The Ten Most Influential Celts Of The Nine In A Row Decade.

Whenever I write one of these, they generate argument and debate; that’s what they are supposed to do.

A list like this is subjective. Of course it is.

But creating debate is exactly why I do it; a list like this creates a question, and the question at the heart of this one is simple enough.

When we use the word “influential” what exactly do we mean?

To me, the word is too big to limit this list to mere footballers or managers. Too many people play a role in the mechanics of winning a league title. Too many people are involved in the intimate day-to-day life of a football club and huge institution like Celtic.

In deciding who have been the biggest influences on our club in the last ten years, I had to think of those who’ve played what some would regard as peripheral roles; one of the guys I contemplated but ultimately left off was John Park, for example.

I think his contribution was a fine one in many ways, but I also thought he had as many failures as successes.

And this is a blog about the unqualified success stories, and those guys who have left an imprint which cannot be denied.

That’s why he’s not in here. Others are.

Obviously, like with everything I write, the reader will make the ultimate decision on how well I’ve done here in putting this list together.

I look forward to some of the responses to it.

Neil Lennon

Neil Lennon is undisputedly the main man from this nine in a row campaign.

He started it as manager and he has finished it as manager. There is nothing more to say.

You can argue the toss as to whether he delivered on everything he promised the first time around, but you can’t dispute that his second stint came at the right time, and he has more than earned our thanks and praise. He is the man at the heart of it all.

Lennon has now won five titles as a manager, all of them within this cycle. If he wins the tenth title it will be his sixth of the run; how can anyone argue that he has not had the greatest, and most profound, influence on this club over the last decade?

His impact on Celtic has been colossal. Aside from his managerial accolades he has also won five titles as a player; is he the most influential Celt of the modern era, even when we include the likes of Martin O’Neill, Henrik Larsson, Gordon Strachan and the rest?

You would have to say yes, right? At the very least you could mount a very good argument in Neil Lennon’s favour, and one that would be hard to dispute. It’s even more impressive when you consider that he hasn’t had it easy; in his first tenure as club boss he had to contend with some of the vilest treatment ever meted out to someone in Scotland. His second tenure started with much of the support doubting he was the man for the job.

But Lennon has always been one of the most courageous figures in Scottish football.

This man perseveres. He endures. He never gives up. He has tremendous self-belief and it can be seen in the way his players will do anything for him. The big victories he’s secured – Barcelona in his first tenure and winning in Rome in this one – show you what he can do.

It is down to the board to back him in the window to come; times are tough and the money is going to be tight, but Lennon will certainly deliver us to the promised land. Even without cash to spend, you would overwhelmingly fancy us, but if he’s resourced we’ll be out of sight and then ten is a done deal and we can start working towards the next milestone.

Lennon will have delivered and then some.

Peter Lawwell

Like him or loathe him, rate him or slate him, there really isn’t much doubt that like Lennon, Peter Lawwell has been a tremendous influence on the past nine years at our football club.

You can debate all you want about whether that’s too long for a CEO to be in a job, but the man continues to do it and if I’m being blunt he’s exactly the guy I’d want in charge at a time like this.

Crisis brings out the best in some people, and I think you’re going to see in the next few weeks and months what the real value of Peter Lawwell is.

There is simply nobody else in Scottish football who can navigate the landscape between self-interested clubs, dopey administrators, TV executives and sponsors the way this guy can.

We face an unprecedented situation here, and already he’s been talking to broadcasters and advertisers and other commercial partners to keep them on board. He is a credible figure where otherwise you might have the likes of Ann Budge, Leeann Dempster or, God forbid, Stewart Robertson trying to do it.

Can you even imagine that?

Lawwell has dominated the politics of Scottish football in the last decade. Even when he hasn’t been trying to, the rumour factory has churned out an endless series of stories identifying him as the real power in the land. Other club officials whisper that he has “too much influence”.

At Celtic Park Lennon is his third appointment of the run.

If there is disquiet, it’s that Lennon has been hired twice and Ronny was hired after being tabbed as the Irishman’s assistant at first. Only the hiring of Rodgers looks like it showed the level of ambition a club like ours requires. This is where some folk believe that Lawwell is too prone to playing it safe; add in this and a couple of transfer window debacles and you can understand why some fans – perhaps even a lot of fans – are concerned.

