The fall and fall and fall of Phillipe Clement.

It is not often that you can tell someone is doomed from the moment they start a new job, but from almost the day Philip Clement became manager of the club across the city, his countdown clock was ticking away in the background.

I never thought he was a good manager, but even if he had been a great one, the odds were stacked against him from day one. He was, to all intents and purposes, a dead man walking. Almost everyone who sits in the managerial seat over there is simply living on borrowed time.

That’s why I don’t advise any of them to sign a 12-month rolling contract—because all of them will be lucky if they last that long. And the one consolation when they’re fired is that they can take a few bucks out the door.

I knew Rodgers was going to see off Michael Beale. I knew Rodgers was going to see this guy off just as quickly. These guys would have had to have been very, very good to keep up with a manager with Rodgers’ success record, and neither of them impressed me right from the start as the kind of people who were going to do that.

To be honest, I don’t know what it’s going to take for them to find a manager of the calibre of Rodgers. No one at that level is going to come and work there under any of the conditions that will be imposed on the next incumbent, and certainly not while Rodgers himself is at the helm at Celtic Park.

But Clement may have lasted a little bit longer had something not happened last season that made his doomed endeavour all the more certain to end in utter ruination. And the irony for the rest of his career is going to be that what doomed him to an early grave was that he actually started reasonably well.

Now, I don’t believe that his form was anywhere near as good as the media was hyping it up to be at the time.

There were a couple of results that went against him early, including one against us, which they were happy to gloss over as if it never happened. And they kept on talking about momentum like it was a real thing, a real thing that the club actually had. And the foolish thing is that it wasn’t just the media saying it—the fans believed it. And that happened to coincide with our mid-season slump.

There were two scenarios that would have given this guy breathing space coming into this season. Had he turned up and muddled through, people would have said, “Well, you can’t judge him until next season, because right now he’s working with Beale’s team, and it’s terrible. So give the guy a break.”

He’d have lasted even longer had he actually managed to close the gap. And if some of the players had looked as if they’d improved under him, that would have been a win, and he would at the very least have got to finish this season out.

But instead, he got his nose in front.

See, for a while, it seemed as if he had proven that some of those players were better than they looked under Beale. And after he got them into the lead—after we had lost twice in a week—the expectation level over there went through the roof. It was a false dawn. He hadn’t improved anything; he benefited from the natural bounce that a new manager sometimes gets in a dressing room.

And I said at the time, “This is the worst possible thing that can happen to this guy. This is a disaster for him, and he doesn’t even know it.”

A manager comes in and inherits a mess. That manager needs time to clean up the mess. A manager like that will get time.

A manager comes in and inherits a mess but makes dramatic improvements and looks as if he’s on the right track. A guy like that is always going to have time.

A guy comes in, looks competent enough that he finds that extra level in good players who’ve just been badly managed, and then that guy gets his nose in front with maybe ten games to go—but then doesn’t get over the line and actually finishes further behind than when he first took the job? That’s a loser.

That’s the guy who had it in his hands and dropped it.

Everyone knows that I don’t see it that way. I think saying that denies Rodgers the credit he deserves because the truth is that Clement never did have it in his hands. The advantage was always with us, so long as we took care of our business. As long as we won our games, we were going to be champions.

Rodgers got the squad to perform miracles in those last dozen matches, and we got there ahead of them. And even without their catastrophic form slump—which came at the worst possible time—we would still be champions, and there is nothing they can say to refute that simple fact. Rodgers gets all the credit and deserves all the credit.

But even as I knew that, I knew their fans would be frustrated and furious about the collapse, and they’d wonder if this guy had bottle. His real nadir came when we left Ibrox with a 3-3 draw, and he celebrated on the pitch like a guy who couldn’t do basic maths—because the basic maths was that if we won our remaining games, we were champions, and there was nothing they could do about it.

We held it in our hands coming out of the game that day, and their fans knew that just as well as ours did. Although there was a little bit of frustration amongst our supporters because we didn’t manage to get the win—even though we’d been in front twice in the closing stages—there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that their celebrations were grossly premature and actually quite ridiculous when put in context.

But that’s what really did for him. That’s where the first doubts set in—when it looked as if he and his players had bottled it when the pressure was on, when the chips were down, and when an opportunity had presented itself that they just couldn’t take. That they just didn’t have it in them to wrench the trophy out of our hands.

