Brendan Rodgers Is The Best Celtic Manager We’re Likely To Get Right Now.

Any conversation about where we are as a club and where we might be headed to will naturally involve a discussion about Brendan Rodgers. To me, that’s probably the easiest bit of the debate to actually have. Rodgers is one of our key assets. He was the best available manager we could have gotten under the circumstances of the time. In the current circumstances, which are in their own way even less favourable, this is even more obviously the case.

Everywhere online, a fierce debate rages over Rodgers and one question comes up over and over again; why did he ever return to Celtic in the first place?

Let me combat a few myths right away. The first of which is that he came back here because he was desperate and had no other options. That’s very obviously not true. For starters, Rodgers was not even interested in an immediate return to football. Several Premiership sides had expressed an interest in him and he had turned them down. There was an offer from Saudi Arabia. Rodgers would not be short of offers even now, and they’d be for big money at that.

Secondly is the idea that he “ruined” Leicester City. In fact, Rodgers performed well at Leicester until his final year. He secured two fifth place finishes in the league, won the FA Cup, reached the semi-final of the Europa Conference League. The context of his final year is much misunderstood; their parent company is based in Asia and were massively impacted by the COVID pandemic, and thus the club budget was severely affected, and Rodgers found himself under pressure to make cuts. For a club like Leicester, in that league, that’s virtually a death sentence.

The question as to why Rodgers returned might have many answers. Maybe it’s like he said, maybe he believed there was unfinished business here. Rodgers has never been comfortable knowing that he left behind him a lot of animosity and bitterness. I believed his apology when he offered it at the first press conference after his return. For starters, I never expected him to give us one, and the one he did make was refreshingly short of BS. He wasn’t sorry for taking the decision to go, but he was sorry that he hurt people in the process.

So what I think happened, and there’s much supporting evidence for this, is that he genuinely believed that the “system” at Celtic was different. He’d watched the club rebuild the squad in a very constructive, sensible, manager led way in Ange’s first campaign. He’d seen them go out and buy quality footballers for good money; let’s not forget that Ange paid a lot of cash for some of the players in his squad. £4.6 million on Kyogo. £4 million on Starfelt. £6 million each on Carter Vickers and Jota and a handful of others.

Even with the unwelcome presence of Mark Lawwell in the building, Ange was still able to pay nearly £4 million for Bernabei (I shudder reading that), £3.5 million for Johnston and £2.5 million for Oh. Rodgers clearly believed that’s how it would work. We can’t deny that from the outside looking in the signs might have been very promising indeed. On the surface of it, he had a high value squad at a club that looked willing to spend good money on the right players.

He probably believed several other things too. First amongst them that Mark Lawwell had been “recommended” by Ange and thus was a top tier professional. Ange was grateful to Lawwell for suggesting him to Celtic, but there is zero evidence that they ever worked together in any way, and as I pointed out in a previous article, Ange knew at the moment Lawwell came in that they were never going to form some sort of dream team; he was waiting for the offer which would allow him to leave the club, so we cannot take that “recommendation” seriously.

But a lot of people cite it even now as “proof” that Lawwell junior knows what he’s doing, so I cannot hold it against Brendan Rodgers if he believed the same thing. He may also have believed, as many of our fans continue to, that Peter Lawwell, as chairman, holds only a ceremonial role. It was, after all, Nicholson and Christopher McKay who went out to Spain to convince him to take the job. No-one called Lawwell was involved, and it is Desmond Rodgers frequently talks to.

Rodgers, on some level, just trusted that the process worked. That it no longer had Lawwell at the helm of it. That the way we signed players, and the level of ambition, had shifted in a positive direction. His comments at the time all suggest that he had an appreciation for what he saw as having unfolded over the previous two seasons. He believed that we were prepared, as a club, to take that big forward step which we were all calling for.

When Ange left the board had to pull a big rabbit out of the hat, and Rodgers was the best manager available who our structure would allow us to get. You know what I think happened? I think they painted the best picture they could to get him, even if it was a misleading one. Once they got their man, they reverted to exactly the plan they had intended to follow, one where we went right back to buying projects and punts, the Lawwell strategy in other words.

Rodgers had given a huge hostage to fortune at that very first fan media conference, when he said that he would be here for the full three years unless he was sacked.

