Chris Sutton has damned the operation at Celtic today by saying that there is not an area of the club that is functioning. That echoes what we have been writing for many, many, many, many, many months now, so obviously I could not agree with him more.

And this morning Paulina wrote a piece arguing that somebody inside the club needs to step up and show leadership.

I want to talk about the people inside the club right now.

Because I know a little more about what happened over the summer than I am entirely comfortable with. And believe me, if even half of what I have heard is true, and I believe the overwhelming majority of it is, then things are even worse than they appear on the surface.

Now, we can all spread speculation and rumour. We can react to every story that pops up and every single WhatsApp message that goes viral.

But there are no secrets inside the club itself.

Whatever is true in those viral messages, whatever parts of them are accurate, everybody inside Celtic already knows what is going on. This club is not made up of little isolated islands where ignorance is bliss.

If the worst of what we are hearing is factual, then the club is in meltdown. And everybody inside it knows what is really going on.

If the dressing room is split, that is known from the dressing room all the way up to the boardroom. If the manager is getting things completely wrong, nobody inside Celtic is ignorant of that fact.

If there are divisions about who really does what, whose authority should be followed at coaching level or on the touchline, then the whole club is operating in full awareness of these things.

And even without any inside knowledge of what happened over the summer, it is painfully obvious just from looking at the situation that, as bad as things appear on the surface, they are much worse underneath it.

What we are seeing is not symbolic of a club that is unified, with everyone acting in its best interests. We are seeing, in fact, quite the opposite.

We are seeing people operating at such cross purposes to one another that it is a wonder the train is still on the tracks at all.

And we always mistake the silence from Celtic as contempt.

But what if it is worse than contempt? What if it is actual paralysis? What if the whole club is frozen in place, with nobody wanting to take accountability and nobody wanting to take responsibility? What if it is just a group of people all looking at one another and saying: “Do you want to handle this?”

You know, one of the best shows ever made for television is The Wire.

And for those who watched it closely, one of the most striking things about it is that life on the street is almost a relative picnic compared with working inside the police force, the school system, City Hall, down on docks or in the newspapers, all of which is explored over its five remarkable seasons.

Because on the streets, the hierarchy is known. The rules are crystal clear. Everyone understands the consequences of stepping outside those rules.

Street life is brutal, but it is simple.

It is when you get inside the major institutions that are supposed to govern the city that you see paralysis, egotism, pettiness, laziness and the true face of what corruption actually looks like, and the thing a lot of people forget is that many of the people who built that show had direct experience of those worlds. They were not simply inventing some fantasy version of institutional life. They were writing the real and the raw.

They were telling you that these are dysfunctional institutions, places where most people are not acting out of altruism or idealism, but are simply harried, exhausted bureaucrats trying to get through another day, another week, another month, another year closer to the pension.

It is a brutal way to look at institutions that are supposed to serve the public good. But we forget sometimes that institutions are filled with ordinary people.

And for ordinary people, it is often easier to look the other way, keep your head down and pretend that the chaos around you is not really happening. That is why I can understand how a football club like Celtic could fall into institutional paralysis.

Because there is no standard being set from the top. There is no example to aspire to. There is no accountability.

Just a collection of people covering their own arses all day, every day.

When an institution gets like that, people are not only unwilling to take on extra responsibilities or anything that falls outside their narrow remit.

Some of them are not even willing to commit completely to the job they are supposed to do in the here and now.

They look around at an institution rotting from the inside, full of people filling their pockets and delivering nothing, and they think: well, this is just how it runs. And some of them probably convince themselves that it runs perfectly well.

There is money in the bank. There are trophies in the trophy room. The team on the pitch is getting the job done more weeks than not.

That is when you start getting into the territory of victimless crime.

And I am not saying that anyone at Celtic is committing a crime. I am saying that it becomes very easy to go into your job during the day and phone it in. It becomes easy to let things slide. It becomes easy to take shortcuts.

Because nobody really suffers anyway, right?

The team is still winning, and that is all people care about.

