For Celtic and Rangers, managerial searches have become a chastening business. A sobering brush with reality.
Six weeks ago, Danny Rohl and Wilfried Nancy could have walked down Buchanan Street completely unrecognised. Nancy vs Rohl sounded more like a High Court custody battle than the headline bout for the next Glasgow derby.
Their emergence at the helm of Scotland’s biggest clubs now offers evidence that the Old Firm lack the gravitational pull of the past.
Rangers used to hire managers like Paul Le Guen and Dick Advocaat and Walter Smith; big, clunking fists of the managerial world. Men with a pedigree and a bulging CV.
Celtic’s controlling shareholder Dermot Desmond would look into the eyes of candidates like Guus Hiddink, Martin O’Neill and Brendan Rodgers and seek the fire within. The Parkhead hotseat was coveted by heavyweights who had functioned at the highest level for a number of years.
The doyens of coaching are hardly beating a path to Glasgow these days. They’re not forming an orderly queue up Celtic Way or on the marble staircase of the Bill Struth Stand with a CV stapled to a cover letter.
While they pitch up for European games and tell the world how much they love the history and the passion and the atmosphere of a night under the floodlights, they never love it quite enough to want to work here.
The big money and the prestige is to be found in England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy rather than the SPFL, and the jobs at Celtic and Rangers are not as attractive to the big beasts of management as fans would like to think.
The people deluding themselves that Jose Mourinho or Rafa Benitez were waiting for a call from Glasgow were in for a surprise when the pool of credible, attractive candidates for Ibrox and Parkhead proved as shallow as a Pollokshields puddle.
Shortlists were filled with underwhelming candidates keen to haul themselves up the managerial ladder and use Glasgow as the stepping stone to a bigger league. Ideally England.
Rangers flirted with the rookie son of Carlos Ancelotti before settling on Russell Martin, a sacked Southampton boss fans never wanted from the off. When he fell on his sword, the line was dangled before Steven Gerrard and Kevin Muscat and they failed to net either. Sean Dyche preferred to wait for Nottingham Forest, a gig which makes being director general of the BBC look like a job for life.
While Rohl shows tentative signs of being a talented, up-and-coming boss, the risk taken by Rangers is matched only by Celtic’s decision to appoint Nancy.
Recommended by Paul Tisdale, fans should cross their fingers and hope their head of football operations is a better judge of a manager than he appears to be of a player.
In Rotterdam on Thursday night, interim boss O’Neill rolled back the years. The last Celtic manager to win in the Netherlands a quarter of a century ago, he repeated the trick against Feyenoord in the De Kuip before adding a vanishingly rare away win at Easter Road.
O’Neill knows the rules of survival in Glasgow, a city where winning games of football is a non-negotiable condition of employment. The same can’t necessarily be said of a Frenchman who has been a front man for four years, lived in North America for two decades, and knows little of a landscape with its own pressures and style of football.
Martin, Patrick Stewart and Kevin Thelwell arrived at Ibrox full of big promises and failed to live up to the billing. While the big jobs at Celtic and Rangers bring profile, money and a VIP box at the Hydro, they can be as hazardous to a man’s long-term prospects as two packs a day.
For that reason alone, senior figures inside Parkhead used to regard a knowledge of the environment as a prerequisite of a managerial appointment.
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John Barnes pitched up for his first job in management and proved a short-lived disaster. Ronny Deila was only supposed to be the No.2 to Henrik Larsson or Roy Keane until the big names pulled out and he was the last man standing. The job was too big for him.
While Ange Postecoglou is held up as the proof that gambles can work, the Australian was a Hail Mary appointment after Eddie Howe pulled out. He should have been the exception, and not the template.
It’s not Nancy’s MLS background that’s the worry, so much as his lack of experience in Europe. A preference for possession-based football in a 3-4-3 formation concerns supporters who grew weary of watching Rodgers’ teams keep the ball for possession’s sake.
Victory in Rotterdam had fans wishing O’Neill would stick around in Glasgow a bit longer. Only he can say if he still has the stomach for dark winter mornings at Lennoxtown at the age of 73. Yet, in negotiating three hazardous away games at St Mirren, Feyenoord and Hibs, he made a convincing case for the devil you know.
Football is an unsentimental business sometimes. O’Neill agreed to look after the team while Celtic found a permanent manager and that’s as far as it goes. Realistically, that’s as far as it should go.
Celtic really need to get cracking in the January window. The job of reshaping a squad weakened by awful player trading should be done by a man who plans – in theory, at least – to stick around for the next three years.
While CBS MLS pundit Charlie Davies describes the Frenchman as a ‘top manager’ and a ‘gem’, the reality is that no one has the first clue how he will shape up in Glasgow. Celtic will be his biggest test, a bigger job than Montreal or Columbus Crew, and his first task is to limp through to January squeezing performances out of a squad badly weakened by a dismal year in the transfer market.
Fans worry that the progress and improvement reaped by O’Neill might be undone by a coach they simply don’t know.
The signs are that the old bhoy will be given one last rousing, emotional send-off against Dundee on Wednesday. Like the late Walter Smith at Rangers, the interim boss has shown the huge value of knowhow and experience in a pressurised environment. Who can say when Celtic or Rangers will see their likes again?
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