That meant they could treat him however he wanted and he could not resign.

Are we able to dismiss, entirely, the idea that they heard that and decided to take advantage of it? He also spoke about “understanding the policy” more; that was another daft thing to have said.

I have written from the first that you cannot expect Rodgers to play “Ange Ball” style football; he is a different kind of manager with different ideas. The board could have looked for someone willing to play Ange Ball, but it wouldn’t have been Ange. There is a reason Spurs went for the real thing and not some pale imitation. You cannot ask a manager to replicate another manager’s style, even with the same players. If you could, Barcelona would never have looked back from Guardiola’s departure and Man Utd would still be in the Ferguson era albeit with a different nameplate on the manager’s door. One man cannot take over one man’s team without changes.

And Rodgers identified the problems, as he saw them, with this team the minute he first watched it and let’s not kid ourselves, they are the same problems we identified. No physical presence in midfield or in attack. Small full-backs and wingers who are easily bullied off the ball. Pacy defenders required to play a high defensive line. We all saw that even under Ange, and it was the reason we didn’t move forward in Europe. How can we be shocked by the manager accepting these issues are real? How can we be shocked that this team can’t play the way he wants?

I don’t care how many people still cannot get past their hatred for Rodgers; this man is still an elite coach and still the best chance we have of turning the success of last season and the one before into something sustained, something that lays a foundation for more.

If Rodgers goes at the end of the season, or God forbid, as some seem to want, now what then?

Well if he goes now, you might as well take the league trophy and drop it off at Ibrox. We’re not replacing Rodgers with a miracle worker at this stage of the campaign; even the act of sacking a manager still sitting, at the time of writing, as the top of the league would send a signal to the watching world that we were in an anarchic state.

Looking at the off-field mess this club is in right now, where everyone sees clearly that we have no long-term goals and a small-time ambition, looking at the way we refuse to reach for the next rung of the ladder and have a policy of selling our best players as soon as they start to blossom, watching the calamitous signing policy irritate Rodgers for the second time, it should be obvious that getting any manager of quality is going to be an impossible sell even at the best of times.

Without that, what do we end up with?

It’s as I said last night; those managers whose ideals belong in football’s dark ages or the managerial equivalent of a punt. I have no confidence in either of those options.

One doesn’t prepare you for the present far less the future (The Mooch is a case in point) and the other has the odds heavily stacked against it as almost every club without a boss is looking for the next big thing, the boss with a hint of gold-dust.

Almost all of those experiments badly fail.

Whatever you think of the Rodgers appointment, whatever you believe about why he returned, you will have difficulty shaking the notion that those above him have made enormous mistakes.

If you think it was a mistake to appoint him, knowing what his transfer priorities would be, you’re saying our board screwed up. If you think he was appointed believing those priorities would be met then you need to hold them accountable for presenting him with a proposal that convinced him of that. It takes both parties to get us into a mess like this, but I know which one I hold most responsible. Even if you disagree, the conduct of those above Rodgers is shocking.

Whichever side you end up on, you cannot but accept that the summer transfer window was an absolute mess, to nobody’s benefit, and January was the same.

With those things in mind, how can you possibly trust the people who hired him to get the next appointment right? The Lennon decision was a disaster. They let Howe string them along for months and then they made an off-cuff decision to appoint a manager in the J League.

We are lucky that worked, but I’ve always described that as a gambler betting the house and his kid’s college fund on red or black at the roulette wheel. Do we hail him as a genius because he got the colour right, or do we recognise him as a reckless, dangerous fool who made a lunatic decision and got lucky?

These people have no long-term plan for Celtic.

You can see that when you look at the transfer strategy. They don’t see signing footballers as something that makes the team better and helps us go further. They see footballers as assets to be developed and sold on. They use the team-sheet to augment the balance sheet.

So those who want Rodgers gone, be careful what you wish for.

The problems in this house start at the top of it and the next manager will have to work under the same conditions, and that in itself is going to limit the quality of the replacement we would end up with.

The idea that we should get rid of Rodgers is dangerous.

He should have been backed by the board, or there was no point in hiring him.

By God, we, the fans, need to back him now.

If this season is going to be rescued, it’ll be him and the players who do it. No-one else can. No-one else will. It is Brendan Rodgers or bust.