That was further emphasised when they came to Hampden for the Scottish Cup final and lost that too. At that point, it was obvious to everyone that he had to start the following season in superb form, or the pressure was just going to mount.

Exiting Europe was the first sign of disaster.

It was not the last. And before we knew it, they were behind in the title race to a significant degree, and their fans were just not going to give him anything like time at that point. At a very early stage of this season—and I mean within weeks of the campaign starting—they already knew they wanted him out.

He’s cried the blues about a lack of resources, and in that, he’s correct. And if you can feel any ounce of human sympathy for the guy, you have to consider that he’s dealing with restrictions few Ibrox bosses ever have, because he’s arrived literally at the fag end of it all, when there’s nothing left to spend.

Which isn’t to say he hasn’t spent money—because he has. But again, you can feel sort of sorry for him because the recruitment options that have been put in front of him stunk to high heaven.

Still, he signed up guys who cost millions and who are never going to make it as footballers at the top level. And that may be the biggest disaster of all, because he was expected to get a tune out of these guys.

Overall, he just wasn’t a very impressive figure, and at times, he was downright weird. One of the things that sealed his fate to some extent was a bizarre interview he gave to The Sun, and I still don’t know what force possessed him to do something so maniacal. He told a national newspaper that he broke up with his wife because she didn’t share his winning mentality and that his kids weren’t even allowed to win at children’s games unless they could prove they deserved to beat him.

And I thought—a man who behaves so abominably towards his loved ones is certainly not going to be a warm and fuzzy presence around the dressing room. Not that you want that in a manager, but you do want some form of human connection.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he amplified that stupidity with an even more ill-judged rant about players having too many babies and how that had affected the form. There was even talk about a “baby ban.” Can you even imagine how that went down in the dressing room or at some of these people’s homes? Can you even imagine having to tell your missus that the manager had said you had to clear your family planning around his schedule? It’s insane. But that’s who he was.

His record leaving is abysmal. In his first seven games against us he secured not a single win. The one he did get would have been impressive except that we were so far ahead the game was a dead rubber. He was a loser at every turn.

And he whined like one. He whined about refs, about the weather, he whined about injuries his own training regimen likely caused. He whined about other clubs. He whined about a lack of respect. Mostly, though, he whined about Celtic and our money and about how he was unable to simply spend, spend, spend.

But it wasn’t Celtic who lost him his job. In the last two weeks, he’s lost to Queen of the South and St Mirren—two teams whose financial muscle isn’t a tenth of what he has at his disposal. So the longer he made that excuse, the weaker it sounded, as the points continued to be dropped at all sorts of grounds against all sorts of clubs, none of whom could compete with the kind of money he was allowed to spend.

I’m always distrustful, first and foremost, of managers who think you can solve every problem by throwing money at it. Listen to Rodgers when he talks about spending—what is he actually saying when he talks about getting the money he needs for this team? He talks about improving them, about taking us to the next level.

He’s not just spending for the sake of it. He’s not just throwing money at a problem. He has identified key areas in the team where the players he has at his disposal won’t be good enough to raise their game to the level needed to compete against teams like Bayern Munich, which is where we should be aspiring to be.

Just look at the guys Rodgers has worked with during his time at this club—he’s turned at least three of them into operators far beyond what they would have been without his coaching. Alistair Johnston, Daizen Maeda, and Nicolas Kühn. He has equipped Matt O’Riley for the rest of his career.

He will leave an indelible mark on other players at this club and make them better footballers than they ever thought they could be. He has got the best years out of Greg Taylor’s career. He has taken Liam Scales—a player signed from the League of Ireland—to the point where he’s now a full international and a Champions League regular.

They say that a good editor can turn a bad book into a good book, but that there is no editor alive who can turn a good book into a great one.

To some degree, the same applies to footballers. If you know what you’re doing, you can make a good player into a great one, but making a good one into a world-class one is a skill no manager in the business has or ever will.

Rodgers has elevated some of these guys beyond the level they should ever have reached—or would ever have reached—without his coaching.

But he cannot make these guys be the players he needs them to be. He cannot turn Liam Scales into Cameron Carter-Vickers, far less a Joshua Kimmich. You can develop Greg Taylor to a certain level, but a guy like Jeffrey Schlupp will always start in the Allianz ahead of him because there’s more talent to work with.

But the fact that Rodgers has improved so many of these guys to the point where Scales or Taylor could have played that game on another night is proof that he has demonstrated talents far in excess of what most managers can do.

