Rangers died, others thrived: How 2012 shaped Celtic as much as the club from Ibrox.

Last week, as everyone knows, marked the anniversary of Administration Day. It’s been 13 years since those events, and I don’t think any of us back then could have grasped the enormous impact they would have—not just on the club across the city, now in its second iteration, but on Celtic as well.

When Rangers went into administration, they had won the last three Scottish Premier League titles. But the cost of doing so had been momentous. Few realised at the time just how severe those costs were, but within months, it was obvious that Rangers would not emerge from that crisis intact. The only debate was about what would happen to the NewCo. Thankfully, that debate was won by those on the side of the righteous.

Over the rest of this week, I’ll be doing an article a day on different aspects of the 2012 collapse—its wider impacts, the lessons that should have been learned, who the real failures were, and why 2012 still matters in Scottish football today.

And it does still matter, because the shadow of 2012 looms over everyone connected with the game here. Scottish football is like a ramshackle haunted house; the ghosts of 2012 still stalk its rooms and halls.

We all know how devastating 2012 was for the club across the city. I’ll explore that in more detail later this week. But the first two articles focus on Celtic—because, as the title of this piece suggests, the impact on us was just as profound. The events of 2012 radically changed Celtic’s policies and, whether by accident or design, those changes were largely for the better.

To understand where we are, you have to understand where we were.

We started the 2011-12 season having lost three titles in a row, with Neil Lennon at the helm, where he’d been for almost 18 months. I never believed he should have got the job in the first place, and I certainly didn’t think he should have survived his failure to win the title the previous season. We were a considerable distance behind the Ibrox club midway through that critical campaign.

At Kilmarnock, we had been 3-0 down but somehow rallied and turned the game around. That day saved Lennon’s job—and probably a lot of others at Celtic Park, too.

But even I have to admit that our run of form in November and December that season was absolutely remarkable. A 15-point lead for Rangers was overturned in early January when Joe Ledley’s goal gave us a 1-0 win over an Ibrox side managed by the utterly hapless Ally McCoist. There had been rumours throughout the January transfer window that their club was in severe financial distress.

They sold Nikica Jelavi? in that window for £5.5 million despite having already fallen behind us in the league race. That should have been the biggest sign of all that things were in freefall behind the scenes.

We eventually won that title by 20 points. Their floundering club had 10 points deducted for going into administration before circling the drain and vanishing over the summer.

The Celtic board’s decision to retain Lennon for the following season was obviously difficult to argue against—he had earned it during that title winning campaign with a spectacular run of 17 league victories in a row. As I said earlier about last season, no one could deny that we were worthy champions and that it was our form that won us the title, not just the collapse of the Ibrox club.

Lennon proved adept at doing more with less—that, in fact, may have been his downfall. The following season, with no Ibrox club in the league, we had one of our most successful Champions League campaigns ever, including that stunning win against Barcelona, which got us into the last 16.

Yet every single Neil Lennon transfer window seemed to require him to turn a profit. The following season, his reward for that staggering Champions League achievement was to see his side weakened in every qualifying round, with a key player sold before each and every one of those games.

It was a self-destructive tendency that we’ve repeated over and over again. But nobody suffered from it more than Lennon did, and it was no surprise when he chose not to stick around.

Then the board made one of its most astonishing decisions—and I still don’t believe they fully understood what they were doing.

I don’t think it was some brilliant strategic move; I think it was a lazy decision, born of complacency and the lack of a domestic challenger. We had been preparing to appoint Ronny Deila as Lennon’s assistant. When Lennon left, we gave Ronny the job instead. That decision had profound repercussions.

When I say the Ibrox club’s collapse in 2012 profoundly changed Celtic as well, this is what I mean. The Deila appointment put us on a different trajectory. That turned out to be one of the most progressive, sensible, and forward-thinking things we did in the years between Rangers’ liquidation and the newco climbing through the leagues.

Ronny might be the most widely misunderstood manager in our history. European performances were not great under him, but then, he didn’t have any of the tools Lennon had. He was overseeing a major rebuild. He restructured training. He changed the players’ diets. He laid the foundations upon which Brendan Rodgers would later reap the rewards.

Most importantly, it was Ronny who saw the potential in two outstanding Celtic youth players—Kieran Tierney and Callum McGregor. He didn’t just keep them at the club; he built the team around them. We’ve been benefiting from the McGregor decision ever since, and the sale of Tierney not only brought in tens of millions, but he’s now set to return, meaning those benefits will continue.

Had an Ibrox club remained in the league, it’s entirely possible we would have continued down the same road as before—hiring Championship-level English managers, sticking with the old ways, failing to evolve.

