Celtic in their Alternative Universe

And so, at the start of this season they made some easy choices.

Contract for Marcelo Saracchi? No problem, we would never have won the league last season without him.

Kelechi Iheanacho. Same goes.

A replacement for Arne Engels? Well, we had a bid of £25m in the January transfer window. We had to reject that because we had no cover. But we damn well made his sure that his replacement was in the building before he was allowed to leave. Why wouldn’t we?

Now contrast that with the utter debacle that Dermot Desmond and Michael Nicholson inflicted upon us last night.

CELTIC FAIL TO PREPARE- WE KNOW THE CONCLUSION

We finished the most lucrative match in Celtic’s history with a team that included Luke McCowan, Liam Scales, Dane Murray, Tony Ralston, Seb Tounetki and a very out of sorts Reo Hatate. These are decent footballers and they gave of their best.

But they are simply not of the requisite quality to play in the Champions League, and they should be nowhere near a team with Celtic’s financial muscle. Their continued presence on Celtic’s payroll is the clearest possible indicator of the complete uselessness of Celtic’s executive and non-executive leadership.

So we failed. And, once again, we exit Europe’s most exciting and lucrative tournament to a team with less than half of the resources available to Celtic.

And, once again, the margin of failure was devastatingly small. Three quality additions at a relatively modest cost would have made all the difference.

We would even still have a surplus on this window. And we would have the marvellous prospect of Champions League football to sustain us through the cold Scottish winter.

So, let’s hear it for Dermot, Michael and the rest of the Board for their latest gut punch.

The Growing Roll of Dishonour

The defeat to LASK was more than an embarrassing result. It exposed the utter rottenness of the business model operated by Celtic for the last two decades. The very business model that Desmond sought to justify in his unhinged rant following the resignation of Brendan Rodgers.

Malmo, 

Maribor, 

Cluj

AEK Athens

Ferencvaros

Midtjylland

Kairay Almaty

And now LASK.

These are all teams with a fraction of Celtic’s resources. And unseeded against Celtic.

They have all denied the club – and its supporters – the sheer exhilaration of many Champions League nights under the floodlights.

One match does not prove that a club’s entire strategy has failed. But two decades of abject failure, losing to teams that we should be playing off the park, exposes the total incompetence of the Celtic Board.

Its often claimed that the Board are “smart business people”. 

That argument shouldn’t detain us for too long. 

What sort of smart business people would, year after year, throw away millions of revenue that is there for the taking?

They are failures who repeatedly manage to avoid accountability for their many fiascos.

A brutal assessment from Callum McGregor after Celtic’s Champions League exit.#BBCFootball pic.twitter.com/vM1qx0XKdk

— BBC Sport Scotland (@BBCSportScot) August 25, 2026

Somewhere in a Universe Far Far Away

So let’s return to our alternate universe. 

In that parallel planet the Board was shaken to the core by the fan protests that followed the Almaty debacle. It was too late to repair the fractured relationship with Brendan Rodgers and John Kennedy. But they realised quickly that they had lucked out with the O’Neill/Maloney/Fotheringham combination. 

There had been some talk of bringing in an eccentric French coach, believed to be the choice of Paul Tisdale. That was laughed out of the Board room by the wise heads on the Board who persuaded Desmond to appoint Martin and his assistants on a two year contract.  

They also managed to convince Desmond that Tisdale, the self-styled ‘football doctor’, was a spoofer who needed to be shown the road south. That happened on the day that Celtic beat St Mirren 7-1 in the League Cup Final, the first leg of a glorious treble.

We can dream………

Meanwhile Back on Planet Celtic Board

Losing to Kairat Almaty last season should have been the catalyst for change.

The Board should have done everything in its power to prevent a similar disaster.

Instead, they botched the appointment of a hapless and clueless Frenchman. 

They then had a wretched January transfer window. 

And, after an improbable title win, they delayed the re-appointment of last year’s successful management team. Valuable time was lost in preparation for the Champions League Play Off. 

Inexplicably Nicholson survived the Nancy debacle, having told the world that the clueless Frenchman was always his number one choice. And that ‘good things are worth waiting for’.

But even with this catalogue of miserable mismanagement a few small tweaks would have guaranteed Champions League football. Three judicious, modestly costed and timely signings would have made all the difference.

The Celtic Board – individually and collectively – should be in no doubt that they are regarded with contempt by all right-thinking Celtic fans.

And until the Board find a spine, send Nicholson back to his apparently stellar legal career and face down Desmond about his coercive control of the PLC then the contempt and loathing will only intensify.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Celtic have the revenue, support, history, and platform to compete effectively in Europe. You shouldn’t need to move to an alternate universe to see Celtic maximise their potential in Europe.

Ask Bodo Glimt or Sabah, the second best team in Norway and the champions of Azerbaijan, not WiFi passwords.

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