For at least the second AGM in a row, the Celtic Trust has put forward a very simple proposition which the Board of Directors has rejected.

And that is to publish a five-year strategy.

Everyone knows how I feel about this.

I’ve written about it often enough. I don’t believe there is a strategy. I don’t believe these people have a coherent thought in their heads about where Celtic should be five years from now, what the football operation should look like, what our European objectives should be, how the club should grow commercially or what success beyond simply staying ahead domestically is supposed to look like.

Worse than that, I don’t think there is anyone at Celtic who wants to take accountability.

Because publication of a five-year strategy would first require there to actually be a five-year strategy. Number one, I don’t think there is. And number two, even if there was, somebody would have to put their name to it.

Somebody would have to own it.

There would have to be targets. There would have to be objectives. There would have to be boxes which could subsequently be checked, or left unchecked.

And then, five years from now, or perhaps considerably sooner, supporters and shareholders would be able to look at what had been promised and compare it with what had actually been delivered.

That is accountability.

And I don’t think anybody inside Celtic Park wants any part of it.

There is, of course, a third possibility. Perhaps there is a strategy. Perhaps they know exactly where they want this club to go. Perhaps the problem is that the strategy itself would be so unacceptable to the average Celtic supporter that they dare not publish it for fear of creating an even bigger backlash.

Those, as far as I can see, are the alternatives.

There is no strategy.

There is a strategy, but nobody wants to be held accountable for delivering it.

Or there is a strategy which they know supporters would reject if they ever saw it.

None of those possibilities should reassure anybody.

And the circumstantial evidence in favour of the first conclusion, that there simply is no strategy, is so overwhelming that I genuinely don’t know how anyone can dispute it.

You only have to look at the man sitting in the dugout.

Martin O’Neill was brought in as an interim manager not once, but twice last season. That is almost perfect proof of a club making things up as it goes along.

And now they’re talking about retaining him for another year?

Why not another year after that? And another after that? As long as they can keep him propped up in a chair, presumably.

The fact that we’re even in this situation tells you everything. There should have been a substantial managerial search taking place last season, long before the campaign ended, so that when the season was over Celtic were in a position to announce the next phase.

Instead, here we are. Again.

That is not strategic thinking. It is the absence of strategic thinking.

We’ve gone over the incoherence of the team-building process over and over again. You cannot seriously believe that signing an £11 million player whom we do not appear to know how to utilise can be part of some joined-up, fully thought-through football plan.

There is no evidence of better supporter engagement either.

What we have instead are pitiful little games of divide and conquer, satisfying one constituency while pissing off another.

That is what divide and conquer has always done, and it is also the ultimate flaw in its usefulness to any regime trying to cling onto power. Ultimately, you look around this club and you do not see any real evidence that a plan is being followed.

Everything is temporary. Everything is short-term. Everything is make-it-up-as-we-go-along. Everything is about getting through the next day, the next week, the next month.

That is not a plan, and there is no way to dress it up as one.

If things look disorganised, if they look fly-by-night, if they look scattershot, that’s because they are. It is not because there is some hidden set of connecting threads which somehow links all this together.

That is wishful thinking.

No such connecting thread exists.

And even if there was evidence that some kind of strategy was being followed, this is not a boardroom or an executive structure that looks as though it has been built with accountability in mind.

A company can be financially successful and still be failing in other crucial ways.

A company which has managed to alienate its customers to the extent this Celtic board has is one where, under normal circumstances, people would have paid a price.

A company with a chief executive so anonymous as to be virtually non-existent is one where questions would have been asked at the highest level.

A company with an interim chairman acting as the mouthpiece for a board which supporters believe has dissembled, contradicted itself and misled them is one where accountability would normally follow.

Then add repeated failures to qualify for the Champions League, repeated failures in transfer windows and communication problems so severe that even when the club attempts outreach, supporters do not trust the motives behind it and do not believe the assurances being offered.

That is what a failing leadership structure looks like.