I don’t think the board knew how radical Ronny’s changes would be. I don’t think they planned it. But that appointment would have been impossible had there been an Ibrox club in the top flight, challenging us for the title. We only made that decision because we could. It was either an act of strategic brilliance (which I don’t believe) or blind luck that turned out to be transformative.

Of course, some now look back on Ronny’s time as the era when Celtic Park’s top tier was closed, when attendances dropped. And yes, a section of the fanbase did stay away. But was that due to Ronny? Or was it because there was no Ibrox club in the league? That’s still up for debate.

The Scottish Cup semi-final loss to Mark Warburton’s Ibrox club was another transformative moment. The board realised that it couldn’t afford to risk Ronny going up against what the media was hailing as a team which might challenge for the following year’s title. To fill those empty seats, they had to go box office.

And that led us to Brendan Rodgers.

That decision altered the club’s trajectory once again.

The absence of an Ibrox club in the league allowed us to appoint Ronny Deila, and he worked his revolution almost entirely out of sight of the average fan. Even today, much of it remains misunderstood, but it was critical in reshaping the club’s internal thinking, paving the way for someone like Rodgers to step in and seamlessly integrate his own ideas and level of professionalism.

And it was the emergence of a new Ibrox club—one that seemed to be in decent shape and on its way back to the top flight—that allowed us to reassess our budgets. We realised Celtic Park could be filled again, but to guarantee that, we needed a box-office manager. That led us to the appointment of Rodgers and, in the aftermath, a flood of silverware. We are where we are today because of that.

There is no doubt in my mind that the events of 2012 radically altered Celtic’s trajectory. The ultimate irony is that some of the decisions made at the time—ones that looked like signs of complacency—actually laid the groundwork for a complete shift in attitude and approach and I genuinely wish I could believe that this was all part of a grand strategy, that it was thought through and executed as a matter of policy.

Some will say it doesn’t matter because the outcome has been overwhelmingly positive. But I would argue that it does matter. It matters if we stumbled into this era by accident, and it concerns me that we might have.

There are two pieces of damning evidence suggesting it wasn’t intentional—that it was luck, not design. The decision to reappoint Neil Lennon, which effectively undid much of the structural progress initiated by Ronny and then Rodgers, and the manner in which we hired Ange Postecoglou—a left-field, last-ditch gamble taken in desperation after failing to land Eddie Howe.

Had Ange arrived through a deliberate, well-thought-out process—had he been our number-one choice all along—I would feel far more assured about the club’s ability to handle life after Rodgers. Because between them, Rodgers and Ange have shown us what Celtic can be. And now, it’s on all of us to ensure we don’t veer off this path. The next appointment the Celtic board makes for the dugout must be someone of the same calibre and vision as those two.

The pursuit of Howe does give me some confidence that lessons have been learned. Because Howe would have been a progressive, top-tier choice, and none of us would have regretted his appointment. The very fact we went after him in the first place suggests the club was, at least, reaching for the next rung of the ladder. That was reinforced in the decision to bring Rodgers back—the absolute best man available.

What is absolutely clear is that, in 2011, we were a club stuck in the mud run by people who were very much of a mind that going toe-to-toe with an Ibrox club, trading trophies and titles, was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

And we know this because, for at least three years, we had been spinning our wheels, with those in charge demonstrating no imaginative flair and no clear idea of how we were ever going to move forward.

And then 2012 changed everything.

Suddenly, we were the last standing superpower. That forced us to reassess the club, to rethink our approach, to change the way we did things.

Whether you view Ronny Deila’s appointment as a sign of downsizing or lowering our ambitions, the reality is that his two years in charge laid strong foundations for what followed. Even the Hampden defeat that led to his departure had a positive effect—it finally shook us out of the last remnants of complacency and dragged us fully into a new future.

Yes, we missed opportunities along the way. We failed to do certain things that should have been done. I’ll talk about those things later in the week; suffice to say we weren’t the only club or institution which failed at some level.

But from the moment the first Ibrox club entered administration, we were set on a brand-new course. And I know there were people at Celtic who weren’t happy about that shift—those content to exist in the Glasgow Derby bubble, who never wanted to see it burst.

But the reality is undeniable: we are in a vastly better place now than we were then. We are stronger, richer, and more successful than we could have imagined in the era when we had lost those three titles in a row. That is an indisputable fact.

2012 forced us to change. And even those of us who question whether that change was by accident or design cannot deny how momentous it has been and how successful we have been since. Nothing about Celtic will ever be the same again. 2012 made us what we are now. There must be no going back.

Photo by Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images

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