Yang’s development at Celtic does not make a case for Mark Lawwell. It’s all down to Rodgers.

It’s amazing how irked I get about the small things.

Sometimes, I think I shouldn’t rise to some of this stuff, but I do anyway—especially when I feel there’s a bit of disrespect being shown to certain people at the club. I never cease to be amazed by how many people don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, how football actually works and who really makes teams great.

Regular readers will know that I think one of the best sports documentaries I’ve ever seen is The Last Dance on Netflix. It’s about basketball, specifically the Chicago Bulls, and not football at all.

But the overarching story is about how the Bulls won two sets of three titles in a row, and how, with Phil Jackson, they had the best coach in the business and with Michael Jordan, they had the greatest player of all time.

Jackson built a team around Jordan that not only won three in a row but, after Jordan came out of retirement, won another three.

The documentary is a triumph, celebrating certain players and elements of that team. It celebrates Jackson himself, who is interviewed throughout. It celebrates Jordan, the star of the show. It interviews Scottie Pippen, Jordan’s teammate for all six of those triumphs, and one of the most grossly underpaid players in the NBA at the time. It also interviews Dennis Rodman, another linchpin of the second three-in-a-row team. It’s a tremendous watch.

But the core of The Last Dance is that it’s a celebration of their final season together—hence the title. And the reason it was their last season together? The CEO of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, decided Jackson would not get another contract, that Jordan would not get another contract, and that Pippen would be allowed to leave at the end of his. In doing so, he broke up what made that a winning team in the first place. Krause was completely unconcerned by that prospect.

The first episode opens with one of the stupidest quotes in the history of professional sports:

“Players and managers do not win titles, organisations do.”

Everything that followed that season pretty much demolished that theory. The Bulls have never won another title. Jackson went on to build another dynasty at the Lakers. Some of the players went on their own journeys in the league and won elsewhere. Jordan retired as the greatest player the sport has ever seen and one of the greatest sportsmen of all time, and he retired at the top of his game and could have played on for year. He said he would not do so unless it was under Jackson.

I understand the argument that when an organisation is working well, it provides a strong foundation for great coaches and players.

I understand that certain clubs go out of their way to bring in the best. And at times, it might feel like a joint endeavour. But it only works as long as those great coaches and players are there. That’s why the history of clubs that rose and fell is about the managers and the players.

Derby County never replicated what Brian Clough did. Neither did Nottingham Forest. Alex Ferguson has never been replaced at Aberdeen, St Mirren, or Manchester United. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Genuine greatness does not start in the director’s box. And the best people to shape a club’s direction are football people who actually know what they’re doing.

Krause’s comments were born out of ego, arrogance, and the misguided belief that the success of that team was as much down to him as it was to Jordan and Jackson. It simply wasn’t. All he managed to do was wreck one of the greatest franchises of all time. As Jordan made clear, he resented seeing a winning side broken up by something other than a failed season.

A team that is winning should be kept together until someone stops them from winning. They should lose that title on the field of battle, not in the Skybox because some suit decides to move things along.

And that’s why I’m irked today at seeing people push the line that Yang is proof the system at Celtic works—that it’s all about scouting and the manager’s job is simply providing a pathway for players signed on his behalf.

It’s rubbish. It’s been proven to be rubbish.

No manager can turn subpar players into genuine contenders. No one can. Scouting should be done in accordance with the manager’s needs. This isn’t difficult to understand. The man in the dugout decides who we sign and who we don’t because he knows what he needs. Yang, in fact, proves this right. It does not support the mad theory that the system itself is the foundation of everything else.

Let’s be blunt. We all know what this “system” argument really is: a defence of Mark Lawwell, a defence that shouldn’t be offered.

Because by any objective standard, Mark Lawwell failed. If he hadn’t failed, he’d still be at the club. If people at Celtic believed his tenure had been a success, he wouldn’t have been moved on. The summer transfer window, where he made signings over the manager’s head, was a failure.

And people can push whatever revisionist nonsense they want, but the facts are the facts. He failed. And things have dramatically improved since he left.

We wasted an entire year of progress trying to do something with the dross he handed our head coach. It is not the job of some bean counter or board-friendly blogger to decide which players at Celtic will cut the mustard. That’s the manager’s job. And all he can do is judge players on whether they fit into his team. It is not his job to build a squad out of dreck. The Ibrox managers have tried that—it hasn’t gone very well.

The idea that Kwon would be a top player if only we had “provided him with a pathway” has been thoroughly debunked. He’s been on loan at two SPFL clubs—St Mirren and Hibs—and he hasn’t exactly set the world on fire at either. He wasn’t even in the squad for the Edinburgh derby against Hearts. He’s been given the pathway. He’s gone out on loan. He hasn’t impressed. The notion that he would be some stalwart of the Celtic team right now if only Rodgers had given him a chance is utter rubbish. Likewise, the idea that Marco Tilio would be tearing up the SPFL in place of Nicholas Kuhn is equally fanciful and ridiculous. It doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

But do you know what does stand up to scrutiny? Brendan Rodgers’ record in developing and improving footballers.

And that has nothing to do with the scouting department or the “buy them cheap, sell them for profit” strategy. That strategy only works under two conditions: 1) The player has the raw materials to develop into a top footballer. A lot of them don’t. 2) The manager is capable of growing that player into a gem.

Everything else is noise.

