‘As broken as I have seen it’, leading pundit gives his opinion on Celtic at the moment and labels it a ‘cesspit’

Chris Sutton has looked at Celtic right now and used the word ‘cesspit’.

Not ‘a bit of a mess’ or ‘going through a sticky patch’.

A cesspit.

And you know what?

He isn’t too far wide of the mark.

You look at Celtic as a club and they’re as broken as I can remember

Here is what Sutton had to say on The Warm Up, as reported by the Scottish Sun:

“You look at Celtic as a club and they’re as broken as I can remember.”

“There has been mud thrown from all sides.”

“You’ve got the split at the top with Dermot Desmond and the fanbase, that’s wider than it was last season.”

“Celtic at this moment in time is a bit of a cesspit.”

“In truth, I don’t see things getting better, when you have one arm of the support on one end and the board at the other end. The anger between the pair is getting bigger. I don’t see that being resolved.”

That last line is the one that stuck with me.

Because a former Celtic striker, a man who has no reason to go easy on anyone, can’t see how this gets fixed.

And neither can I.

If the club is broken, the question is who fixes it

So let’s take Sutton at his word and say the club is broken.

How, and where, do we go about fixing it?

Because it’s all well and good pointing at the wreckage, but somebody has to start clearing it up.

It seems to me that the stumbling block to fixing anything at Celtic is Dermot Desmond.

Not the manager, not the players and not the fans standing in the rain at away grounds.

Desmond.

Which leaves him with two choices.

He can sell up his shares and allow people who actually have the best interests of the club at heart to run it.

Or he can decide to work with the fanbase and fix it himself.

That’s it.

There is no third door marked ‘carry on exactly as before and hope it blows over’.

To be honest, I think things are too far gone

Now, I’d love to tell you I believe in option two.

I don’t.

Sutton says that split between Desmond and the support is wider than it was last season, and I can’t think of a single thing that has happened since to suggest otherwise.

If Desmond remains in power, things are only going to get progressively worse.

Not a bit worse, mind you, but progressively worse.

And I don’t say that lightly.

Most fans are now of the firm belief that Desmond is not a fan at all.

Because if he was, he wouldn’t have allowed what has happened to this club to happen.

He seems hell bent on division and destruction, and none of this behaviour makes any sense.

You don’t build a business by telling your customers to get lost, never mind a football club.

It honestly looks like he’s putting Celtic on a path to destruction on purpose.

Having said that, maybe there’s another way of looking at it.

Maybe he’s just too old to be as heavily involved in Celtic as he still is.

Don’t take that as a cheap shot, because I mean it.

For his own good, and for the good of Celtic, it might be time to step aside.

As for his son, nobody is going to accept him

If the plan is for the next generation to take over, I’d give it up now.

Ross Desmond burnt his bridges with the fanbase at last year’s AGM.

Nobody is going to accept him in any capacity at this club.

And yet there he is, reportedly overseeing transfers.

Think about that for a minute.

A man with no football background that any of us can point to, deciding which players walk through the door at a club in the state Sutton has just described.

That is an alarming development in and of itself, because he is in no way qualified to do it.

It’s the cesspit in miniature, really.

The wider mood is the point

I’ll give Sutton this, he doesn’t just aim his comments at the board.

He talks about the players calling out tactics in public, and about Martin O’Neill leaving everything up in the air.

Fair enough, those are his opinions and he’s entitled to them.

I’d argue they’re symptoms rather than the disease, though.

When there’s no clear direction from the top, everybody below starts pulling in a different direction.

Players speak up because nobody is telling them not to.

The manager muses about his future because nobody is giving him a reason to stay put.

And the support splits in half because nobody in the boardroom is speaking for us.

Sutton also pointed out that on the face of things, Celtic are top of the league.

Which is true.

But a club can be top of the table and rotten underneath, and that’s exactly where we are.

Results can paper over the cracks for a while.

They can’t paper over a fanbase that has stopped trusting the people running the place.

So yes, Chris Sutton is right

I didn’t want to write this.

I’d much rather be spending the afternoon having a go at the Ibrox side.

But there’s no getting away from it.

The club is broken.

It is a cesspit.

And it won’t get fixed until the man at the top either sells up or finally starts listening.

I’m not holding my breath…

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