There’s also the ghost of Resolution 12, which is where some are going to judge his true legacy … and he’s not coming out of that particularly well at the moment.

Yet watch Lawwell where his job really matters, in the commercial side of the club, to see where his value to us lies. The recent Adidas deal in the biggest in the history of the game here. Within that sphere, Lawwell is nearly untouchable.

Scott Brown

Where does on-field leadership rate when you are making a list like this?

Normally, the managers would all have finished in front of the players, and there’s an obvious manager who could be sticking in here at number 3, but Brown edges him out.

He does so because Brown has been a momentous influence on the quest for nine, and particularly in the last five years or so when his drive and commitment and passion for the club have been there for all to see. He even signed a contract extension when most thought he was gone.

Brown has faced off everything the Sevco hype machine could throw at him.

He has best them all. Who will ever forget the amazing sight of Joey Barton – the self-styled hard-man and rent-a-gob – looking down at the turf, unable to even look him in the eye, prior to their battle, which Brown utterly dominated him in.

There are some detractors of course; a handful of the more spiteful commentators refuse to regard Brown as a truly great captain, but their bitterness stops them being taken even remotely seriously, and even if they were not so overflowing with bile their point would be absolutely ludicrous.

Scott Brown has more than earned his status as a club icon.

The trophy haul is extraordinary enough, but the suspicion that Brown will be hanging around the club long after he finishes playing is an amusing one.

If he gets his coaching badges there’s a chance that his days skelping the opposition all over the place might not be over with yet; like his manager, Brown is already one of those players Sevco fans wish they’d never seen in the Hoops … the possibility that he might one day dominate from the dugout should be keeping them up at night.

Brendan Rodgers

Let’s face it, there’s no way Rodgers was not going to be omitted from this list, or even from a spot in the top five.

That Brown knocked him out of the number three slot is due to one thing only; the manner of his departure, as shocking now as it was at the time.

I sometimes think that Rodgers has only the most tenuous grasp on how completely, and utterly, he has blotted his record with the Celtic supporters. He may believe, and some others certainly do, that there is a way back from it, a way to make it right, and that time will heal the wounds but he’s dead wrong about that.

Time will only make it look worse.

When we secure the ten and when the various people who played their role in that take their bow at Celtic Park the fans will afford Rodgers a polite applause, if he’s there to take it in the first place that is. It might well be he has something more important to do that day.

But although I’m sure most fans will be respectful, he will not get the adulation he would have been entitled to expect had he hung around even until the end of the last campaign.

Departing having secured 3Treble, most of us would have blamed Lawwell and the board for his departure, however fair or unfair that might have been.

Frankly, reading some of the accounts of his last two years at Liverpool it becomes clear that Rodgers has an egotistical streak which poisons the relationships at every club he’s at.

Nobody will be able to get their heads around the idea that this guy didn’t fancy staying here and making nine in a row history and then closing it out with the ten; there is little doubt that had he done so this top ten would look very different and he would have been right there at the top, in the place of highest honour, as a club icon and immortal.

For all that, his impact on this run has been immense and undeniable.

Two titles were delivered, and although Lennon got the third of them over the line Rodgers had teed it up.

Two trebles were brought too, and he was the first manager in the history of the game to manage that feat.

He had already delivered a League Cup before departing, so there were seven trophies in a row that he delivered for the club … a momentous thing.

The Invincible Treble is something that no manager will ever pull off again, and all this is to say nothing for the players who improved out of sight under his watchful eye.

With a better ending he would have topped this list.

But he ruined it all.

Dermot Desmond

Dermot Desmond is one the most powerful people in Scottish football and certainly the most powerful man at Celtic, but he leaves so much of the day-to-day business to Lawwell that he is easily superseded on this list by two managers and a player.

That’s not to devalue what he does at the club, but the man behind the throne prefers it this way.

Desmond’s contributions are mostly secret, and his influence most often concealed behind the person of Peter Lawwell, but there is at least one massive decision we can lay at his door and it is the one to appoint Rodgers as manager.

