The Celtic Boss “Hopes” For A Happy Ending To This Window. He’s Being Hung Out To Dry Here.

Yesterday, the manager held his weekly press conference, and while some tried to put a positive spin on it, I found nothing positive in it at all—not a single thing.

We have a manager talking about being “hopeful” that the club will make signings when the need for it is so obvious. The word “hopeful” shouldn’t even be part of the discussion; this is critical for the board right now.

Rodgers sounds like a man who has accepted his fate, and that fate is to see our club downsized while he tries to put on a brave face. He said yesterday that he loves it at Celtic, that this is the club where he wants to be. I take that the same way I did when I sat at the fan media conference that welcomed him back to Celtic Park, where he guaranteed us that he would be here for the full term of his contract unless he was sacked.

This is not like last time. Rodgers will not burn his bridges with the supporters after doing so much to repair that relationship. He will stay the course, grin and bear it, and, domestically anyway, he will most probably endure.

We will likely be champions again, adding another title to his collection, and perhaps a couple more managerial scalps from Ibrox too.

But when his three-year deal is up at the end of next season, Rodgers will go, and he won’t look back. While he may never say a bad word against those running the club, football is a small, gossipy world, and everyone in it will know about the restrictions placed on him, the way he had to work, and the kind of people he had to work for.

We will never have a manager as good as him again while these people are in charge. We will never again attract an elite-level coach to a club with such small-minded, low-ambition leadership.

Last season, during the summer window, when Rodgers confessed that he would work with what he was given, I knew we were in trouble. I stopped believing that window would produce anything of value, and it didn’t. While some were hopeful on the last day of the window for a big signing to change the mood, I knew there wouldn’t be one. I didn’t even bother to stay up for it. I didn’t have the radio or TV on. I wasn’t monitoring every broadcast.

Like Rodgers, I had accepted the inevitability of a letdown, and I’ve already accepted that for this year, and there’s still a week to go. And I’ve accepted it because Rodgers has accepted it.

He’s even backtracked on us signing a third striker; he knows it simply won’t happen. He’s already given up on it, and he’s talking about Maeda being our forward line backup. That’s fine in itself, but no one can pretend that this was the plan, because it wasn’t. We know it wasn’t, because Rodgers said so himself that he wanted that third forward in.

It’s not as if he’s suddenly discovered that Maeda can do that job, everyone’s know that since we brought him here. Rodgers did not decide this. He was left with no choice.

If he’s given up on that, there’s no reason to believe he hasn’t given up on a whole lot more. Rumours link us with a Lyon reserve. Guess who just signed for Lyon? Tanner Tessmann, one of our summer-long targets, mentioned weeks ago. Did we even make a bid? Could we even be bothered? But we’ve opened talks with some “project” from there. This transfer policy, if that’s what we’re still calling it, makes me want to vomit.

Imagine how Rodgers must feel.

All his grand ambitions have been left in the dust this summer by a board with no excuses, because we all know the money is there. Last night’s news that O’Riley is gone only means that the mountain of cash is even bigger. With just days left in the window, we’re heading into an SPFL fixture on Sunday at a tough ground, weaker as a squad than we were when last season finished. That is not just scandalous, that is unforgivable.

Yesterday, I posted a lengthy piece debunking the idea that this is how transfer windows work, because no transfer window in recent memory at Celtic has worked this way. There are so many obstacles in our way now. There’s no point in believing there will be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I genuinely do not believe it.

I keep talking about the people who run Celtic not having a strategic thought in their heads, and they keep proving they are among the worst strategists I have ever seen. In times to come, people will look at the signing of Adam Idah as the moment when all the artifice was cast aside and these people were revealed as absolute amateurs—absolute fools being completely outclassed by others in this business, far smarter and far better than they are.

We had one fit striker while we were low-balling them. And they waited. Kyogo has a history of injuries, and so they waited because they knew they could afford to wait and that we couldn’t. They named their price, we said, “Here’s what we’re offering,” and they waited for us to come back with a higher bid. We tried to play it cool, to pretend we were playing some tough guy game. We never had the stones for it. When they called our bluff, we paid their price.

I’ve never seen a club get itself in such a mess over the simple act of signing players when it’s sitting on a large sum of money.

