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Brendan’s Deal Will Take Us Beyond The Magic Number. How Does “Mind The Chasm” Sound For A Banner?

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The news today that Brendan Rodgers has put pen to paper on a brand new, long term, Celtic deal is music to the ears of our fans. Tomorrow’s game against Kilmarnock will be a celebration of everything that makes our club great.

The league title has been secured, six in a row, and we’re heading for a cup semi-final which would leave us on the brink of the treble.

The future looks no less promising, and bright, than the present day though.

Brendan’s new deal commits him to this club towards ten in a row and beyond. That is major, but I wonder if even that constitutes the legacy he’s talked about. When we hit ten we’d not, after all, be terribly far away from #goingfor55!

This deal is about stability. It’s about giving us security in the future, because although the media will be at great pains to point out that it doesn’t tie his hands if other clubs come knocking it gives us the right to name our price. That’s significant in itself. That Brendan is happy for that to be the case is telling in itself. That he won’t have done so without significant guarantees of money to spend hardly needs to be stated; it’s just stating the obvious.

The reaction to this, even amongst the hacks, has been mostly positive.

But then, what else could it realistically be? We have the box office manager, the box office club, the best players, the most money. Even the press can’t ignore that, or try to rock the boat too much. Charles Paterson of Sky tried his damndest yesterday to suggest that Stuart Armstrong not sign a new contact – the clip of that is unbelievable, his comments wholly ludicrous, his question loaded like a 357. Magnum that he then pointed at his own feet – but he was alone in that room in trying to score stupid points. Everyone knows the score now.

I don’t expect the positivity to last – as I said above, some of them will be readying the lines about how it doesn’t really offer us security even now – but we’re the only show in town, minus the freak one across the road, and to that extent even some of the most recalcitrant hacks will have to simply suck this one up and accept that we’ve got the momentum.

Where will that momentum take us?

Well it’s clearly not intended to take us only to ten in a row, although that’s the clear inference in the four year deal. Brendan himself has said that was unimportant (unimportant but not inconsequential; he can count to ten as well as the rest of us), and that in fact his long term commitment is for the players.

“If I don’t commit I can’t ask them to,” he said, which is a very good point and suggests strongly that new deals are on the table for some of them too, including Armstrong. It’s also for future signings, of course.

The club is thinking big now. With hotel deals and investment in infrastructure, with extended contracts for top performers, with new facilities and upgrades to existing ones … Celtic is in a good place going forward, which is the notion that this deal “takes him up to ten in a row” is true but only tells half of the story.

This is about more than that.

For one thing, it’s clear that we’re targeting Europe now, regular qualification being the start of that. That implies that proper money is going to be spent here. We don’t need to splurge millions on an SPL standard team … that kind of cash is only used for getting us ahead on that bigger stage.

Let’s face it, we will all enjoy the march towards ten but that on its own isn’t going to be enough to satisfy the appetites of the fans for the next four years. It won’t be enough to appeal to the quality of player we need to get better.

This is all about the Champions League. This is all about reaching a place where we move up the seeding ranks for openers, so that when we get to the groups we’re not stuck in that Hellish situation of being in the fourth pot. It would also be good to think that when we’re no longer dragged down by the national co-efficient that we will have less qualifiers to play. That’s got to count for something as we move forward.

Regular access to the Groups is only the start of it. We want to start performing well in them. That means a year where we’d want to miss out on the more glamorous games and have the kind of group which Leicester City found themselves traversing this season. Clearly we’d still have to take a tier one team, but we were just appallingly unlucky this year in that we got such sterling quality in all three of the pots.

We surely can’t get something like that again?

I’ll be doing a piece on the co-efficient situation over the weekend, perhaps. That’s worth looking at, especially in light of what I posted earlier on Scottish clubs and Financial Fair Play. The chances of seeing any team from the SPL in the Europa League Groups looks somewhere between slim and none for the foreseeable future; the qualification process for that is a minefield of murderously hard games and those which you don’t know enough about to predict with accuracy. But no team from here is presently good enough to get past that.

In other words, clubs who watch what we’ve just announced and think they can bridge this gap with European income are dreaming. If we qualify for the Groups for the second season in a row, and they flail about as I expect and those co-efficient numbers suggest, you might as well stop using the word “gap” entirely.

How does Mind The Chasm sound for a banner?

It’s not hard to imagine the dismay this news has generated in Sevconia. King’s revolution is already in ruins. Caixinha has no record of staying at a club longer than two years, and Brendan has already seen off one Ibrox boss. I would put money on Brother Pedro not being the last.

This is the true nightmare scenario for them.

Until today they could have clung to the anticipation that Brendan might be poached in the summer; I know that was shared by certain sections of the press. That wee hope bubble is now burst and with it a lot of assumptions that what’s being built here is something not designed to last.

It most certainly is.

It most certainly will.

Brendan’s deal takes us to the point of history.

But as I’ve said before here, history will not stop at ten. People talk as if that’s the end, as if we would just down tools, satisfied to have got there. The numerical charts go higher than that … and right now no-one can see an end in sight.

Ten is the least of their worries, because ten is the least of our ambitions.

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