The story behind that is as insightful as it is wonderful. Desmond’s anger was piqued at a show of “We are the Peepul” supremacism at Hampden after Sevco had achieved its finest result and knocked us out of the Scottish Cup in Delia’s second campaign.

Desmond decided in that moment that he would find a way to humiliate these egotists, swollen by their momentary – and fleeting – glory.

He put the decision to discuss the future with the manager at the top of his To Do list and immediately started thinking about his replacement … and he was determined, above all, to bring in the best man he could.

The first stage of Desmond’s revenge was to announce the appointment in the days before Sevco’s Scottish Cup Final against Hibs; that swept them from the back pages and I have always believed was a contributory factor in their defeat that weekend.

Their club was stunned by that decision, from the boardroom to the boot room.

They never recovered from it. Their defeat the following day was catastrophic and as they went backwards Celtic forged ahead of them … it was, and remains, beautiful and that was Desmond doing what he so rarely does and flexing his muscles.

God help Sevco any time he decides to do so in the future.

All that aside, Desmond has presided over a decade of unparalleled growth and success at Parkhead.

The man is doing something right.

Our club’s professionalism is far and away better than that which you see at Ibrox, and he’s a big part of the reason why.

Ronny Deila 

Whenever I write about Ronny Deila, I always want to go overboard these days, to launch into Churchillian praise and lavish upon him the sort of accolades I believe he was denied whilst he was at Celtic Park. My gratitude for what this man did at our club grows in direct proportion to our proximity to the ten.

The closer we are the deeper my appreciation gets.

And the irony of this is that it took me time, after Ronny had gone, to fully get it.

Because on the day Sevco knocked us out of the Scottish Cup I wanted him gone.

For a few weeks I didn’t even think we should give him the respect of finishing out the season.

Yet he did it, and he did it with a grace and good nature that would have been entirely missing in others asked to finish a campaign under the same conditions and pressure. Ronny Deila was a Good Man and those who think those guys don’t finish first need to take a look at what he accomplished at Celtic Park and, more importantly, what he left behind.

If we are forced to confront the idea that Lennon benefited from the improvements made at Celtic Park under Brendan Rodgers then surely it is incumbent upon us to recognise that he, too, was building on the work of his predecessors.

Look at some of the footballers who came on leaps and bounds under Ronny; Kieran Tierney, Tom Rogic, Leigh Griffiths and, perhaps most importantly, Callum McGregor.

Ronny infused into our team this idea – totally alien to many of our players before he arrived – about how footballers should consider themselves athletes first and foremost; he has given some of these guys full careers on the back of that amazing advice.

It is hard to imagine either McGregor or Tierney being quite the super-fit stars they’ve become without him.

Ronny also pioneered the 4-2-3-1 at Celtic Park, which Rodgers felt right at home improving and tweaking when he arrived.

Rodgers stood on Ronny’s shoulders … and this is why I am going to take especial satisfaction on the day we win ten and the affable Norwegian comes out for his applause.

It ought to be one of the loudest and most raucous of the whole day.

Chris McCart

Callum McGregor, Kieran Tierney, James Forrest and Mikey Johnston … to name but a few. These guys owe their careers to one guy above all; Chris McCart is his name, and his position as Celtic’s head of youth development is responsible for some of our greatest successes in the last ten years.

He is the star-maker, almost more than any other man.

He has graduated all these guys, and others, to our first team squad already, and their impact on the last few years has been enormous.

But Chris McCart has done a lot more than that, and given dozens of other footballers careers of their own, albiet they were not quite good enough for Celtic Park.

McCart has delivered not only for Celtic but for Scotland too; he is a real star behind the scenes at Celtic Park and more attention should be paid to the job he’s done in recent years. Those who wonder why we haven’t developed more top class players should have a think before opening their mouths; I named four at the start of this piece who’ve come through in the last ten years … but for Tierney leaving we’d have built our team around those guys.

This is actually a pretty good ratio when you consider it.

And there are others – like Dembele – coming through right now who might well go on and stake their claim.

The work the Celtic Youth Academy does is excellent. McCart is the man at the centre of it.