Rodgers knows what he wants this team to be, and he knows that coaching alone will not get it there. That’s a very different place from where Clement was. Clement has proved that he’s one of those managers who can’t improve talent beyond what he inherits, and so, of course, every problem he has needs to be fixed by writing a cheque.

That’s one of the reasons I always found it laughable that he talked about being at the centre of a project designed to craft young footballers into saleable assets—he’s nowhere near good enough to be at the helm of a job like that.

He also had a certain European-style arrogance, which fits in very well at Ibrox but which a lot of other people in the game find irritating enough when his team is winning and downright embarrassing when they aren’t.

Because you wonder just what it is that he has to be arrogant about—when he can’t seem to make basic decisions, when he can’t demonstrate any talent for developing footballers, when his tactical naivety is breathtaking. And yet, he still comes across like a lecturer talking to dumb kids.

He made every mistake of his predecessors and a few more that were unique to him. He arrived grossly unprepared for the scrutiny.

He also made the classic error of believing that all the early adulation from the media somehow meant he had friends and allies there—not realising, as we do, that every Ibrox manager gets the same fawning treatment until the wheels start falling off, and then all of them end up hounded to the door.

Because this media has no loyalty and no respect, and it sets these people up just to knock them down again. Nothing gratifies these hacks more than making big predictions that Celtic have finally met their match, only for it to blow up in their faces and leave them looking stupid. He is not the first manager to be stunned at the viciousness with which they turned on him, and he will not be the last.

At least his suffering is over.

He walks away with his pockets full, despite the ridiculous stories that he offered to leave half of his payoff on the table. I do not believe that for a second, but it sounds good, and it might help him find work somewhere else before long. It also spares the Ibrox club the monumental embarrassment of having to admit what the payoff actually cost them and how long they’ll be writing him cheques for.

In his own way, he has been highly entertaining. The “Don’t mention the VAR!” press conference, complete with the funny walk—that was one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed doing this job.

I have a memory that goes all the way back to Walter Smith walking into a media conference and not being asked a single question because the shell-shocked hacks were too scared, or Pedro Caixinha addressing the fans from the bushes after Progrès Niederkorn had battered his side. None of it came close to that absurd, hilarious, unexpected managerial meltdown.

At other times, he has been almost unbearable—the constant complaints, the constant excuses, the constant failure to offer a shred of credit to the opposition. And if we found his lack of personal accountability grating, just how insufferable must he have sounded to the fans across the city who bought season tickets in the expectation that this guy knew what he was doing?

He was in his seat for just 16 months. That can feel like a little or a lot, depending on how you look at it. For the average Ibrox manager, he actually outlasted quite a few of them. Historically, you have to remember that in 69 AD, Rome went through no fewer than four emperors. On that timeline, it sounds pretty impressive.

It’s less impressive when you consider a managerial win ratio lower than Michael Beale’s—but still higher than Steven Gerrard’s. Which is something the media probably don’t want us talking too much about, as some of them rush to anoint him as a future successor and king.

A lot of managers go not with a bang, but a whimper. This guy self-detonated in spectacular style. And the only thing in doubt was how long it would take for the debris to hit the ground. When he lost against Queen’s Park, almost all of us thought he was gone that day—no question.

But he limped on for another two weeks, exposing the Ibrox board at its weakest and worst. It’s only now, as they scramble for the door themselves, that they’ve found the nerve to push him out.

Weakness piled on weakness. Stupidity piled on stupidity. But those have been the hallmarks of his time there.

That’s what passes for a legacy now over at Ibrox.

No one will mourn him—except maybe Celtic fans, because as long as he was there, they were a club going nowhere. Then again, they are a club going nowhere, which is why I started this piece by saying he never stood a chance.

No one over there does—unless we make some kind of momentous mistake and screw it all up. But financially, structurally, and in terms of football quality, we are so far in front of them that they can barely see us through the dust.

He was never going to be the guy who changed that.

He was a dead man walking. It was just a matter of time. But it didn’t have to be this spectacular, and it didn’t have to be this quick. A lot of the harm done to him was self-inflicted, so I cannot muster a shred of genuine sympathy.

But without a doubt, he entertained us for a while. And I think we’ve got many, many more laughs ahead—at the expense of the next poor sod they put in that chair. Because before we even know his name, before we even have an inkling of what he intends to do, I can say this with the same confidence I had about Clement:

His grave’s already dug. The silly sod doesn’t stand a chance.

Photo by Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images

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