'Board failings laid bare by Celtic's latest self-inflicted Champions League calamity'

Celtic's lack of quality and experience was exposed as Midtjylland progressed after extra-timeSNS

Celtic's lack of quality and experience was exposed as Midtjylland progressed after extra-time

By Tom English
BBC Scotland

It's safe to say Celtic won't be inviting the Amazon Prime cameras into their inner sanctum for one of those footballing fly-on-the-wall documentary series' the channel produces so often.

A pity. The sight of board members running around with their trousers on fire might make for some light entertainment to contrast with the dull failure against Midtjylland on Wednesday.

One of the favoured definitions of madness is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

Celtic are the embodiment of that. As a football club they've now turned up unprepared for Champions League battles four seasons in a row, though this latest chapter is considerably the worst.

Before the Midtjylland game, you had the newly-installed Celtic manager, Ange Postecoglou, saying the club was flying by the seat of its pants. That was just the latest in a series of thinly-veiled messages to his board to get a move on in the recruitment stakes.

After the game, Postecoglou dispensed with the thin disguise and called out the people running the club. Two competitive games into his reign and already deep frustration is being played out in public. And no wonder. Celtic brought a pea-shooter to a gunfight in Denmark.

Jaw-dropping dip in quality & nous

The last time they played a Champions League group game was against Anderlecht at home in December 2017 - a 1-0 defeat that saw them finish with a single victory from their six games in what was, admittedly, a brutally-hard pool featuring Neymar's Paris St-Germain and Robert Lewandowski's Bayern Munich.

Celtic were coached by Brendan Rodgers then. In goal, they had Craig Gordon with a back four of Mikael Lustig, Dedryck Boyata, Jozo Simunovic and Kieran Tierney, three of of whom played at the Euros this summer.

In midfield, they had Scott Brown, Stuart Armstrong, Callum McGregor, James Forrest and Scott Sinclair and Moussa Dembele was up front. They had Odsonne Edouard, Kristoffer Ajer and Leigh Griffiths on the bench. Griffiths had scored 20 goals the season before for club and country, the famous 'invincible' campaign at Celtic Park.

Compare that team to the collection of players dumped out in Denmark. The drop-off in quality hits you square between the eyes. It's astonishing. Celtic finished a critical European qualifier with Scott Bain, Anthony Ralston, Stephen Welsh, Dane Murray and Adam Montgomery as their rearguard.

The biggest Celtic boffins would need to be deployed to figure out if there's ever been a more callow defence in their European history. To be fair to all of them, they competed hard.

They tried their hearts out. You couldn't fault their effort and nor could you point the finger of blame at them or their manager. They did their best and were all let down by what Celtic have become at board level.

The club's attempts to replace departed personnel has been scattergun in recent years. Documenting it, even in snapshots, tells you more than enough about what's gone on at Celtic Park.

Lustig was a huge presence for many years. He left in June 2019. Since then there's been a conveyor belt of right-backs, signings and loan deals, and none of them have stuck.

Cristian Gamboa, Moritz Bauer, Hatem Elhamed, Jeremy Toljan, Jeremie Frimpong, Jonjoe Kenny. A revolving door. They did great business with Frimpong, selling him for big money, the upshot being that Postecoglou felt Ralston was his best option against Midtjylland. Yet Ralston hasn't been an option Celtic have wanted to consider for years.

At left-back, also, Celtic have gone through the numbers since Tierney left for Arsenal. Emilio Izaguirre in his second spell, Boli Bolingoli, Greg Taylor and Diego Laxalt. Jonny Hayes played left-back for a time too. They signed American Andrew Gutman on a three-year deal, then loaned him out to Charlotte Independence, then Cincinnati, then sold him to Atlanta United.

Celtic reportedly got around £11m for Frimpong which, give or take a couple of million, covered the fees paid for Carl Starfelt, Kyogo Furuhashi, Liel Abada, Osaze Urhoghide and Liam Shaw - combined. They also made £25m clear profit on Tierney. They'd need the best lawyers in the land to argue the Tierney money has been invested wisely.

In the 2018-19 season, Rodgers' last at the club, Ajer played 45 games, Boyota played 32, Simunovic played 30 and Filip Benkovic 27. That's a completely different level of centre-half than they had on Wednesday, a jaw-dropping fall-off in nous.

Shane Duffy's expensive loan deal was supposed to address that, but was a dismal flop. They've been unlucky with the long-term injury to Christopher Jullien, but the clue there is in the 'long-term'. They knew Jullien wasn't going to be anywhere near ready for the Champions League qualifiers.

Disaffected fanbase deserves respect

Since Celtic last made it to group action, Viktoria Plzen, Young Boys, Brugge, Genk, Midtjylland, Krasnodar, Rennes, Ferencvaros, Istanbul Basaksehir and others from outwith the old reliables have made it through.

Celtic are now further away than they've been in a terribly long time. Four successive failures, but the previous three almost pale into insignificance compared to this week's self-inflicted calamity.

It was like a watching the sequel to a movie with no new plot and the same tiresome ending.

They're a club in transition but, as Postecoglou keeps pointing out, the end product is painfully slow in coming. As was his appointment in the first place.

Celtic delayed in dealing with the Neil Lennon situation, then delayed again when waiting for Eddie Howe.

That 100-plus days spent twiddling their thumbs as the blessed Eddie figured out what he wanted to do created a chronic time pressure. The catalogue of bad decision-making reached a crescendo at that point. Howe should have been set a deadline to make up his mind.

Instead, he U-turned late and Celtic haven't had enough hours in the day since then. They sacrificed their Champions League season in an ill-fated pursuit of a guy whose agent had announced he wasn't going anywhere until the summer at the earliest. Madness.

Starfelt is coming to bolster the defence and others will follow, but it's too late for the Champions League. Again. You have to ask what is Celtic's plan here.

The chairman, Ian Bankier, and majority shareholder, Dermot Desmond, don't talk about the club to the media. That's their prerogative, but they've got a fanbase that's increasingly disaffected and some respect needs to be paid there. A schmoozing session with fan media ain't cutting it this time.

'Catastrophic to me, means the end. This is far from the end'

In the last two-and-a-half years they've brought in around £56m in transfer fees (principally on Tierney, Frimpong and now Ajer) and have so far spent around £30m. That's not counting loan fees for Duffy, Laxalt, Kenny and Mo Elyounoussi just last season.

Their spending will increase in the weeks ahead and Celtic will surely look a lot different then than they do now.

But having signed poorly in recent times is there much confidence in the regime to suddenly start signing well? There's still no sporting director, still no head of recruitment, still no new coaching assistants for Postecoglou. They don't have enough foundations in place.

When Postecoglou said on Wednesday that he didn't do a good enough job to convince "people" to bring in more players, more quickly, who are the people he's referring to?

"Maybe I wasn't clear enough," he said, though you'd need to living on the moon not to notice that Celtic need reinforcements. He pointed out that he tried to be as forceful as he could be.

Whether he was talking about the chief executive Dominic McKay, Bankier or Desmond, or all of them, he sounded like an exasperated manager.

He didn't like the description of the Champions League exit as catastrophic, but for a club that sees itself, somehow, as a Champions League club then a fourth straight failure is a a horrible event.

The harsh reality of his plight is that if things don't improve against Hearts on Saturday then those questions will be launched at Postecoglou all over again.

"That's pretty strong language," he said in response to some of the criticism.

That inquest was just a warm-up routine compared to what will happen if the people above him don't get their act together and give the man a chance.

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