Wilfried Nancy highlights “chronic instability for years between the fans and the board” at Celtic. He isn’t wrong, is he?

And the truth shall set you free!

Look who has crawled out from under his rock to offer us his considered thoughts on Celtic Football Club.

Wilfried Nancy.

Eight games.

Two wins.

The shortest permanent tenure in the entire history of our football club.

A man who lost to Hearts, lost to Roma, lost a cup final to St Mirren, and did all three of them inside his first week in the job.

A man who then went to Tannadice and lost again, before getting himself beaten 3-1 by the Ibrox side on our own turf.

And now, from the safety of a French podcast, he wants to explain to us all where it went wrong.

The Record have carried the lot of it this morning, naturally.

Take a wild guess who he reckons is to blame.

It wasn’t him, obviously. It’s never them, is it?

Speaking to the Sur La Ligne podcast, Nancy told us his ending at Celtic became “irrational”.

He told us the “performance indicators showed we should have won games by two or three goals”.

He told us he was second in the league, and only three points off top, when they “decided we wouldn’t continue together”.

Performance indicators.

Performance indicators.

Give me a break.

We were there, Wilfried.

We watched it with our own eyes, week after week, and no amount of xG is going to convince 60,000 people we were secretly winning games by two or three goals.

Then he took a swing at the rest of Scottish football for good measure.

“The Scots aren’t quite ready to adapt. Mind you, I’m not generalising. I’m talking about the football side of things. They have a way of doing things, and they struggle a bit to change some of their ways of doing things, so I tried to implement it. There was some resistance, but that’s part of my story.”

Ah.

Of course.

The problem wasn’t the eight games.

The problem was that we were all too thick to appreciate the genius unfolding in front of us.

Resistance.

The man was at our club for the length of a bad head cold and he has us pegged as a nation of flat-earthers who couldn’t grasp his philosophy.

Nuff said.

And yet.

Buried in all of that self-serving guff, he said one thing that stopped me dead.

Here it is.

“So, the project appealed to me. I also knew there were many obstacles. There’s been chronic instability for years between the fans and the board.”

Chronic instability for years between the Celtic fans and the board.

Read that again.

Because a man who was here for eight games, with every reason in the world to blame anyone but himself, has walked away with the most accurate summary of this football club that any outsider has offered in a decade.

He isn’t wrong.

Is he?

That is the bit that should sting.

Not the “performance indicators”. Not the xG. Nor the wounded pride of a flop boss doing the rounds on a podcast to rebuild his CV.

The bit that should sting is that our dysfunction is now so obvious that a man passing through for eight games clocked it on his way out the door.

It isn’t a secret.

It isn’t an internal matter.

This is our brand now.

When a manager sits down to consider the Celtic job, this is what he is weighing up.

Not the 60,000. Not the history. It’s not even the European nights.

The chronic instability between the fans and the board.

And every one of them is hearing the same thing from their agent, who has been on the phone to Silent Mike and seen the operation up close.

Now ask yourself the obvious question. Whose instability is it?

Because I don’t remember the supporters selling 15 players in one window.

As I wrote this morning, Paolo Bernardo took that number to 15 out, 2 in, with Engels and Johnston still to go.

I don’t remember the supporters haggling over £257k with Paderborn while the Champions League qualifier sits a fortnight away.

I don’t remember the supporters appointing Wilfried Nancy in the first place.

That was them.

All of it was them.

The instability isn’t something that happens to the Celtic board, like the weather.

It is manufactured in the Celtic boardroom, quarter after quarter, and then handed to us to absorb.

We are not the unstable element in this equation.

In fact, we are the only part of it that has never once wavered.

We turn up and we renew.

We’re the one who fill the away ends.

We sing through the shambles.

And the reward for that loyalty is a fire sale, a threadbare squad, and a 75 year old man being asked to drive a f***ing Smart Car like a Honda Civic.

The tragedy is that Nancy has handed them a mirror, and not one of them will look into it.

Dermot Desmond won’t.

Michael Nicholson won’t.

Brian Wilson certainly won’t – he is far too busy telling us about “unity” to notice that a former employee has just described the exact opposite to a continental audience.

They will dismiss this.

They will file it under sour grapes from a man who won two games out of eight during his time at Celtic, and in fairness, most of what he said deserves exactly that.

But not this bit.

This bit is the truth, and it arrived from the one direction they never see coming.

When your worst ever manager is the one telling the world what is wrong with your club, and he’s right, you are in a very bad place indeed.

Chronic instability for years between the fans and the board.

He got one thing right in eight games.

Which, let’s be honest, is one more than this board has managed in five years…

And so it goes at Celtic.

We continue down the toilet.

World class in everything we do.

Maybe world class in shithousing your fanbase, yes?

And then some.

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