Celtic: From sabotaging a winning manager, to backing one who can’t, this is the state of play on Derby day

After New Years Eve, I decided to take a couple of days detox from writing about Celtic.

I say detox because everything around our club seems to be toxic at the moment.

The board blames the fans for the toxicity, and the fans blame the board for it.

But any neutral from the outside looking in who understands our club is intelligent enough to see that the current failings are coming from the top.

For years now, luck and success due to a floundering rival have masked over the institutional failings of Celtic.

I’ve said many times down through the years that this luck would eventually run out.

The Celtic board has ridden it’s luck, but they have ridden it for the better part of this century.

The very definition of riding your luck is to let favourable events take their course without taking undue risks.

I think it’s fair to say that this Celtic board is all out of favourable events.

A lot of people say that football dynasties rise and fall, many would cite Manchester United and Liverpool as perfect examples of that.

Some north of the border might even say that the deceased club from Govan is a perfect example of that.

We know better.

Are we seeing the collapse of a dynasty at Celtic?

Well, it’s hard to say really, could you define a business run by conservative accountants, lawyers and politicians as a dynasty?

If we were really to delve into Celtic in the 21st century, it is clear to see that first and foremost, it was a money making business.

Secondary to that it was a footballing operation.

Which was realistically sustained by the lack of a credible rival from 2012 onwards.

The footballing landscape in Scotland was ripe for dominance by a club with more money than the rest of the club’s in the SPFL put together.

Yet, throughout all those years of dominance, Celtic never used that financial advantage wisely.

It was never used to facilitate the club becoming “world class in everything it did”.

Today, the club has tens of millions sitting in the bank, yet it is floundering in every other aspect of it’s current existence.

During my two days detox from writing, I kept an eye on happenings at the club.

If I’m being honest, it’s all become a bit surreal.

It is no longer fantasy to think that the current Celtic board could conceivably drive our club into a position similar to that which we experienced in the ninties.

They are seemingly happy to sell our dominance to protect their own misplaced egos.

We are teetering on the brink of heading into the wilderness.

But when I say teetering on the brink, I mean that right now, this is still salvageable.

There is still time to put Celtic on the course and trajectory it should be on.

The problem is that the people who have control over the club have no ability to pull it out of the death spiral it finds itself in at the moment.

Because they are the ones who put it in that very death spiral.

To put that into perspective, we just have to look at the what we are heading into today, and what they are presiding over.

We are entering into a match against our fiercest rivals, and for the first time since the old club died, not a single Celtic fan is confident that we can win this fixture.

Yesterday, we watched Wilfried Nancy go on a seven minute rant about how the media, and everybody else besides, is killing him.

To Wilfried Nancy, I’d say this, losing five out of seven fixtures is what’s killing you.

Nothing else.

Celtic rarely loses five fixtures in a season, let alone in just over a month.

This is uncharted territory in the 21st century for our club.

Most Celtic supporters born on or before the turn of this century have never experienced something like this.

Wilfried Nancy would do well to understand exactly what it is he’s dealing with here.

But that’s the problem, he actually seems oblivious to it.

He went on yesterday about not having four or five weeks of a pre-season.

Did Martin O’Neill have four or five weeks of a pre-season?

Did Martin O’Neill not hand the club over to Wilfried Nancy with seven out of eight wins in the bag, and Celtic right back in the title race?

Nancy chose to break what wasn’t broken thereafter.

He did this because he naively believed his football philosophy could be super-imposed onto a squad that had been used to playing 4-3-3 for years.

Proof positive that this was a fallacy culminated in being soundly beaten in every department by a Motherwell side put together with a fraction of the resources available to our club.

That should have signalled the end for Nancy.

Yet instead, we were subjected to a pity party in yesterday’s pre-match media conference.

Poor me, said Nancy.

The Celtic board, shockingly enough, has been unavailable for comment throughout all of this.

Yet, they continue to back a manager with the worst managerial record in the club’s history.

Yes, this board actively sabotaged and drove a winning manager out of the club, and replaced him with a complete rookie.

They took a gamble, and it has exploded in their faces.

But they continue to back this busted flush because not to do so, would mean admitting they got this spectacularly wrong.

That they would rather watch our club fall out of the title race to back this vanity project, epitomises our board’s utter incompetence in technicoulour.

We are now at juncture we have never been at before at Celtic.

Where in our board’s eyes, winning managers are toxic, divisive, misleading, and self-serving.

And losers must be backed at all costs.

Because what else could it be?

If we lose today against the Ibrox side, I have no doubt that the board will still fail to pull the plug on this shitshow.

The ultimate humiliation will not be enough.

Today is shaping up to be one of the worst Glasgow Derbies at Celtic Park in living memory.

On a day where we need the Green Brigade more than ever, their ban is still in place indefinitely.

Yet 2,500 bigots will be allowed into Celtic Park to pour their bile onto us for two hours?

Our own fans, who paid their season ticket money, are banned, while these neanderthals are welcomed and permitted to subject us to their poison at their liberty.

You genuinely could not make this up.

If, as many of us expect, the Ibrox side lords it over us, we will have to listen to the toxicity of their fans for the entire afternoon.

This is what the Celtic Board wants.

What we will experience this afternoon, every single aspect of it, is down to them.

It has nothing to do with the Celtic support.

Even if we somehow manage to win today, all it does is prolong the inevitable.

Wilfried Nancy is not going to turn this around now.

Not unless he has a healthy dose of pragmatism, which after yesterday, I doubt we’ll ever see.

What a sorry state our club is in going into 2026.

I wish I could inject some positives into this, but there are none at the moment.

A victory today would represent a small chink of light.

But that’s all it would represent.

After what I witnessed on Tuesday night, I fear for this afternoon.

Whatever happens, I’ll see you on the other side.