One of the challenges inherent to decision making once mass hysteria triggers amidst the fog of war is to maintain strategic perspective. Given where events are within the Celtic universe as the calendar turns from 2025 to 2026, it is a good time to revisit a long-term perspective.
Entering the 2025-2026 season, my concern was that Celtic faced a likely inflection point - kind of like an important decision within a choose-your-own-adventure book, which was as style of children’s literature popular in the 1980s when I was a kid.
A quick summary of what I foresaw:
Celtic faced with material known and controllable risks dealing with a manager in the last year of his contract, an antiquated football operating model, a thin squad with a poor underlying level of quality, and a controlling shareholder seemingly resistant to modernising.
Hearts, Hibernian, and Rangers in the nascent stage of modernising using different operating models pushed through new ownership participants.
A club and country club coefficient backdrop poised to shift in an extremely negative way against Scottish clubs and Celtic in particular.
A return to the perils of a Champions League qualifier.
I could delve into more and deeper into each, but have written and spoken about these at length since February 2025.
I have used circumstances at Anderlecht within Belgium over the last decade as an analogy for what has unfortunately been my base case for Celtic over the next 3, 5, and possibly 10 years. As I often say, analogies can be useful when introducing something that is unfamiliar.
For example, if I was to meet someone who had never seen a zebra before and was not familiar with the animal, I could describe it as being “like a horse.” They are obviously two distinct animals with very important differences, but the comparison gets the picture to within the directional neighborhood.
A primary variable within my base case outlook was whether the plethora of risks facing Celtic this season would trigger a kind of “avalanche” like what happened in 2020-2021, and then what the details of the avalanche would look like.
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