There was a story being circulated last night, in part by the journalist Stephen McGowan, which relates to Shaun Maloney and the current situation around him.

According to McGowan, Maloney does not want to be Celtic’s assistant manager. He wants to be the club’s head of football operations, technical director, or whatever exact title McGowan uses in the piece.

And, according to that report, this is a source of some unhappiness for Maloney.

I do not know whether the story is true.

I know that things happened over the summer, some of which are in the public domain and some of which are not, which have complicated what would otherwise have been pretty reasonable working relationships.

But this would be a new wrinkle. An additional element. And not a welcome one.

Because there is something which clearly escapes some of the people at this club right now, and they had better start acclimatising themselves to the simple fact of it.

All their fates are intertwined. If the coaching staff are getting things wrong, that is on O’Neill too, because he went to bat for them.

If the board of directors thinks it can hide behind O’Neill and the coaching staff if this all goes sideways, it is wrong as well.

And if Maloney and Fotheringham believe they can simply skip out on their own responsibilities, they had better think again.

Nobody walks away from this with a position at Celtic Park, far less a more senior one, if everything hits the skids.

Their fates are tied up in the success or failure of this Celtic team. And if they have not realised that yet, they had better start realising it quickly. Because otherwise this is going to end in a very bad place for them.

I know there have been disagreements behind the scenes. I know that not everybody is on the same page. I know there are disputes over all sorts of issues, some operational, some personal. And you know what? I could not give a shit.

Everyone is in this together. We are all under fire. We are all taking the heavy artillery of the media and the club’s critics. And we are all going to be suffering if this season ends with a championship flag flying over Ibrox.

As I have said, the consequences of that do not stop at a single campaign. They roll over into the next one, and probably into the one after that.

If people think this is bad right now, I have news for them.

It can get a hell of a lot worse.

And in the event that it does, nobody’s reputation will survive. Nobody’s. As far as careers go, reputations go and legacies go, this is the zero-sum season. It either ends in victory or it ends in total defeat. Total defeat for everyone involved.

Nobody gets to crawl out of the rubble afterwards and pretend they were the sole voice of reason trying to prevent the disaster. Nobody gets to pretend that if only things had been done their way, everything would have worked out fine.

That is not going to cut it. It is not going to wash.

Anybody at Celtic who has been involved in this shitshow of a season is going to find that supporters react very negatively if they retain any job at all. Nobody is going to enhance their career on the back of a meltdown.

If Maloney is unhappy, I could not care less. Maloney is still drawing out of this club what ordinary supporters are putting into it.

So, his unhappiness, his frustration, if indeed this story is true, is about as important to me as what is happening on the dark side of the moon.

And I would imagine that almost every Celtic supporter feels exactly the same way.

It is dispiriting, at a time when demands are being placed on supporters to park their own issues with the club and unquestionably support people we know to be failing, to then see those inside the club act so profoundly selfishly in a scramble for status.

The guy in our debate the other day made a comment so profoundly dumb that I did not even address it. I did not feel I had to.

He talked about the sacrifices those running the club have made.

Let me tell you about sacrifices.

Sacrifices are people debating whether they can afford to attend games, scraping together the money to buy ticket packages for matches which the players, the manager and the club itself often look as if they do not give a fuck about.

Sacrifices are those people who have already bought tickets, already paid their money and are now contemplating the protest of not attending the games that remain in this competition, even though doing so will be profoundly painful for them.

It will feel to them like a personal betrayal of the club they love.

That is sacrifice.

And to see those inside the club disrespect that with the way they behave, with the appalling selfishness, to see them squabbling amongst themselves instead of getting their heads together and doing the best they can for the club, is truly shocking.

I said at the end of last summer that this board had crossed a line from which it could not return when it decided that it would not give Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers the resources he needed to do his job.

I said then that it was one of the most disgusting things I had ever seen, and that they had abrogated any right they had to consider themselves morally fit to lead this club forward.

How many other people at Celtic are acting selfishly right now? How many of them, as I said last night, are barely interested in the jobs they do or the roles they are supposed to be fulfilling? How many of them feel as if they are turning up simply to collect the pay cheque at the end of every month?

This club is rotting. And it is rotting from the inside.

The biggest threat to Celtic is inside Celtic’s walls.

The real damage being done to this club is not being done by some external foe, although that damage is certainly coming.

It is being done by people who claim to love it, but who have spent their careers taking out of it what fans have put in and now believe that this is their entitlement.

If Shaun Maloney wants to scrabble around for position and status, a better gig and a higher salary, he had better prove himself in the job he has. He had better make miracles happen, because that is the only chance he has of convincing any of us that he should even have a job at Celtic, far less a better one.

It is time everybody inside the club got a grip and put their egos aside and started to get familiar with the reality of where we are; if this goes down, they all go with it.

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