Could we have gotten to nine in a row without him? Of course, but Forrest has been nearly ever present in that time, Callum has played in nearly every campaign, Tierney had broken through under Ronny and Johnston could be a star for years.

Along the way we’ve seen Liam and Ewan Henderson, Anthony Ralston, Jack Aitchison, Calvin Miller and others.

There is much more to come from McCart’s graduates too, and there will be many more of them in times to come as well.

John Kennedy

John Kennedy has been on the coaching staff at Celtic Park now that it’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t playing a role at this club.

He has served three managers now, and if he hadn’t done so with distinction then I would suggest he’d have been gone a long time ago.

He is clearly doing something right, and since the team has won a lot of trophies in that time he can back that up with evidence.

Behind every great success story are people just like this guy, beavering away in the background, not appearing to do much, but always there, lending their solidity, their presence, their experience, bringing continuity as well.

He was one of the guys Rodgers left behind; we are supposed to believe that represents some kind of negative.

When you consider Rodgers late took Lee Congerton you wonder just how suspect some of his judgement actually is.

Kennedy remains and is now Lennon’s assistant, a role he has performed very ably. I think he’s done an excellent job.

Kennedy is one of the unsung heroes of this period.

In the end I hope he gets the full credit that is due to him for his sterling contribution to the Celtic cause.

James Forrest

As the player, along with Scott Brown, who has played in every single season of the nine campaigns, it is easy to put James Forrest in this list.

What’s incredible is that until Rodgers came to the club he looked like a player who had gone backwards after an excellent story, and I would have put money on him leaving and nobody particularly mourning that.

Forrest is five games short of 400 for the club. He is 12 goals shy of joining the 100 club.

He is certain to do both of these in the next campaign.

His contribution to Celtic’s march towards the nine – and the ten – cannot and will not be underestimated.

He has drawn criticism from the fans at times, but this guy never hides.

He always gives us 100%.

His goals and his assists have been massive.

He is a huge favourite of the members of our admin team over at The CelticBlog Facebook group.

There are few footballers in our recent history who have given us the service and dedication that Forrest has. Given his debut by Lennon in the 2009-10 campaign, he might yet go on to become a one club footballer, that rarest of all things in the game.

On his day he is unplayable.

It is not for nothing that big clubs have sniffed around him almost from the moment he broke into the first team squad.

He has shown us remarkable loyalty on top of everything else; this is a footballer who was born to wear the Hoops and who doesn’t seem as if he wants to do anything else.

We owe him a lot. He has been stellar for us. Nine in a row is the triumph he was born to play his part in, and the tenth title will be his crowning achievement as he gets his 400th appearance and his 100th goal. He will be remembered as a Celtic legend.

The Green Brigade

It should surely go without saying that the fans have played a momentous role in the last ten years, and in the nine in a row campaign.

It would have been crazy not to mention them in the piece, and if you are going to talk about the fans you have to talk about the Green Brigade.

Oh I could have talked about the bloggers instead – we, too, have played a major role in the last decade – but The Green Brigade have been so prominent there’s just no way to ignore them.

Like them or loathe them, they bring colour to Celtic Park.

Their banners and their politics might not be to everyone’s taste – I agree with 95% of them – but they are always thought provoking.

They always spark discussion and debate, and our club should welcome that.

Have they crossed the line a few times?

Yes, with their pyrotechnics and such like.

But nobody can deny that they’ve done more good than harm.

Their fund raising drives are incredible.

Their food bank collections are inspiring.

Their sense of social responsibility makes a mockery of all those who would portray football fans as knuckle-dragging neds.

These guys and gals know what they stand for. They are to be admired for that.

Whilst it is a stretch to say that they represent the Celtic support, I would say that they definitely represent some of what is best about us.

And when all three Celtic managers of this era have directly praised them, when the board regularly meets with them and when the CEO himself is broadly happy with them and supportive of what they bring, when the club went so far as to introduce safe standing and hand that section over to them, there’s little doubt that they have had an influence and will continue to have one.

They are deserved participants on this list.

James Forrest is the guest on the latest Celtic Down Under podcast, which you can listen to here.

As Scottish football goes through the current crisis it is important to keep up with developments and the key issues. We are determined to do so, and to keep you informed as well. Please subscribe to the blog.