Ange Leaving Celtic For England Is Not “Inevitable” No Matter What Some Idiots Say.

Most Celtic fans are well aware that there are a few ex-Celts in the media who simply cannot be trusted to speak sensibly. They are self-promoting charlatans. One of the worst is Kris Commons and his latest crayon scribblings are awful.

He says that Ange won’t go to Brighton. Well, of course not. It’s as if this is a stunning revelation, but to most of it us it isn’t. Commons does think he’ll leave us for England one day. He describes this as “inevitable.” He’s not the only one who has.

Inevitable is a word that is thrown around a lot by our media. I wrote yesterday about The Cringe. But in point of fact, there is nothing “inevitable” about Ange’s departure to that over-bloated league down south. All roads do not automatically end there.

There are two major reasons why it is not “inevitable” and the first one is obvious enough. Most of the clubs in that league would never look at Scotland as a place to find a manager, no matter how well that manager is doing or has done.

There are exceptions. Two of them, and I’ll get to those in due course. But for the most part this holds. The EPL is the most arrogant league in the world, and it’s the most cash rich. They believe they can have their pick of the global managerial talent pool … and the top level guys there do not come to Scotland, or such is the general view.

As a corollary to that is the second point. Those clubs which might come looking in Scotland are, by and large, not the ones that a successful Celtic manager would leave here for. The job of managing this club is prestigious and well paid and comes with a raft of advantages which you won’t find in the lower leagues of England where career life expectancy is low.

Why would you trade success at Celtic for a mid-table or relegation dogfight? The league down there is staggering slanted to the advantage of a handful of clubs. Two of their teams are now owned by oligarchs and one of them is still struggling.

No manager is leaving Celtic for Brighton or Bournemouth or one of those sides. It would be madness. That’s a career step down, not up. And whilst Ange is not afraid of risk, he’s not a mug either. Those clubs might talk a good game about allowing a manager time to bed in and get his ideas across, but at the first hint that it might not come together they sack people. If relegation seems like a threat it would be more or less immediate.

That’s Russian roulette with five rounds in the chamber.

All this talk of inevitability is just pure rot. The EPL has been in existence now for a lot of years, and football in Scotland has been lagging behind the money on offer in England for even longer than that. So here’s a question for the hacks.

How many Celtic managers, in our history, have actually left the club having received an offer from down south? How many have actually handed in their notice and went because the grass seemed greener south of the border?

The answer, of course, is one. The prize narcissist.

And there is mitigation for him, as well, of course in that the ego clash between him and the former CEO was part of what drove him out of the door. Rodgers thinks that’s the stage where he belongs, because he loves to be at the centre of it all. But he wouldn’t have left for a club like Leicester had the working atmosphere at Parkhead not been so toxic.

Rodgers, of course, along with Gerrard – the only other manager from Glasgow clubs who has ever been “poached” by another team – had “EPL profile” before coming up here.

Gerrard has, for years, been tipped as a future Liverpool boss … that factored into his thinking and in his attractiveness for jobs down south. To top it all off, Gerrard has since hinted that he was as frustrated by his board as Rodgers was with ours.

There is nothing “inevitable” here except the inevitability of attention seekers trying to piggy-back on a non-story to get their names in the headlines. It is pathetic, and sadly it is what we expect from them.