A single entity who comes in and runs the club like a dictatorship? Or a double act, who run it as a partnership, each falling back on the others ideas? This is one of the questions Celtic will have to think about answering as our hunt for the next boss steps up.
The game has a history of managerial dictatorships.
Alex Ferguson had several good assistants in his time at Manchester United, but none were allowed to overshadow the man himself. Mourinho has people he trusts, but you never think of him as ruling by committee. He isn’t the type.
But it’s hard to think of Martin O’Neill without John Robertson, just as it’s hard to think of his managerial role model Brian Clough without Peter Taylor.
Brendan Rodgers got a lot of the ink and matchbook backing for his management skills.
But I think Chris Davies had just as much to do with his success.
You think of one, you think of the other.
There are a lot of dictator types out there.
Almost every manager we’re linked with comes as a one-man band.
Only one partnership has been suggested to us as yet, but it’s an intriguing one and if I had the choice of who takes over next it would be Martinez-Maloney. These guys have worked together for a while now, and of course it helps that Maloney has a Celtic connection.
Martinez-Maloney is a bit of a dream team.
You’ve got a top class European coach who plays the right kind of football and has the right kind of ideas, and you have a former Celtic star who graduated from the academy and knows what it takes.
They’ve been a great partnership for Belgium and turned that team into one of the best in the world.
Martinez has some unfinished business with Celtic.
He interviewed for the job once before and came very close to taking it.
He was an outstanding candidate then; he’s a better one now. He too knows the weird peculiarities of Scottish football, having once played up here. This is a smart and capable man, with a modern footballing outlook.
Teamed up with Maloney, they could be a great force.
Of course, the dictatorship has its merits too … and if we decide to go that way fans will understand why. But our greatest successes of the past two decades have come when we were run by O’Neill-Robertson and Rodgers-Davies.
The first sign that Ronny wasn’t going to be his own man was when he had John Collins foisted on him. Lennon, too, was denied his partner in crime Garry Parker, although it’s probably a good thing he wasn’t allowed to have him.
The thing with a partnership is that you get two great coaches for the price of one.
The dictator will have his own ideas about staff, but when two people have worked together for ages and they know each other’s shorthand, there’s a different alchemy.
We should move heaven and earth to get the Belgian dream team, and most interestingly because we might be able to get Maloney here now, as Martinez’s point man.
Let the manager continue to run the Belgian team in the Euros.
If we already have Maloney in the building we know that the big decisions are being made between them both, that Maloney’s woprds and deeds carry the imprimatur of the man at the top.
More to the point, so will the players.
He can analyse them and sort through the wheat and the chaff.
He can start the process now, so that Martinez is ready to go later, like a presidential transition team moving its people into key departments after the election but months before the inauguration.
This would ease our concerns and answer all our questions.
Come on Celtic, make it happen.
You owe us something like this.
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