A Badly Flawed Signing Policy
This tracks back before then, of course, to something that was apparent from Lawwell’s earliest time at the club.
Our transfer strategy changed when he arrived and it first hit home during “the Wilo Flood window” when the CEO, so convinced of his own abilities as a great poker player, wouldn’t sanction the couple of hundred grand that would have got us Steven Fletcher from Hibs.
He once quipped that it’s the name that would be carved on his headstone; I told him, on the morning after the AEK home game that if things went tits up at Celtic as a result of that he’d never have to worry about hearing that name again.
Nevertheless, it haunts him and it should because that was the first time we all saw that Lawwell was egocentric enough to overplay his hand at our expense.
In the years that followed, Strachan, Lennon, Mowbray, Deila and Rodgers would all be baffled as signings were foisted on them that they clearly didn’t want. You can tell that by the number of games some of these signings started.
These were players someone else at the club fancied, and the managers never had a say in it at all.
And most of these players were, if we’re being honest, absolute duds.
Lawwell likes to give the impression that he masterminded the strategy in the last decade; funny that he never learned to trust the judgement of his managers more than his own.
Signings take forever. A lot of players are sold without the manager’s approval.
We stopped using the Bosman market somewhere along the line, and missed out on some quality.
Friends of the man were given jobs – such as Strachan’s other son – and we simply stopped aiming high.
We also missed out on some incredible top Scottish talent during this spell.
The days when our managers were forced to accept players they didn’t want – bloating the squad and the wage bill and removing resources managers could have used – are hopefully now at an end, but that depends on getting the structure of the club right this time.