It reveals everything about the current fragility of Celtic supporters that they made the early-morning journey to Ibrox on Sunday with fear in their hearts. Rangers with the managerial crisis. Rangers with the 6-0 away defeat in Europe. Rangers without a league win.
A 0-0 draw in the Old Firm was widely viewed as just about enough, if hardly appetising. That too damned with faint praise: Celtic had no shot on target in the first half of a league match for the first time in approaching eight years and have now drawn their three most important games of this nascent season 0-0. Excitement? Everybody is just getting through this grimly.
For the several hundred Celtic supporters who travelled to Kazakhstan last midweek, a message of mutiny soundtracked their worst European elimination since the 5-0 Champions League qualifying defeat to Artmedia Bratislava in 2005.
A small allocation at Ibrox meant that “Sack the board” would never be heard on Sunday, but no fear: the internet carries the same message. Celtic have become a club in turmoil with every strand disconnected.
This summer always felt significant. Celtic had won the Scottish Premiership by 17 points and with a goal difference of +86, comically dominant domestically. But that dominance only made their European performance more of a bellwether for the health of the club and the relationships within it.
With only one qualifying round to negotiate, for which Celtic were seeded and drew the lowest-ranked possible opponent, a golden chance to seize around £40m of prize money presented itself. That was the plan.
When transfer business was slow in July, it was perceived as a calculated gamble: you can sell the project better to prospective signings with Champions League football secured and there is typically better value to be found as the window progresses.
Celtic would hardly be the only club to wait until the second half of August to get busy, but it felt like an extraordinary risk given the money in the bank and the punishment for missing out.
The subsequent failure is multifaceted and significant. Brendan Rodgers must share the blame: the failure to score a single goal in 210 minutes against a team ranked 315th in Europe was catastrophic and overshadows the success of last season, when Celtic finished above Manchester City in the league phase of the Champions League and only lost 3-2 to Bayern Munich in the knockouts.
This was always a danger with Rodgers, whose return to Celtic after his Leicester City sacking felt like an implicit acceptance of flatlining. As Leicester supporters discovered, when the football gets slow and the team lacks a potent, in-form striker, it becomes aesthetically unappealing and too easy to blunt. Kairat Almaty blunted it.
But even before Kazakhstan, Rodgers had been signposting his own fears with little subtlety.
“We have gaps in the squad that are very clear,” he said on 3 August. “I have to convince the board to really push to get the players in that we really need. Clearly, I’m not doing that job well enough, but I will continue to push and hopefully we can get the players in by the end of the transfer window.”
The Champions League debacle created an unhelpful catch-22: Rodgers believed that he had been let down by summer activity that would have made qualification far more likely; the board believed that Rodgers had underperformed and so made transfer activity harder through the failure to qualify. Supporters in Almaty made it clear who they felt merited the most censure.
Then came the second failure. The supposition – among most supporters and the manager – was that Celtic would react to criticism with a busy end to the transfer window.
The hunt for a centre-forward led them to Kasper Dolberg, who seems set to join former club Ajax, and Chelsea’s David Fofana, who preferred Charlton (although that loan move fell through). Celtic’s board seem to lowball for players as if mid-August was mid-July and then act surprised when deals are not forthcoming.
With Adam Idah sold to Swansea City for £6m on deadline day, Celtic barely have a first-team striker at all. Even if the target list changed after dropping into the Europa League, that does not explain nor justify inaction. Celtic sold Kyoto Furuhashi in January and didn’t replace him. They have now sold Idah and Nicolas Kuhn and not adequately replaced either man. Jota will be injured for much of 2025-26.
The accusation is twofold: 1) that Celtic are grossly lacking ambition having made profit in their last three summer transfer windows, including the one just gone, with little obvious improvement to the first team, and 2) they now face the prospect of a Europa League campaign (Roma, Bologna, Feyenoord and Braga among others) far more arduous than it should have been due to the lack of signings. Rodgers is managing with an arm tied behind his back.
It places Celtic in a football no-man’s land. They will likely be far too good for anyone else domestically (Celtic have conceded one goal this season, when they were 4-0 up against Falkirk in the League Cup).
They are a best price of 1/7 to win the title, given Rangers’ own travails. In Europe, they are outsiders to make the top eight of a group stage in a competition that Celtic fans didn’t even expect to fall into.
At any other club at any other time, this might have been spun as part of a process. You miss out on the Champions League and so you effectively accept a fallow season, aiming to win everything domestically but keeping your transfer powder dry for 2026, when you can spend double.
That doesn’t really apply here for two reasons. Firstly, next summer will be harder, not easier – buying from a position of strength is easier than from a position of weakness. Rodgers, who currently seems entirely fed up, is out of contract next summer and will surely be seeking a second escape down south before then or when the deal expires. Right now, few supporters would blame him.
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Secondly, an air of mutiny has entered the mindset of Celtic’s support. Blog posts and podcasts on Tuesday morning were rife with accusations that ranged from distaste to cowardice.
Those who had been giving Celtic chairman Peter Lawwell and chief executive Michael Nicholson some grace until the window closed were fuelled by righteous indignation at being let down. The reported pay rises both received are an extra bitter pill to swallow.
Celtic are now in a mess. The players don’t seem to know what the manager is asking of them or how to create clear chances. The higher-class striker to finish those chances does not exist.
Supporters felt let down by Rodgers for the results against Kairat but reserve far more anger for those above him. Rodgers himself seems deeply disillusioned with the support he has had from upstairs.
This summer at Parkhead was supposed to be the start of something. Unfortunately, it was merely a wasteland of squandered opportunities and failed chances to kick on. It may well have lasting consequences for those shouldering the responsibility for failed leadership.
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