Brendan Rodgers Re-Structured Celtic’s Transfer Policy Yesterday As The Board Sat Listening.

The AGM yesterday provided one massive moment for us to take towards the next phase of this campaign; the manager asserted his full control of the transfer policy.

At long last. He and the board will have hoped we don’t notice the difference between what he’s been saying up until now and what he said yesterday, but of course we do.

Things have changed. They have almost certainly changed for the better.

Our future is a smaller, better squad with more quality players in it.

That’s the upshot of what he was saying, and in January that policy will start to be realised. There is no question whatsoever that he is imposing his will on this now. He reiterated the need for quality, not quantity, for proven talent rather than project players, all stuff he’s done before.

But this time he did it in front of the top brass.

He did it sitting there beside them. He did it in a public forum with a room full of our supporters laid out in front of him, and not one of them contradicted him or clarified his comments or even tried to. So, it’s a change of approach whether it was agreed beforehand or not. It’s now a fact.

To be fair, the board have been swimming backwards on the signing policy since the summer.

When Peter Lawwell gave the chairman’s report in the accounts, he appeared to indicate a similar change in thinking when he acknowledged that a policy of signing projects wasn’t going to get things done and that those signings had to be married with the purchase of ready-made talent.

Rodgers had already aired his extreme displeasure in public and probably raised 99 kinds of Hell behind the scenes with Desmond.

That would have crystalised thinking.

That would have focussed minds.

Whatever happened, they were already indicating the change as far back as September. Hearing the boss lay it out yesterday makes it official.

This is clearly good news, perhaps the best bit of news to come out of that low-grade farce yesterday.

It’s also pretty clear from the way Rodgers is talking that he knows which players will be departing in the same window, with Kobayashi, Tillio and McCarthy already publicly aware that they’re going and I suspect that Mikey Johnston and a few others have been given the nod behind the scenes.

The squad will be smaller come February, but better.

Top of the list will be a striker, but I would imagine the left back position will be looked at and maybe the goalkeeper position. But more important, I think, than any of them is a quality midfielder and we have to have identified some targets by now.

But the important thing, more than the names, more than the positions, is that Rodgers sat there yesterday and confirmed that he is now in charge of transfer policy.

This is a far cry from the guy who sat in front of the media towards the end of that window and said that his job was just to coach the players the board deemed him worthy of getting.

Whatever it was that changed that situation – the fan backlash against those comments, the deep dismay they caused or Rodgers himself shaking things up behind the scenes – we’re now in a different place.

That’s all to the good. We can look forward to January with confidence now.

If we do good business there, the summer should take care of itself.