BEING a football fan is a naturally agonising business at times, but the humiliation being felt by Celtic fans this week is generational stuff.
Throwing away a four-goal aggregate lead to crash out of the Champions League qualifiers has got to be one of the worst performances of any Celtic team ever.
There is no excuse for it on a practical level. The management of the team was abysmal and perplexing – individual performances even more so. In the words of captain Callum McGregor, the team got precisely what they deserved.
That being said, this being the sixth consecutive failure to qualify, and hot on the heels of Rangers’ failure to qualify for the Europa League, bigger questions ought to be asked not just of Celtic, but of Scottish football more broadly.
I don’t think another post-match autopsy of yet another Celtic European failure would really achieve anything. It was blatantly obvious what the issues were on the pitch to anyone with eyes, and the real problems are structural at heart.
It’s not that Celtic occasionally have a howler – that’s true of every team. It’s the increasingly uncomfortable gap between what they can do domestically and what they can do in Europe, and what the underlying reasons for that are.
The dominant forces in Scottish football should be capable of European success and however particularly bad this defeat was, it’s a pattern that is only destined to rinse and repeat unless something changes both at Celtic and across the domestic board.
Now, as a Celtic fan, did I take some measure of joy from Rangers failing to qualify for the Europa League? Of course I did. Even my dad, a staunch Rangers man who usually bites back, took it on the chin. Similarly, will Rangers fans have that same, unmistakable spring in their step this week?
Of course they will. My dad got in my car this morning and, giggling like a schoolgirl, asked me if I could pick him up at “five to four” this afternoon. A line he had clearly been gleefully rehearsing all night.
Rivalry is what it is, it’s the essence of the game in Scotland, but it would be stupid not to recognise that Scottish teams find themselves in somewhat similar boats.
The circumstances we’ve seen play out in recent weeks are just different examples of the exact same problems.
Our domestic league is nowhere near as competitive as it should be, and while it’s admittedly an enjoyable reality for a Celtic fan, it also works to our own detriment.
Last season had the entire country salivating at the mere sight of some real competition in the league title – competition that ultimately couldn’t catch up even at Celtic’s very worst.
That gap in both ability and resource creates a wider footballing ecosystem that is weak and stagnant and lacks real ambition.
If our domestic competition was capable of producing genuinely competitive and consistent quality, Europe would soon stop being the predictably unyielding experience that we seem to passively accept it as and start being an opportunity for Scottish football to level up in the way it’s capable of.
Being up against well-organised teams with less room for error and complacency is the kind of development Celtic – and the rest of the domestic league – desperately need if they want to make any serious shot at Europe in the future.
Instead, Celtic can underperform for months on end and be in absolute disarray and still walk away with the league title at the end of it all.
That’s not at all to imply that Celtic’s success isn’t deserved – we earn it fair and square every year and consistently prove ourselves to be the better team.
But because the conditions in which our domestic title exists are strangling the development of every team in it at every possible level. Is it really any wonder we’re all heading home from Europe with our heads in our hands?
Even on our way to Europe – and before the inevitable defeat seems to find us – our expectations are woeful. We treat qualification like it’s the ceiling instead of the floor and then we consistently fall short of getting there.
There’s nothing wrong with recognising progress or being realistic in our expectations, but for a country with Scotland’s relationship to football, we should be aiming for and should be reasonably able to achieve better than just good enough to scrape through the qualifying stages.
We have fans willing to travel to wherever beckons – stadiums that generate some of the best atmospheres in the world, footballing histories that are significant in European terms and some genuinely incredible technical ability.
All of it is consistently made smaller by an institutional lack of investment, youth development and strategic thinking that’s keeping us stuck in a mind-numbing loop of familiar Augusts.
I don’t say any of this either to escape what is an admittedly bleak reality for my own team. I’ll reiterate, our performance this week was atrocious to the highest possible degree.
And I don’t think Celtic can rest too comfortably on the wider limitations of Scottish football, however much there are real structural challenges at play.
Ultimately, we have more resources than any other club in the country and we have a responsibility to utilise that for our own improvement and for the furthering of our ambitions as a club.
Every year, the opportunity to do so passes us by in the very same fashion as it did the year before and the year before that. At some point, you just have to call it out for what it is: a complete failure by those who run Celtic to do their jobs.
If you want to be treated like a serious Champions League club, you need to act like one. That ambition can’t begin two weeks before the qualifying stages – it has to be embedded at a strategic level across every single dimension of your decision-making year-round.
Our failure is a direct consequence of the club’s chronic unwillingness to rise to that challenge.
This week’s result was uniquely Celtic, but it was also uniquely Scottish. So much of what we do well in football is failing to translate beyond the limitations of our own borders and the mismanagement of that success domestically, across the entirety of our game, is the catalyst for that failure.
We have all the ingredients to be something bigger and better, if only we’d stop standing in our own way.
