With Odsonne Edouard about to sign for us – and I’ll cover the ridiculous stories coming out of the media, and especially Sky Sports News later on – we’re completing our first deal of the summer. There will be others, but there won’t be changes on a grand scale here.
Purely and simply, there won’t be because we don’t need them. They are not required.
A few reinforcements at the back, a creative attacking player for one of the flanks and, as looks likely, John McGinn of Hibs (this story is too widespread and comes from too many good sources for it to be in the slightest doubt) and we’ll be all good to go for European and domestic schedule that will be even more taxing than the last one.
But we will have one major advantage; we will have a settled squad, and one which is full of players who’ve been over the course before and who are confirmed winners. Not just winners, but double treble winners. That is important. That might prove to be everything.
Sevco has a major problem. Their entire team needs rebuilt, and Gerrard seems to think that’s what should be done. It is lunacy. No amount of rebuilding is going to catch Celtic, not with the budget available to him, even if they sell players to bring in more cash. Trying to gel an entirely new squad takes time, and time is the one thing Sevco hasn’t got.
Why do they do this, year after year? For one thing, there’s no scouting system to speak of there, which means they basically have to be approached by agents and by scouts in order to find players and all those people are on the hustle, all those people are trying to get an edge. But even if every signing they make is right on the nose, you’re throwing a bunch of new personalities into a room with a bunch of people already at the club … egos clash, people form cliques, foreign players take time to settle … and you need to hit the ground running.
Not easy to do when an entirely new management team has come through the doors. Much harder to do when they are building a new squad from scratch. Even with the best will in the world, and the best personnel at your disposal, that is an impossible task.
Celtic has been building the squad for the last few years. Sevco has wasted so much time and so much money trying to construct its, and they do the same every single year. One of the reasons we’ve had success is that we do squad building right. Brendan didn’t rip it all up and start again; he took what was there and made it better.
That is what good managers do. It’s easy to spend money.
It’s easy to completely tear up what someone else has built and start from scratch … but the best don’t do that. Warburton tried this and failed. Caixinha tried this and failed. Both men had far more experience than the youth team coach in the dugout at Ibrox now.
And neither of those men, no matter their relative strengths, was a match from Brendan Rodgers and his team. With six trophies under their belts, do you think our team will be less ready for the challenges that lie ahead? Of course not.