Rodgers Focus On Youth Is Great, But It Can’t Be At The Expense Of Celtic Spending.

One of the themes we return to on this site over and over again is the one about perception versus reality, and the perception this board has allowed to harden into reality is that they will talk a good game about not wanting tens of millions sitting in the bank but find every way they can to keep that money there and to justify it afterwards.

Another of the themes this site returns to over and over again is to deny, flatly, the idea that we would rather see money spent than develop our own young talent. There are people who will say that if you’re spending big money on players that you can’t do that. I think that’s nonsense, and anyone who watches how the top clubs do it knows it is.

Look at Manchester City. They have one of the best club sides that’s been assembled in Europe in my lifetime. They can spend whatever they want on football players, and yet the shining light in their team right now, possibly even more so than Haaland, is Phil Foden, who has a claim at the moment to being the most exciting player in Europe. He’s a graduate of their own academy. They spent massive sums on players, and he is better than almost any of them.

We can produce top class players, but as I said the other day in the Daniel Kelly piece, it all works better if they step into a team which is already winning, a team which is already hitting form and at its peak. City didn’t throw Foden into games; he was eased into their side and we need to be very careful that we do the same, and damn all the white noise around us.

There are hacks – some of them, like Ewan Murray – who constantly accuse us of not promoting our youth. It’s garbage. We have a proud history of it and no team would spend tens of millions needlessly if it had superstars in the academy side. Our young players will get more opportunities under Rodgers than they would ever get under other managers, because that’s one of the things he’s famous for. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be thrown in at the deep end.

Nor does it give our board an excuse to keep their hands in their pockets. The team needs a dramatic rebuild this summer and only a fool would deny that. As far as I’m concerned expecting Rodgers to fill some of those gaps with unproven kids would be an even bigger disgrace than the chairman letting his son play Football Manager for real this summer with £18 million of Celtic’s money, which is to say your money and my money.

So whilst I welcome the idea that Rodgers might be quietly working away on his own little in-house revolution, and whilst Daniel Kelly is a player who looks like he has something big to offer us, and whilst I’d like to believe that Rocco Vata will be next to sign a deal and show us that he’s not just another version of Mikey Johnston, I do harbour that concern.

Nobody has to sell me on the idea of youth players getting to strut their stuff in this side. It’s been far too long since we saw the emergence of a Tierney or a Forrest or a McGregor, and we need to produce some of them if we’re not to lose European squad places as a consequence when the likes of Forrest hang up their boots. It is imperative.

But these guys have to be good enough, and sad to say they need to be better than anything that we’re able to buy or we’re weakening ourselves to nobody’s benefit. But I suspect there are people at the top of our club who would be just fine with that.

It’s this board we have. They have made suspicious minds out of all of us I think, and in some ways maybe we’re just paranoid and more distrustful than we need to be, but there would be a whole lot less of that feeling around if a certain Peter Lawwell were not in the building to inspire so much of it. All this coincides with his return and whether that’s the perception or the reality really couldn’t matter less; as long as he’s there these suspicions will remain.

That was the madness inherent in bringing him back and giving him the big chair. That was the arrogance to think we’d either not notice nor care that the policy which was working was junked to let him have the controls in his hands again.