“I’ve signed for three years, I guarantee you I’ll be here for three years". So said Brendan Rodgers upon his controversial return to Celtic in the summer of 2023.
Recently, amid turmoil both on and off the pitch at the club, he stressed that his ‘motivation had never been higher’, and he had even recently publicly signalled to the club’s principal shareholder Dermot Desmond that if he was to be offered a deal to stay in Glasgow beyond this season, he would be amenable to signing it.
He couldn't have got the message.
That Rodgers felt compelled to resign from his position, given his earlier comments and the not insignificant matter that he was walking away from the millions of pounds that remained on his current contract, told you that the relationship between the pair had imploded irreparably even before non-executive director Desmond was allowed to drop napalm on the Celtic website in the form of his character assassination.
The undignified end to Rodgers’ Celtic career and that jaw-dropping evisceration of him by Desmond is unlikely though to solve the perpetual struggle between boardroom and dugout – when ambition collides with conservatism - with which every Celtic manager must eventually contend. Nor build bridges between the board and the fanbase.
The unbecoming personal barbs at Rodgers are his to defend and respond to, whether that be in the media or in the courtroom in the coming days and weeks. But in the wider picture, the one area of the astonishing rant from Desmond that is subjective at best, and most out of step with the prevailing feeling among supporters, is that their transfer model and structure have served them well for 20 years.
Not only that, but that the extraordinary failures of the summer were ‘not due to our structure or model, but to one individual’s desire for self-preservation at the expense of others.’
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What this point all boils down to is what you consider success for Celtic to actually look like, and how high you set that bar. Financially, certainly, Celtic have never been in a stronger position. But that is where a lot of the anger from fans comes from, and much of the displeasure of Rodgers this season too, given that the board had previously admitted that hoarding such levels of cash in the bank was 'inefficient'.
That wealth simply wasn’t trickling down effectively onto the pitch. Or, in the case of the big money signings that have been made, like Arne Engels, Auston Trusty and more recently, Michel-Ange Balikwisha, they have spent more time on the bench than on the grass.
And all the while, assets like Nicolas Kuhn were sold for hefty profits while the team entered the vital Champions League qualifier against Kairat Almaty without a right winger. They then entered the league season with a free signing as their marquee acquisition up front in Kelechi Iheanacho despite earlier selling Kyogo Furuhashi and then Adam Idah for the guts of £20m.
Does that sound like a model serving all aspects of the club well, beyond their bank balance, to you? And what these failures had to do with Rodgers’ subsequent desire for self-preservation, naked as it may have been, is anyone’s guess.
Celtic’s domestic success over the past two decades is inarguable, and the board will contend that it is better to have their cautious, steadying hand at the tiller to preserve the future of the club than the alternative, such as the chaos that has played out across the city at Rangers for almost the entirety of the period Desmond references.
But the turmoil that has often engulfed Ibrox is another factor in why the Celtic supporters simply no longer see domination on home soil as being the limit of their ambitions. And neither should they. Surely, Europe is where the success of Celtic as a football club (which is, first and foremost, what they are, should anyone in the boardroom need a reminder) should be measured.
For whatever faults Rodgers had, his publicly repeated ambition to push Celtic in pursuit of competing at Champions League level seems to be where this acrimony between himself and the board has germinated.
Given those public urgings before the transfer window closed and then his statements of clear dissatisfaction with the club’s transfer business thereafter from Rodgers, to suggest as Desmond did in his diatribe that the manager was fully on board with signings and could not name a single instance where the board hadn’t backed him, seems a hard sell to a sceptical fanbase.
Rodgers named numerous such occasions publicly, in fact, not least at Ibrox on the day before the transfer window closed, when he said that no striker would be allowed to leave the club without another coming in. Idah was subsequently sold, and no replacement found until Rodgers consulted his own little black book to call up old pal Iheanacho after the club had failed to land their targets.
Whatever your opinion on Rodgers and his part in Celtic once again conspiring to collapse in extraordinary fashion from a dizzying position of strength - and he must accept his share of the blame - this statement from Desmond will do nothing to absolve either himself or the executive board in the eyes of an apoplectic support.
Neither will the call he made to Martin O’Neill to come in and take over until a permanent successor is found, which - with the greatest of respect to a fine Celtic manager and man - only further exacerbates the feeling that the club under his control is one that grasps grimly to the past and the old way of things, more than it has ever truly strived for a brighter future.
One thing that Desmond absolutely got right was that some of the abuse aimed at board members, and particularly abuse aimed at their families, if that has been the case, is unacceptable. But that doesn’t mean the fans don’t have a right to express their dissatisfaction at the way their club is being run.
If anything, in his desire to turn down the heat on his trusted lieutenants on the ground in Glasgow, and to try and wrest control of the narrative from Rodgers, Desmond has succeeded more in tarnishing Celtic’s reputation as a well-run club than he has in bolstering his own or that of the board. Sometimes, some things are better left unsaid.
Tonight, at Celtic Park, the banners with the scored-through faces of Desmond, CEO Michael Nicholson and chairman Peter Lawwell will be on display once more, and the fans will continue to call for their removal. Perhaps more vociferously than ever.
No matter who is in the dugout, fairly or unfairly, many among the Celtic support won’t rest until these men are no longer in the boardroom. A protest by the Celtic Supporters Collective is already planned for outside Celtic Park this evening.
The irony dripping from Desmond’s payoff line, that Celtic was bigger than any one person, wasn’t lost on any of them.
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