Rodgers is one of the best managers out there at developing talent—at turning a player with the right raw materials into a star. Yang is not a triumph of scouting. Yang is a triumph of having a manager who knows exactly what he’s looking at. Let’s not forget that almost all those other guys went out on loan. Yang is the one who stayed. Why does these people think that is?

He stayed because the manager believed there was something there he could work with. And it’s only when the manager believes there’s something to work with that any actual work is going to get done.

I know there are people who think there should be a statue of Peter Lawwell in the car park. They’re welcome to go and raise the money for that if they want. They’re welcome to have a little discussion among themselves about which of the great managers and players they’d like to take down in order to put his up—because that’s the logic of their position. That organisations win titles, not players or managers. By organisations, they mean directors. That’s what they believe. So, by their reasoning, we should be honouring the great CEOs of the club before anyone else.

(Yes, even the anonymous ones like Michael Nicholson. At least the Invisible CEO will be easy to get a statue of. Just stick up an empty plinth. Tell people there’s a statue there, it’s just that we can’t see it.)

It’s an insult to Rodgers to pretend that he has left some great talent withering on the vine because he’s just too lazy, or whatever other nonsense, to do his job. It’s an insult. How many players have been brought to this club over the years who no coach in the world could have turned into first-team regulars? And what amazes me most is not that these people continue to bang the drum about “the strategy,” but that they’re utter zealots on the subject. There’s no flex in their thinking.

Some of them go on about how Rodgers has broken with the strategy, how his signing policies have moved us away from being a club that buys low and sells high. And they’re full of predictions about how disastrous that break is going to be. But look at Rodgers’ record and tell me it’s a disaster. Tell me there aren’t more high-value, eight-figure possible sales in that team right now than there have ever been. Who’s responsible for that? Who gets the credit for it?

Look at the progress we’ve made—the obvious, tangible, real, hold-it-in-your-hand progress we’ve made in Europe this season. And that’s been done because Rodgers has taken control of the team-building, taken control of the signing policy, directed it where he wants it to go. And what do you know? We’re still making profits. He’s still managed to do it while posting a player trading surplus.

But tangible success on the pitch clearly doesn’t matter to these people as much as “the strategy.” The strategy, the strategy, the strategy. Follow the plan!

Even when the plan isn’t working? Even when the plan lands us with a mediocrity at the head of the Football Department, hired on the basis of God knows what—except for his second name?

How can someone defend that appointment and his performance, and then have the audacity to critique what Rodgers is doing? It blows my mind. That’s not someone coming to a reasoned judgment; that’s a zealot. Or it’s someone pushing an agenda. Either way, there’s little to credit that point of view.

This idea that if you just provide a pathway for a player, you’ll turn him into a star is nonsensical. It begs the obvious question: how long should we give it to see if someone has what it takes? How long should we persevere with subpar footballers just to see if we can suddenly transform them?

And what are you willing to give up in the meantime? Are you willing to sacrifice trophies? Are you willing, perhaps, to sacrifice a title just so you can say at the end of it, “Look, we’ve got six players in this team we can sell for a lot of money”? The people who think this way have the wrong priorities.

Yang is in great form right now, but that’s because the manager saw what was there. He knew it needed work, but he was willing to put in the work if the player was. And Yang, to his absolute credit, has responded brilliantly. He’s willing to do the work. He’s changed the way he plays. He’s added a sharper edge to his game. He’s starting to put the ball in the net on a regular basis.

He’s not the complete player yet. He’s not even assured a place in this team beyond this campaign. But he’s improved, massively, and there is no doubt about it.

But I repeat—other players from that intake have been allowed to go out on loan. And the reason they’ve been allowed to go out on loan is because the manager just doesn’t see what they have to offer.

He held on to Yang because there was something there—one of the rare examples from that window where there actually was something to build on. But without the right manager in place, without a guy who can spot that, without a guy who can see where the rough edges are and knows how to polish them, you could sign eleven Yangs and you’d never build a team out of them.

I’m afraid this is a very simple concept: the right organisation is the one that goes out and finds the right manager and gives him the players he wants. I know this flies in the face of what a lot of people in the cult of Daddy Lawwell believe, but it is a fact. This club has made its greatest progress when the man in the dugout has had the power to shape his own team in the manner he sees fit. An architect, not a placeholder for people who don’t know about football but think they do.

It is great to see a player you didn’t expect to produce suddenly lighting up the team. It’s great to see that. But to properly appreciate it, you have to acknowledge that it was the management team—the man in the dugout and his coaches—who took potential and turned it into something more.

And they’re the only arbiters of potential who should be listened to at a club. Because they’re the football people. They’re the ones who understand what they’re looking at and know what they’re doing, and the manager most of all, because he is the man building the unit and he knows which individual pieces he needs and where to put them.

The best strategy this club can follow is to make sure we always have men in the dugout who know their business—and then let them get on with it. To bend the whole scouting department to their needs. That’s why we’ve progressed more quickly since Rodgers came back than at any time since O’Neill was in charge—and that’s even accounting for that one wasted summer.

And I would surely hope we’re not going into next season doing our own version of The Last Dance. It is time for the bloated egos in our boardroom—and those who cheerlead for them—to recognise where the real talent at our club is.

To understand how success sustains success, how a football club is actually built, and how best to keep that momentum going.

The only person who should be setting strategy for the Celtic first team squad is the guy who picks the team. Managers and players win championships. Since time immemorial in football, it has ever been thus.

Photo by Craig Williamson/SNS Group via Getty Images

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