has brought Celtic fans to the boil is straightforward. Problem: they need a striker to help turn around a season of chaos and decline. Solution: their most recent accounts showed £77million in bank reserves, so spend some of that. Reality: now, on day 18 of the transfer window, they have still failed to deliver a goalscorer. Worse, it is day 355 since they sold Kyogo Furuhashi for £10million so they have needed a proven, quality centre forward for almost a year.

But paralysis in the transfer market is the tip of the iceberg for a club which has lost its way. Celtic’s largely unchanging board of directors has been accused of hoarding money and lacking ambition for years, but there was always the twin defence of unprecedented domestic success and financial stability, with the latter point gleefully cherished as rivals Rangers were liquidated. Celtic have never had a period of sustained success on the scale of the 43 domestic trophies from the 82 contested since 2000. In the past decade alone, they have aggregated annual profits of £123million. From a shareholders’ point of view, Celtic have been exceptionally well run. There was a Midas touch with recruitment, too, developing gems including Matt O’Riley, Jota, Kieran Tierney, Moussa Dembélé and Virgil van Dijk and selling for vast profits.

Ernest Hemingway’s line about how bankruptcy comes about — gradually, then suddenly — applies to how Celtic have descended into crisis. The mountain of money is still there but the decline over the past year has been remarkable. Last February, they were on course for another treble and it took a 94th-minute Bayern Munich equaliser at the Allianz Arena to deny them victory in one of the finest performances by a Scottish team in Europe for years. They were narrowly eliminated but looked on the cusp of growing into a credible force finally capable of competing regularly in the Champions League knockout rounds. It was time to strengthen.

Instead, retreat and deterioration. Since then, Celtic have reached two cup finals and lost both of them, been eliminated from the Champions League by Kairat Almaty of Kazakhstan without scoring a goal, sold the winger Nicolas Kühn and the forward Adam Idah for a combined £23million and endured a bitter relationship breakdown with their exasperated manager Brendan Rodgers. The past three months have been a tailspin. Including Rodgers, they have lost two managers, a chairman, a head of football operations, a head of scouting operations, a head of performance, and two sets of management backroom staff. The nadir was the appointment of Wilfried Nancy as manager in December and the embarrassment of sacking him 33 days later after six defeats in eight games.

Recruitment has been hollowed out to the extent that January transfer business is being led by the 73-year-old caretaker boss Martin O’Neill hitting his phone: “There are only so many calls I can make in a day.” Agents say targets the club were pursuing last month, for Nancy, have now been abandoned. Celtic’s approach to communications is from the dark ages. No-one from the club has faced the media to explain why Nancy was appointed, or what happened with Rodgers, or the failure of the self-styled “football doctor” and head of football operations Paul Tisdale, or why there seems to be no strategy or long-term thinking to their once excellent recruitment.

The failure of a cash-rich club to get business done in the summer or this month has been the final straw for infuriated supporters who want regime change. The Irish financier and billionaire Dermot Desmond has been a non-executive director and benevolent dictator for three decades. Desmond owns only 34 per cent of the shares but with allies he has control. So powerful is he that Celtic are run by a non-executive making the significant executive decisions. And the actual executives lack the autonomy they would expect at most other clubs.

Desmond is 75. The director Tom Allison and interim chairman Brian Wilson are both 77. All three have been on the board for more than 20 years. The chief executive Michael Nicholson has been with Celtic for 12 years, the chief financial officer Chris McKay for ten. All are Celtic supporters and independently successful — spectacularly so in Desmond’s case, while Wilson is a former MP and government minister — but although there is also female representation, the board is perceived as pale, male and stale.

Celtic have benchmarked themselves in a Scottish context, doing just enough to stay ahead of Rangers and seeming to deprioritise competitiveness in Europe — they have not won a knockout-round tie since 2004 — while allowing their Parkhead stadium to feel outdated and unloved. On big Champions League nights, the international media must leave the stadium entirely to interview the managers in a tent.

In Desmond’s time, Celtic have frequently gone back to former managers and players, employing Neil Lennon twice, Rodgers twice, O’Neill three times, Fraser Forster twice, Jota twice and Tierney twice. Last week, the attempted solution for replacing Kyogo after a year was to sign… Kyogo. The player was not prepared to leave Birmingham City to return. Ange Postecoglou was a visionary appointment they got right. The recent left-field appointments of Nancy and Tisdale were dreadful.