But of course, what eventually happens is that the institution fails on so many levels that it all comes crumbling down, and one of the ways this happens is because people are under the mistaken impression that the team props the structure up.

If only it were true. It’s actually the other way around. All those various components and parts are supposed to be propping up the team.

It is not the team’s results that are holding everything together. It is an imperfect, failing system that has been creaking under the weight of the stresses being put on it. And once it goes, it all goes.

The team is the central hub of all of this, and the team only functions if the rest of the machine functions. You start breaking parts in one section of the machine and it is the central component that suffers.

If the scouting department is not doing its job, then the new players coming into the team to replace those who leave will be inferior players.

If the coaching system is not coaching properly, then none of the machine is going to function at all.

If those who are supposed to lend support and encouragement to the team are undermining the manager at every stage, then of course things are going to break down in the place that matters most.

And what we are seeing at Celtic is not the breakdown of one component. It is a multifaceted failure. It is multiple components fizzing out or blowing up all at once.

Those inside the structure can point to the success of the team and think that guarantees them an easy life. But in fact, every failure, every time they’re asleep at the wheel, every time they are lax in completing a task, they jeopardise the success the whole system is built to secure. And that impacts everything.

And if nobody cares in one part of the operation, nobody is going to care in another.

If there is no leadership from the top and there is no set direction, then none of the departments are going to function properly.

Here is the problem.

Even if you brought in somebody capable of fixing their own little section, if someone came in and said, “The scouting system is not working. I am going to repair that,” then great. That is excellent. That is a step forward.

But it does not fix all the other parts of the machine.

And it is only going to take the complete failure of one of those components to bring the whole machine to a shuddering halt.

In order to fix this, the change has to come from the very top of the house.

It has to result in systems rebuild, a retooling of the whole machine so that it starts to function again.

And I do not know how many times we have highlighted the horrible fact that so much of this machine simply does not function as it should.

The academy structure. The scouting structure. The ability of those at executive level to actually close deals. The second-guessing of the manager, however that happens. The disconnect between the man in the dugout and his coaching staff. The substandard level of some of that coaching staff. Hiring practices which do not appear to be based on merit.

And on and on and on.

Multiple points of failure, all impacting directly on the functioning of the central component: the team on the pitch.

And we wonder how we got here.

It is not hard to understand when you look at the bigger picture.

One guy could fix all of this tomorrow, of course, if he wanted to run this club in a professional manner.

He is the last person who is going to do it, because he does not know how. As hard as that is for some people to believe, he does not know how.

Dermot Desmond is not a football man.

He does not know how to run a football club. The skill set that got him to where he is is an entirely different one from the skill set needed for this.

Worse than that, I do not think he has any real interest in making it run properly. He wants it to run the way he wants it to run, and he thinks it is running just fine.

When this machine finally breaks down, it will be his fault.

Of all the departments that fail, of all the people who are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, the blame for all of it will ultimately lie with him.

Because it is he who has allowed this culture of unaccountability and responsibility-dodging to grow and grow until it is suffocating the life out of this club.

And until he goes, I do not know how we fix this.

All I know is that this is how we got here, and things do not simply get better once you are here. Not until people start putting them right.

Sutton’s observation matters precisely because this is no longer about identifying one broken part and replacing it. This is not one bad transfer window. It is not one failing scouting department. It is not one manager getting his tactics wrong.

It is not one executive failing to close deals, one coach doing a substandard job or one board member making bad decisions. It is what happens when enough individual failures are allowed to coexist for long enough that they eventually become the system itself.

You can change the manager. You can change the scouts. You can change coaches, executives and recruitment personnel.

But unless somebody changes the culture which allowed all those things to fail simultaneously, eventually you will end up right back here again.

That is what institutional paralysis looks like. Everybody knows there is a problem. Everybody can see the machine shaking itself apart. Everybody understands that eventually something is going to blow. But nobody wants to be the person who reaches for the switch.

And at Celtic, the one man with the power to order the complete rebuild appears to believe that the machine is functioning perfectly well.

That is not merely another problem. That is the problem from which all the others flow.

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