Celtic’s left back situation reveals the need for proper succession planning at the club.

In my earlier article today, I said that Celtic’s motto and transfer policy for the next campaign should be No Step Back. But I’ll go even further than that because stories last night that Greg Taylor is set to sign a pre-contract agreement with Dinamo Zagreb should not have surprised a single one of us.

Now, it should be said that Rodgers spoke today about this and he isn’t ready to concede defeat on this yet, so Taylor may not have inked the deal at the time of writing this. But it’s been evident for a while that Greg might be leaving for a new challenge.

And as he’s given us nothing but good service during his time at the club, there isn’t a single one of us who should wish him ill for that. As long as he continues to perform and produce on the pitch for Celtic, we should be perfectly fine with the decisions he’s made and understanding of them.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t present Celtic with a bit of a dilemma—because of course, it does. He’ll be here for the rest of the season, but we have to wonder how much we’re going to get out of him in the course of it.

I am always wary of a player still being in the team when he’s only got six months left on his deal, and it’s strange, to say the least, that we find ourselves with him as our first choice in this situation.

But as I said yesterday, Ryan Christie was in the same position, and he gave us nothing but outstanding service in the latter stages of his deal. He didn’t let it bother him, didn’t let it affect him—he continued to play brilliantly right up until the moment he left. So as strange as this might seem, these things sometimes work themselves out.

If Taylor has signed a pre-contract, his future is secure. This isn’t a player entering the last six months of his deal without a club to go to in the next campaign—that’s a different order of risk for a footballer.

But having a first-choice left-back with six months left on his deal and a second-choice left-back who’s only here on loan is a ridiculous position for a club our size to be in. And again, it’s very revealing of the short-term thinking that goes on inside our walls. That has to come to an end.

We do this too often. We apply sticking plasters to gaping wounds. We’re here right now because there was no forward planning. We knew Taylor was in the last year of his contract in the summer, and yet we signed a loanee—and not even a particularly impressive one at that as his backup. I keep saying this: we need to do better.

Tierney is coming, and he’s coming as our first choice, excellent. That’s as good as we could hope for—if he’s fit, which is my only concern. But we also need to sign a really good backup. Someone young, but talented enough that if Tierney does break down, we can put him straight into the team without any worries.

A sticking-plaster solution won’t do.

If we bring in another loanee and then find ourselves needing to replace Tierney in the team regularly because he isn’t playing enough games, we’ll be back in the same mess, scrambling to sign two left-backs all over again.

I don’t like loan deals unless they come with an option to buy. And even then, I’m still pretty leery of them because they don’t give you certitude.

What this team needs is a period of stability, not upheaval. That’s why I said No Step Back should be the mantra. We should be looking to retain the best players we have for the next campaign. They’ve already proved what they can do this season, and they’re only going to get better the longer they stay together.

If a player is absolutely desperate to leave and banging on the door, that’s one thing. But I think with Rodgers in charge, things are as settled as they’ve been in a long time. And we need to be thinking two steps ahead for once—proactive instead of reactive.

Succession planning, as Rodgers calls it, should be the watchword of this team. Bringing in players on loan is a short-term answer to a problem that can simply be solved by spending money. I understand why that’s a sticking point—because this club doesn’t like to do that too much.

But it’s about time they did.

It’s about time some of the vast wealth sitting in our reserves was put out on the pitch where it belongs. There are still holes in this team. Not many, to be fair, and that’s a credit to Rodgers and the way this rebuild has gone. But they exist. And the left side of the defence is a glaring one that needs to be fixed.

So even with Kieran Tierney coming home, we still need a signing there. And it has to be a player willing to come in and dig in for the long term.

We know that under Rodgers, players will get their chances. The rotation system works well, and we know that Tierney may not be fit enough to play a full campaign. So, whoever signs won’t just be coming in as a backup—they’ll be a full part of the squad. That should make the signing easier to do.

But it has to be done. We can’t keep getting ourselves into this situation, where we’re looking at three or four positions to fill because we’ve neglected them for too long, despite the money sitting in the bank.

In Taylor’s case, not only have we probably known for a while that he was going, but we should have been looking to upgrade him for better; that’s Tierney, of course. That’s pure Brendan Rodgers thinking. And again, it drives home the point—if this guy is backed, he will do some job for us and the more we back him, the longer he might stay.

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