When Rodgers resigned, Desmond derided him as “divisive, misleading, and self-serving” but increasingly supporters are focusing on another sentence from that stunning character assassination: “What has failed recently was not our structure or model, but one individual’s desire for self-preservation at the expense of others.” They do not buy that. To them, the structure and model are central to Celtic’s decline.

For months, there have been escalating protests against Nicholson, McKay, Wilson, the long-serving former chief executive and chairman Peter Lawwell, who stepped down last month, and the previously untouchable Desmond. A broad umbrella group, Celtic Fans Collective, was created and quickly organised demonstrations and a “Not Another Penny” campaign persuading fans to give the club ticket money but no more. The annual general meeting collapsed amid chaotic scenes as Desmond’s son, Ross, gave an address lambasting some supporters as bullies who had “dehumanised” Lawwell and Nicholson. Lawwell, a senior and highly respected figure in Scottish football, said he and his family had suffered intolerable abuse and threats. The club has seemed at war with sections of the support. The ultras group the Green Brigade was banned and fan media had access withdrawn.

“Celtic is a broad church with a very diverse fanbase, yet somehow the club is managing to upset just about every faction of the support,” Tino Callaghan, founder and host of The Celtic Exchange podcast, said. “Pretty much everyone you speak to in real life or online is pretty scunnered and fed up with the malaise that has set in. There’s a lack of ambition. We got to a sort of high point when we went toe-to-toe with Bayern Munich and to crash down from that, in the manner we have, is just extraordinary.

“Celtic were at a fork in the road. You could take one turn and show even more ambition and go, ‘This is something we could do year on year, this is a level we can aspire to, we can give our fans more of these big occasions.’ Or we could do what we’ve inexplicably done: downgraded, sold our best assets and now rolled through three managers and turned in a number of abject displays. If you win 13 out of the past 14 titles you’re thinking, ‘This is great, I enjoy that, but what’s next?’ They need young, fresh, creative thinking and 70-odd-year-olds aren’t giving you young, fresh and innovative thinking.”

Celtic’s signing inertia is significant because their domestic supremacy can no longer be taken for granted. Hearts, backed by Tony Bloom and the data gurus Jamestown Analytics, are six points clear at the top of the Premiership. Rangers, under American owners aligned to the San Francisco 49ers, are improving — and spending — to create a compelling, three-way title race. Celtic could finish outside the top two for the first time since 1995.

David Low might be considered a Celtic removal man. In 1994, he helped oust an unpopular board and usher in the transformative Fergus McCann era. Low wants the present board removed too. He is the co-founder of Celtic Supporters Limited (CSL), a vehicle to accumulate small shareholdings and build a structured organisation strong enough to hold the board to account.

“We’re not a protest group, we’re not getting pitchforks, we’re not getting personal, we’re trying to be constructive,” Low, a businessman and financial analyst, said. “We represent, I believe, the silent majority. The reason why we’re all unhappy is because Celtic are underperforming, which is to do with bad management, lack of ambition, lack of understanding. There are lots of reasons for it. It’s in care and maintenance mode. ‘Steady as she goes, guys’. That’s the mantra.”

Desmond has insisted he will never sell Celtic and ownership will stay in his family. Low’s view is that deals can always be made, were someone to offer a multiple of his original £30million investment. The motivation behind CSL is accountability and recognition for minor shareholders rather than an eventual takeover. “We’re just pissed off that we’re being mismanaged. We want to have a say because the balance has been lost between the corporate ownership and the fan ownership. We think the fans should have a say.”

The directors’ position is that their “self-sustaining model” protects the club and can support infrastructure, investment and a £65million wage bill through any years without Champions League income. The £77million is rainy-day money, in other words. The lack of transfer activity has been variously attributed to difficulties in individual negotiations, Uefa’s sustainability regulations, and even misleading media coverage.

One leading agent has some sympathy with the board. “It’s not easy to get players in. The highest-commodity player is a striker. The whole world’s after strikers. Celtic is a big club but the problem they’ve got is that Scottish football’s not a big draw. They are trying. They either get outpriced or they move too slow sometimes because it’s got to go through certain people. But you need to find somebody that’s going to score as many goals as Kyogo, and that’s difficult.”

Celtic will land a striker soon — “remarkably, I think we are a bit closer” O’Neill said on Friday — but this weekend there is Auchinleck Talbot and the fourth-round tie should be too much of a mismatch to matter. A new arrival will be a start, and O’Neill may yet steer them to another Scottish title, but all the underlying issues remain. Never mind waiting for a goalscorer, Nicholson’s 2023 aspiration to be “world-class in everything we do” is light years away.

Auchinleck Talbot v Celtic

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