Celtic Are Broken and O’Neill Has No Answers: What That Means for Sunday’s Old Firm

Celtic are in trouble. Real trouble. Not the 'rough patch, they'll come good' kind. The kind where you watch a team play and genuinely struggle to identify what their plan is.

Back-to-back heavy defeats, five goals shipped against LASK, a shellacking at Ibrox, and now a 3-1 loss to Ferencvaros at home in the Europa League. That is not a blip. That is a pattern.

The Goals Are Leaking and Nobody Seems to Know Why

Three goals against Ferencvaros told you everything you needed to know about where this Celtic side is right now.

The first was soft. The second, just before half-time, was the kind of goal that well-organised sides simply do not concede. No urgency to win the loose ball, no strength in blocking the cross, no shape in the box. Hesitancy at every stage. Then Daniel Arzani, a former Celtic player of all people, waltzed through acres of space and put one in the top corner like he was in a training session.

Colby Donovan had pushed too high and could not recover in time. Arzani had all the time in the world. That is not bad luck. That is structural.

Celtic had 62.5 percent possession in the first half and still went in trailing 2-1. Dominating the ball means nothing when you cannot do anything meaningful with it. Safe passes, no vertical runs, no pressing triggers, no tempo. It meandered.

O'Neill's Personality Carried Celtic Once. It Is Not Enough Now.

Martin O'Neill has done this before. He came back last season to a mess and restored order. He made Celtic hard to beat again. Ferociously hard. Nobody beat them on the title run-in and that was all about grit, organisation and the force of his personality driving standards up.

That version of Celtic feels like a different era now.

His post-match comments after Ferencvaros were telling. Flat in tone, short on conviction, heavy on frustration. He spoke about psychological damage and the difficulty of low moments. He promised to get things together for Rangers. But he did not sound like a man who had found the answers. He sounded like a man still searching for the questions.

Camilo Duran, who looked sharp and eager when he first arrived in Glasgow, had eight touches in the opening half playing in his preferred position. Eight. He is a shadow of the player who seemed so enthusiastic just weeks ago.

Kasper Hogh cost £11 million and has scored in one of his eight Celtic appearances. A striker who put three past Olympiacos and two past Manchester City for Bodo Glimt now looks awkward, isolated and starved of service. O'Neill has not found a way to use him and that is a serious problem.

Callum McGregor, the heartbeat of this team for years, looks lost. When your captain and your totemic midfielder looks uncertain, that feeling filters through the whole squad.

What Sunday's Old Firm Means in Betting Terms

Rangers will be watching all of this very closely. They already put several goals past Celtic at Ibrox last weekend and now they get the chance to go to Celtic Park and really twist the knife.

We think Celtic are vulnerable. Their defensive shape is poor, their press is non-existent and their confidence looks shot. Rangers pressing high and hitting on the counter could cause real damage, exactly as Arzani's goal showed on Thursday night.

The 'Beware the backlash' narrative will be all over the coverage heading into Sunday, and Celtic at home in an Old Firm is never something to dismiss entirely. But right now the evidence does not support backing a Celtic side that has conceded freely in multiple consecutive games.

Rangers to score first, Rangers to win, and over 2.5 goals all look like angles worth considering. Celtic at anything short than decent odds to win feels risky given the form on display.

If Celtic are going to show us something, it needs to happen on Sunday. But backing a team to suddenly rediscover everything they have lost, against their fiercest rivals, on the back of this run, takes a leap of faith most punters should not be willing to make right now.

McGregor said the team is a little bit broken. He is right. And broken teams do not always fix themselves in a week.