Let me tell you what two problems we’re going to face in the coming week, and it’s so obvious that a child could see it, and it’s been obvious to some of us for many months, us bedwetters, apparently smart enough though to see landmines Celtic are blundering into.

Someone asked Brendan yesterday if there is a cut-off point beyond which we can no longer countenance selling players, and he said, “Of course.” I strongly suspect that’s why the board decided to sanction the sale of O’Riley last night, before this weekend, because they didn’t want to test Rodgers’ deadline.

But here’s the thing: what’s good for us is also good for other clubs.

The lunacy of how we’ve gone about this business will be made clearer than ever in the next few days as we face those two obvious and easily foreseeable issues.

The first is that if we want genuine quality, we won’t be giving any club we approach enough time to sign a replacement for the guy we buy. That’s where we are. The same problem Rodgers identified yesterday will apply to us repeatedly over the next week. It was so clear to some of us months ago that we have been screaming about it at the top of our voices.

No less a person than the manager himself confirmed that after a certain point, Celtic will not entertain any bid for any player because replacing them will not be possible. But our board’s transfer policy—the one to which he’s now tied—is to do our own incoming business at the very last minute, facing that obvious, daunting obstacle.

The other one is even more apparent.

Celtic was always going to face certain difficulties in this window because of the enormous pile of money we’re sitting on in the bank. Had we done our business at the start of the window, we would have looked like a well-run club trying to get things done so the manager could integrate new players into the team on the American tour, as we all believed he would. Our commanding fiscal position would not necessarily have been an issue for us.

Now, in the final week, we’re desperate to sign players. Desperate, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows we’ve dragged our feet for the whole window. Everyone who watches these things is well aware that we’re now in full-on panic mode. And we’ve just sold Matt O’Riley for £25 million-plus, so not only are we desperate, we’re desperate and rich, and there has never been a situation where those two things have been combined where all involved didn’t seek to take full advantage of it. That too was a blatantly obvious pitfall, and we’ve stepped into it as though blindfolded. That is utter idiocy on the part of this board.

You know, the luckiest thing that has happened to us in the last few weeks is the injury to Kyogo which finally forced us to pay Norwich’s fee. Because if we hadn’t done it last week we’d have gone into this one with their club knowing full well we were out of time to explore other options and they could, and would, have stuck an extra couple of million on the price-tag, and our manager would have been brought to his limits if they’d then refused to pay.

Every club we approach now will jack up their fees because they know what our situation is. Every player we try to sign will cost us more, and that means deals we could have got over the line weeks ago will either not happen or we’ll pay through the nose for them.

The club could have got players before selling key assets, and saved themselves this trouble, but they didn’t, because they never think beyond getting the money in the bank before it can be spent. That’s put us in the worst possible position to negotiate deals.

This stinks in so many ways—from the brazen disrespect it shows the manager, who they are now blatantly pissing on from a great height, to the way it reveals the appalling depths of their contempt for those of us who sit in the stands.

But most of all it shows how self-destructive this whole window has been. The boss is silently fuming and you can tell he is. They’ve made a mug out of him. The fans, those who can see straight, are not so silently fuming, and the away support at Paisley should make its feeling clear, and its disgust registered in decibels although the time to do that, as I said, was at the last home game because the next one is after the window shuts and even if I thought there would be car-park protests prior to a game against the Ibrox club – and I don’t – it will be far too late for them to matter.

If this window ends as looks absolute certain now, it will do immense harm to the relationship between fans and those who run the club.

The negative perception of these people will harden into fact; that means nothing they do from here on in will remove it or change it and the disgust a lot of our fans feel for Lawwell will expand to cover Nicholson, and I cannot make and I will not make any argument in his defence.

If, as some suspect, their plan is to spend a huge part of the surplus on stadium redevelopments, that has no appeal whatsoever if it comes at the cost of the team and that’s how it will forever more be viewed. That’s disco lights on a much bigger scale, and that was the window, of course, that pushed the manager to the brink last time.

That’s what he got – those and Mulumbu – instead of John McGinn and the others he’d earmarked.

That’s what those lights mean to me, and what they will always mean to me; they are what we bought instead of the player who would have anchored our midfield for the next decade. That’s where our warped priorities lie now.