Martin O’Neill Would Have Been A Wonderful Figurehead At Celtic.

Earlier today, I wrote about my dismay at the latest Celtic news about two of the candidates for our vacant Under 18 manager’s job. I cannot believe that we would appoint either of the two complete novices who the media are talking about, in particular when the manager is talking about wanting to bring more youth talent into the team.

This afternoon, Martin O’Neill was confirmed as the latest boss of the English League Manager’s Association, and I can’t help but think that if our club was seriously going to recruit from the old boys network, they would have been far better off had they spoken to our legendry ex boss about returning to this club in some capacity.

He would have made an outstanding chairman. He is educated, smart and knows football inside and out. He has the respect on the global stage of all those other players who have held the European Cup aloft. As a manager he has reached European finals and won major honours. He has coached his national team. He ticks every box you could want in terms of being an ambassador. But we chose to protect Lawwell’s climb through the ranks instead.

Don’t get me wrong, Lawwell is an experienced man and he is a half decent at the bureaucratic stuff. But as Lee Congerton said the other day, Lawwell is nothing more than a jumped up accountant and our club could would been better placed, I think, with a football man instead, and O’Neill, who studied law and is articulate as well as intelligent, would have been a magnificent asset.

He would have been just as good as the head of recruitment, where he would have been able to recognise qualify footballers, and been receptive to the needs of the manager and would have clearly understood the unique perspectives of the man in the dugout. He would have been absolutely brilliant as a director of football or a sporting director.

So why didn’t our club bring in this highly qualified and experienced individual? Why did we mess about with the likes of Mark Lawwell? There are actually some good arguments against it. For a start, a man like O’Neill casts a big shadow, both upwards and downwards, and there are a lot of managers who might not want to work under someone like him.

But I think that argument is less valid in the case of Martin O’Neill that it might be under a different but equally experienced candidate. He and Rodgers would have worked together beautifully, and the clear lines of demarcation would have been drawn up well in advance. Everyone knows that this club needs a football department which is completely segregated from the rest of the club, with its budget set out year on year and spent at the manager’s discretion.

That needs a big personality at the helm of it. And Martin O’Neill would have been superb at it. A perfect pedigree, and a Celtic connection into the bargain.

So why didn’t we? Maybe he didn’t want to come and work at Celtic. Maybe he didn’t want to take on such a large and difficult responsibility. And maybe – and this is what I think may well lie at the heart of it – he didn’t want to come unless he had total control.

I think it’s simply that shadow, cast upwards, and the idea that O’Neill (or really any football person) would want complete autonomy and would not allow the bean-counters to make strategic decisions in any area where he held sway. Their job is to find ways to give the manager a bigger budget every year, not to decide for him how it is spent and especially not on whom.

These people just do not want to give that kind of control up. It’s why we’ve talked about a full football department structure for years but never bothered to put one of them in place, and that’s part of why hardly any part of the football structure works the way it should. With a sporting director or director of football like O’Neill, we would not be going out to hire the likes of Charlie Mulgrew or Jonny Hayes to sit at the helm of the Under 18 team.

Because, again, this is the difference between what some executive knows and what a football person understands; they seem to think that you can throw anyone into such a role, no matter how minimally qualified they are, and get results. A football person would understand why those jobs require more than just “I played for Celtic” on the CV.

Perhaps O’Neill was approached and said no. Perhaps he likes the quiet life and knows that a full-time role at Celtic would not have provided that; he’d have been right in that regard. This club is not boring, not lately anyway, and it’s not an easy gig.

But we need somebody in that role, and that’s more obvious as time goes by. And it cannot be another jumped up number cruncher type.

We need someone with the gravitas and the skills to do the job properly … a football person. Whether connected to Celtic or not, that’s not important. But someone who understand how to build, and run, a football department and who the manager will work with well.