A few months ago, this website published a piece about the changes to Ibrox’s scouting system, changes we said would be disastrous.
They were slashing the number of flesh-and-blood personnel and going to a stats-based model. John Park was getting just three staff to work with, in order to scour Europe for the best talent he could find.
That, we said, was doomed to failure. The whole Park experiment was doomed to failure from the first minute he was in the door over there. There was no chance at all that the cut-price version of it was going to pay dividends when the whole venture was, in the first place, a cheaper version of the one we’ve been successfully running for years now.
I’m well overdue a proper article on The Strategy; I keep saying I’ll write it. I’ve got a good one in mind. It has its critics and I’m one of them, but some of those who are being hyper-critical of it clearly don’t know what they are talking about. Foremost amongst them in Stephen McGowan, who would have you believe the whole thing has been a failure because we’ve had more flops than resounding successes in the past three years.
The thing of it is, that’ just not true.
Even the summer window wasn’t a complete disaster; if you assume Holm has something to offer us long-term, that Yang can become a decent player, if you recognise that Palma already is that’s three out of the eight permanent signings right away who look like they might offer something.
Lagerbeikle and Nawrocki will be part of our long-term central defence; let’s not forget that both got injured right away, that we drafted in Phillips as emergency cover and that Scales has surprised us all by getting in the team and staying there.
If you assume Carter Vickers is our first-choice centre back and that the manager likes Phillips because of his experience at a higher level than our league, then the question becomes about who backs those two up. Nobody would have expected that Liam Scales would emerge not only as that player but as the starter alongside the big man … the reality is that Rodgers selects people based on form, and right now there is no valid reason to leave Scales out.
Phillips will probably go back to Liverpool in January, there being no real reason to have him hanging around. The emergency which brought him here is over. We’re back to nearly full-strength at the back, and when Welsh returns that’s the ball game.
The eighth permanent signing, the one everyone forgets, was Tomako Iwata. Everyone recognises what he has to offer us long-term, especially the manager. Japan’s MVP, their player of the year, the season before we signed him, he’s come good at the right time and Rodgers clearly loves him and thinks he has a big contribution to make. Out of the eight permanent signings, you could make an argument that no fewer than six have a chance to make it.
Are there bad signings? We don’t know how good, bad or indifferent Tilio might be, and the decision to brand Kwon an absolute flop seems to have been taken indecently early; he is certainly the furthest from first team football of the signings and is probably not going to be here much longer. Tilio too might end up departing in January, on loan.
Signings nine and ten are loanees; Bernardo and Phillips himself. I don’t know if the manager likes Bernardo enough to make that deal permanent but bringing him on loan with the option to buy is smart because we can find out what we need to before deciding.
Why the focus on our summer window? It was the one across the city which was truly disastrous, that’s why. The media wants to pretend that it’s Celtic who shambolically dropped the ball; it’s just not true. At Ibrox their summer signings were abysmal. All three of the strikers they own look like a bust. Danilo has spent longer on the treatment table than out on the pitch and he’s out with a bad one again. Dessers and Lammers are just woeful.
Dujon Sterling can’t get in the team. Where in God’s name is Kieran Dowell? Don’t even get me started on Cifuentes; he got sent off today and that would have been no loss to their team whatsoever and nor will his absence whilst banned. That is one of the worst signings I have ever seen in Scottish football. He offers exactly nothing.
A free transfer goalkeeper and their loanee Sima; that’s the two players from their transfer intake who look like they might be decent. The rest you can write off as an absolute waste of money. John Park was at the centre of that decision making process.
Everyone responsible for that window should be fired over there, and it seems that Park has paid with his job. Fair? Unfair? It certainly doesn’t seem unreasonable. He believed his own hype, but most importantly Ibrox fell for it hook, line and sinker. They thought they were getting a scouting genius, but he was simply another spoke in the wheel at Celtic.
Our scouting system works. There is no doubt about that at all. It delivers.
It can find good players, and we have the money to spend not only on that system but on bringing those players to our club. Sometimes – as with Jota – you have to pay a few quid to bring these guys in. Ibrox would never have been able to do that deal. It’s just one of the many, many things they miss about how the system at Celtic works. Many of these guys weren’t cheap.
And Ibrox has been trying to do it on the cheap, although that might not be the right choice of words. Say rather that they’ve done it on the cheap because what other choice was there? There will be even less choice going forward as the full consequences of blowing up the summer become clearer to them. And that’s part of what they’re missing.
Even if no Celtic player from the summer was looking like a success, we can take that on the chin. We can send these guys on loan, write off the loss and next season spend again what we did here. Even if every player flops, we could write that window off as we had to do with our COVID summer where we spend £6 million on Barkas and squandered more on Ajeti.
That’s why the system at Celtic is defended so vocally by so many. When you get right down to the nitty gritty of it, it delivers more often than not. It finds a certain standard of player. It finds not only good first team footballers, but saleable assets who enhance the squad and the balance sheet both. The whole thing is built on solid, sustainable foundation.
Ibrox never attempted to build those foundations, and so what Park inherited was a badly funded mess and even if he’d been ten times better at his job than he was, he was never going to get that up to the standard they wanted … the standard of Celtic’s.
It was doomed. So too is whatever they are trying to build right now, because like the Park experiment, it’ll be done cheap. It will be done without the necessary ground being laid first.
How do we know that? We know it because they just tore that ground up when they pushed Park out the door. How much of his own planning was already in place when they brought their new director of football in? Whatever was there, it’s leaving with him.
The situation over there is as chaotic as it ever was. They continue trying to do it like Celtic, without understanding what it is that we do. Their problems are never going to lessen until they realise that and either quit trying to be us or take it seriously, fund scouting and analytics at the expense of the first team for a couple of seasons and then hope it works.
John Park was not the answer. He departs Ibrox in exactly the manner I always expected; as yet another answer to the wrong question. They never improve because they never learn.