Anyone with a background in sales or marketing will tell you that there’s a science behind placing a product in the hands of a consumer. Timing always plays a part in sealing a deal.
This time last year, Celtic hit the button on their season-ticket renewal push on April 23. Three days earlier, Brendan Rodgers’ side had romped to a five-nil win over St Johnstone in the Scottish Cup semi-final.
Three days later, they would beat Dundee United at Tannadice by the same margin to claim a fourth successive title. Roll up, roll up.
Some things age better than others. The spiel Celtic used to persuade their fans to part with their hard-earned cash almost 12 months ago is not among them.
‘There are moments in football when your heart is filled with anticipation,’ it read.
‘When the future is unwritten and full of promise. That moment is now. We’re back, for the future.
Celtic players reflect on a disappointing day at Tannadice after losing their last league fixture
‘The future is bright for Celtic Football Club and we look forward to you joining us as we write the next chapter in the club’s history.’
Good luck to the individual tasked with penning this year’s pitch. As for the right time to try and pluck the heartstrings? Answers on a postcard. The judicious approach might be to rip the bandage off now and have it done with.
The fact is that while Martin O’Neill’s team aren’t yet out of the running in this title race, there is scarcely a slither of evidence to suggest that they can still pull this off.
We’re now more than 80 per cent of the way through this Premiership campaign. Notwithstanding the fact that Alistair Johnston and Arne Engels are set to return from injury, you’d need to suspend reality to make a case for Celtic retaining their crown.
Even with O’Neill at the helm, they are surely too weak, too inconsistent and already too far back to make up the ground.
Five points behind leaders Hearts and two off Rangers ahead of the weekend, Celtic — in their manager’s own estimation — would need to win each of their seven games to stand a chance. This is a side which has only won five consecutive matches once this season.
They’ll do well to keep their hopes flickering between Sunday’s trip to Dens Park and next weekend’s home match with St Mirren.
Even if they somehow pull that off, they’d need to go on a perfect run in the five post-split games. Stranger things have happened, but not too many.
Martin O’Neill has failed to spark the same run of results he managed in his first interim spell
After 31 games, they have accrued only 61 points. That’s 17 points worse off than at this stage last season, 13 away from what they had two years back and an astonishing 27 points shy of their 31-game tally in Ange Postecoglou’s second season.
Perhaps most damningly, they are six points off the number they had at this juncture in 2020-21 – the last time they failed to win the title.
It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the task they face. A defeat at Tannadice prior to the international break was the eighth of the season. Since the reward for a win became three points in 1994, no side has won the league while sustaining that number of losses.
The hole Celtic are in is now so deep that they’re doing well to see a shaft of daylight. And it’s entirely self-inflicted.
Fourteen months ago, as Rodgers’ side came within a hair’s breadth of eliminating Bayern Munich from the Champions League, a continuation of the club’s domestic dominance wasn’t even discussed. It was almost taken for granted.
The only pertinent question was whether Celtic could start to regularly trouble the latter stages of UEFA’s premier competition.
From that swashbuckling show in the Allianz Arena to the latest pitiful display on Tayside, the fall from grace has been extraordinary. It has not, however, come by accident.
When a club’s hierarchy fails in its duty to support the football department, there can only ever be one outcome.
Like the car owner who puts the wrong fuel in his vehicle, Celtic have spluttered and stalled their way through this campaign.
The board got away with it when they sold Kyogo Furuhashi to Rennes a year past in January without having a replacement waiting in the wings and didn’t heed the warning.
With Rodgers reminding them he was not a ‘maintenance man’, they flogged Adam Idah to Swansea and Nicolas Kuhn to Como.
Claudio Braga’s late leveller for Hearts against Celtic in January was a blow for the champions
With head of football operations Paul Tisdale pulling the strings, Shin Yamada, a striker who’d scored five times for Kawasaki Frontale the previous year, came in.
He didn’t score a single goal in his eight appearances in Glasgow — or even look like he was going to — and joined German second tier club Preuben Munster on loan in January. He’s yet to score a goal for them either.
Hayato Inamura, another Tisdale production from Albirex Niigata, also came, saw and offered zilch. The full-back, who Rodgers pointedly said wasn’t good enough, is now back on loan at Tokyo FC having made his one and presumably only Celtic appearance against Livingston.
No signing has summed up the incompetence of Celtic’s recruitment drive quite like Michel-Ange Balikwisha.
You can get a lot of diamonds in Antwerp for £4.5million. Celtic bought a winger with the heart the size of a pea and offered him a five-year deal. He’s not been seen since going through the motions against Auchinleck Talbot. He’s been a monumental waste of money.
With £65.4m in the bank prior to that Munich match, Celtic were in a position of extraordinary strength. Nine months on, having failed to consolidate, they were desperate.
Kelechi Iheanacho arrived as a free agent after the window had closed. Unsurprisingly, he’s been beset with injury.
Balikwisha has been a particularly poor signing, failing to shine against even Auchinleck Talbot
The theme of trying to pull a rabbit from the hat continued after Tisdale followed Wilfried Nancy out the door.
Like Iheanacho, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has pedigree. He was also without a club since leaving Besiktas last summer. After a bright start when he scored against Livingston on his debut in February, his time out has caught up with him.
The former England midfielder has still made more of an impact than Junior Adamu and Joel Mvuka. You might say that wouldn’t be difficult.
Adamu looks every inch a forward who’s scored three times in 49 appearances for Freiburg in the Bundesliga. Mvuka, a winger who’s on loan from Lorient, is simply miles away from the required standard.
In terms of recruitment, which might kindly be said to have been abysmal, perhaps the most damning indictment of all is to be found in the goal-scoring statistics; Johnny Kenny remains the club’s top scoring centre-forward in the league despite moving on loan to Bolton in January. You can’t win a title on that basis.
As they prepare to board their buses for the trip to Dundee on Easter Sunday — a city where their side has lost three time already — Celtic fans can only hope that they are about to witness the start of a sporting resurrection.
Deep down, most will feel that the script for this season has already been written. It’s certainly not the one they were promised.
