Chris Sutton has looked at the wreckage of Celtic’s last three matches and refused to let the manager carry the can – the real culprits, he says, sit in the boardroom.
Chris Sutton has named the Celtic board, not Martin O’Neill, as the source of the crisis engulfing the club, arguing that a summer of recruitment failure has left the manager fighting a battle he was never properly equipped to win. Writing via the Daily Record, Sutton put it bluntly: “Put bluntly, he’s been shafted.”
A week that laid everything bare
It has been a brutal seven days for Celtic. A 4-0 Champions League aggregate lead was thrown away in Linz, LASK completing a 5-1 aggregate win after extra time to send Celtic out of Europe’s top competition yet again. Then came the humiliation at Ibrox, a 3-0 League Cup exit without so much as landing a blow on theRangers, before Ferencvaros added a home defeat in the Europa League at Celtic Park.
Callum McGregor called the squad “broken.” Sutton agrees – but insists the damage was self-inflicted long before a ball was kicked this season, a point he’d already been making through the summer as the recruitment failures piled up unchecked.
Why this falls on the board, not the dugout
Sutton’s argument is straightforward: Martin O’Neill inherited a squad stripped of legs and balance without adequate replacements sanctioned. Arne Engels left and nobody with his athleticism arrived. Benjamin Nygren scores goals but doesn’t offer what Engels did in midfield, and it showed at Ibrox when Celtic were run over in the engine room.
Oliver Sorensen came in during the frantic closing days of the window – another arrival scrambled together rather than planned. That, for Sutton, is the real indictment. Celtic’s approach to the market has repeatedly resembled emergency surgery rather than considered strategy, a pattern laid out in detail in the club’s own transfer window crisis this year.
The numbers make it worse, not better
What makes this sting is the money sitting untouched. Celtic reported £67.4 million in cash at December 2025, alongside £14.1 million in accounting gains from player sales – resources that should have insulated the club from exactly this kind of squad thinness. Instead, the Champions League collapsed against LASK, the League Cup vanished at Ibrox, and Ferencvaros added insult at Celtic Park.
Dermot Desmond has sat on the Celtic board since 1995. Michael Nicholson has been chief executive since 2021. Brian Wilson remains interim chairman, and Chris McKay oversees the finances. Between them, according to readceltic.com, they must answer for a recruitment budget that never translated into a squad capable of surviving the moments that mattered most.
The counter, and why it doesn’t hold
Some will say O’Neill should have been firmer about who came through the door – Sutton concedes as much, noting the manager was more assertive on personnel first time around at the club. But that’s a fair criticism of style, not an excuse for the club’s failure to resolve key positions before the European qualifiers even began. The supporter unrest building around the board isn’t manufactured outrage – it’s the accumulated frustration of watching the same mistakes repeat themselves season after season.
Where it leaves Celtic
Sutton’s closing line cuts to the heart of it: “The biggest culprits will be the suits above him who have placed those in the dressing room into this needlessly perilous position.” That’s not tribalism, it’s a fair reading of a club with money in the bank and nothing to show for it on the pitch when it counted.
O’Neill and his players will take their share of responsibility for what’s gone wrong on the pitch, and rightly so. But the board built this squad, sanctioned this window, and left the manager short of the tools needed to compete on multiple fronts – and until Desmond, Nicholson, Wilson and McKay are made to answer for that, the same cycle will keep repeating. Mon The Hoops.