And if real accountability existed at Celtic, people would have paid a price for those failures.

So, in those circumstances it is very easy to believe that, even if a strategy document does exist, nobody wants it published because nobody wants their name attached to it.

Because once your name is on it, you own it. You own the targets, the deadlines, the promises and, ultimately, the failures.

If those objectives are not met, supporters no longer have to ask some vague question about who was responsible.

There would be names. There would be people who had signed off on the plan. There would be people whose performance could be measured against it.

And suddenly the clamour for accountability would have somewhere very specific to go.

At a club where accountability is already virtually non-existent, it is very easy to believe that any strategy which does exist is being kept out of sight precisely because nobody wants to be responsible for either its implementation or its failure.

And then there is the third possibility. The one so dark that it is almost inconceivable that it could be true. Almost.

Not impossible. Not under this Board of Directors.

And that is the possibility that a strategy does exist, but that it is so bad, so limited and so detrimental to the ambitions of Celtic supporters that they dare not publish it.

I don’t know what that strategy would be. I don’t know how it would work. I don’t know how it would be implemented. I can scarcely imagine what it would look like.

Unless, of course, it was a strategy based almost entirely on maximising returns while identifying the minimum level at which Celtic can function, remain commercially successful and still sell tickets.

Although why any football board, and any group of so-called Celtic men, would ever want to run this club at subsistence level while continuing to make money and fill the stadium is beyond me.

And I genuinely do not understand why that would even be a better business model than simply putting a winning, ambitious football team on the pitch.

So, I keep coming back to the first two explanations.

Either this club has no plan.

Or it has one, but nobody wants to attach their name to it in case it fails.

That does not necessarily mean any hidden plan would be ambitious. It could very well contain elements of the third possibility. Perhaps nobody wants their name on it because it is a horror show. Perhaps because it is low quality. Perhaps because it is low ambition.

All I know is that yet another attempt by supporters to get some clarity about where this club is going has been met with blank resistance.

No explanation offered. Nothing encouraging suggested. Just a flat refusal to do something which is commonplace across major institutions.

Serious organisations publish strategies. They tell stakeholders what they are trying to achieve.

Some football clubs are so proud of their medium-term plans that they devote sections of their websites to explaining them, measuring progress and highlighting where expectations have been met or exceeded.

And from a public-relations perspective, why wouldn’t you?

What better way is there to communicate with supporters than to show them where the plan is on course, where targets have been reached, where expectations have been beaten and where progress is being made?

Governments publish manifestos for much the same reason. They want to return to the electorate later and say: we promised this, this and this, and here is what we delivered.

Of course, governments do not fulfil every manifesto commitment.

Circumstances change. Some promises have to be altered. Some targets are missed. Some ideas turn out not to work. That is the cost of doing business.

There is no serious reason not to publish a plan merely because you are concerned you might fail to hit every target. If a strategy exists and they are refusing to publish it simply because they are afraid of being judged against it, then that is gutless.

And if a strategy does not exist, then what the fuck are our Board of Directors doing all day, every day, except maintaining?

And as I’ve said before, we all know how maintenance ends when it becomes the objective instead of progress.

The world reshapes itself around you.

Other organisations move. Other clubs modernise. Other markets change.

And eventually you find yourself facing circumstances you neither control nor know how to accommodate.

That is what I fear is happening here.

This is not some minor administrative issue. This is not supporters asking for a glossy brochure filled with corporate buzzwords.

This is supporters saying: tell us that you know where you want Celtic to go.

Tell us that there is an objective. Tell us there is a route. Tell us somebody is responsible for delivering it. That is a minimal requirement of good governance. And they refuse to do it.

The only question is why.

And as I said at the start, none of the three possible explanations is remotely good.

None suggests that we are heading towards a positive outcome.

I continue to be astonished that, in the absence of a published plan, anybody can confidently insist that one exists. Especially when virtually everything we can actually see at Celtic suggests the opposite.

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