THERE is, of course, a poem by W B Yeats entitled Who goes with Fergus, but it is not the question currently being asked in the West of Scotland - who stays with him? is really what's engrossing our attention. Well, Jock Brown apart, who does? Not, certainly, the fleeing Dutchman who, Mr McCann informs us, was just about to be sacked when he beat his employer to the punch by resigning. Some members of the demoralised championship-winning team - there's an oxymoron for you - are also talking as though they might follow the disenchanted Dutchman out of Parkhead. Paul Lambert claims that he joined Celtic only because of Jansen and hints that there may be no compensating attraction to hold him. Reviewing his position, is how he ominously puts it. Just how many of this team-mates share this view remains to be seen.

So, who stays with Fergus? It seems such an intensely difficult thing to do - leaving appears to be the far easier option. Witness Macari, Burns, van Hooydonk, Collins, di Canio, Cadete, Hay, Jansen. It is already a formidable list and there seems no reason to disbelieve that it will continue to grow. There is a risk that they may become known as Teflon Celtic, since nobody (Jock Brown again excluded) seems to stick to them. The real test will, of course, be what the club's supporters (in McCann-speak, customers) decide to do. If they were to go in significant numbers, then even Mr McCann, so disdainful of what others say, might have to pause and think again. But even to suppose such a defection is to invite speculation concerning the extraordinary animus of a perhaps sizeable majority of supporters against the managing director - the aversion to Jock Brown is surely no cause for headscratching

- but why should Mr McCann be the target of such fierce vituperation?

Let us, to begin with, acknowledge his achievements, for they are far from trifling. The tread of the bailiffs was already on the stairs, the reek of repossession heavy in the air, when Mr McCann arrived, timeously as the Fifth Cavalry, to pluck Celtic from the brink of bankruptcy. He was hailed as a messiah, and an ecstatic support, seeking for so long a leader worthy of their devotion, showered money upon him, through the share issue and season tickets, asking him only to be the architect of their dreams. They cannot complain of having been completely deluded. A truly magnificent stadium is close to completion, 50,000 season tickets (it leaves Manchester United and Rangers trailing) have been snapped up, and for the first time in the club's history its commercial potential has been brought into some kind of accord with its footballing status. Why then, incredibly, barely two days after

the winning of a championship, so long and so vainly pursued, are there fans outside Celtic Park with banners inviting, demanding, pleading with, McCann to go - now. Have these people taken leave of their senses?

Not quite. They have simply fallen out of love. That marriage between McCann and the fans, made in Paradise and officiated over by Brian Dempsey, has suffered an apparently irretrievable breakdown. Love, says the cynic, is a temporary insanity curable by marriage. These supporters are well and truly cured. They have watched in disbelief and dismay as vows were broken and infidelities committed. The stadium is a wonder, but for them it was always a means to an end - it was for something very different that they truly hankered. What a shock to discover that their partner has a very different dream - for that is what they now believe.

It is not just that Mr McCann exhibits that some old fatal Celtic talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, that same old incurable urge towards self-mutilation - it is that he does it with such arrogant aplomb. He was in cheerfully philosophic mood as he meditated Jansen's departure, in sharp contrast to those who were mourning outside. Coaches and players come and go, he intoned, almost as if he were an incarnation of Tennyson's book: ''For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.'' He didn't quite say this, but it was enough to cause those who now long for his departure to shiver with apprehension.

His total lack of embarrassment contrasted sharply with the uneasy, defensive, somewhat shamefaced justifications advanced by his subordinates. Mr McGlone visibly squirmed as he grudgingly conceded that, admittedly, Jansen had won two of the three domestic trophies, but then faulted him for not winning the league three weeks earlier than he did - a stranger listening would never have suspected that the last championship was won 10 years ago. Mr Brown mumbled something about Jansen not being very good at filling in forms, but his heart was clearly not in it and one was glad for his sake when the camera moved away.

But Mr McCann - it is what is so unnerving - gives the impression that he genuinely believes every word he says. It took the breath away to hear him condemn Jansen for always claiming to be right and for always putting the blame on other people. In their first 100 years Celtic had four managers; Mr McCann is about to equal that number in the four years since he took over. Every dismissed manager, every departed player, tells the same story of an employer impossible to work with or for - no doubt we should allow for a certain degree of bias on their part. But, by the same token, how are we to take Mr McCann's consistently unvarying assurance that it was always he who was right and reasonable, while they were unfailingly wrong and unyielding?

The problem is that Mr McCann believes in himself - it is, after all, the secret of his remarkable rise to power - and has the highest respect for himself as a self-made man. He has an imperial temperament and he expects instant and unqualified obedience. He comes to football from business and he sees the one as easily convertible into the other, with the qualities that served him so well in the creation of the one empire being applied with equal success to the creation of the other. The machine-like efficiency of the office is to be imposed upon the football stadium. The office becomes a paradigm of all human activity; sport is to be bureaucratised along with everything else. And so Mr McCann's strength becomes, paradoxically, a weakness, as though a man dressed for Alaska were to arrive by mistake at the equator.

The very qualities that made the millions are the ones that antagonise the very different people he now has to work with. But, being as he is, how can he possibly see this?

He will, in all likelihood, survive till he chooses to go. He has been lucky. The league is won and next season's tickets are sold. The supporters will grumble, but they love Celtic much more than they dislike him, and there is the additional, novel allure of the champions' league. He will sit next season like an emperor in his peerless palace, but with an army of sullen subjects who resent him even while they pay the tribute. But he will not care, because, however arrogant, he is not Big Brother. People can think what they like so long as they do what they're told.