Rodgers is Celtic’s best bet … but there are alternatives we should be watching.

The other night on the podcast, we talked briefly about Celtic’s tendency to hire the same people over and over again. We’ve hired Lennon twice as manager. We’ve hired Rodgers twice. We hired Lennon’s assistant—or the guy who was pegged to be Lennon’s assistant. And we used City Group contacts to hire Ange.

So there is a distinct lack of imagination in the Celtic boardroom when it comes to managerial hires. But this has never been terribly costly. I didn’t think the Lennon thing was going to work out, and it didn’t in the end, but other than that, the managerial appointments have been pretty much on the nose.

The question as to who replaces Rodgers is always uppermost in our minds. A lot of candidates have risen and fallen. A lot of possibles have gone by the wayside. But one constant remains, and it is critical: anybody who takes the Celtic job needs experience in a high-profile role, and they need to show accomplishments that will just about satisfy the fans that we’ve broadly gotten the appointment right.

If you look around English football right now, you see a lot of potential Rodgers-types. Almost all of them are going to be coveted by other English clubs. Look around Europe and you see more of the same.

Again, the timing will be critical, because if you wait too long and someone’s rep is already established, you’re not going to get an up-and-coming coach. The only other thing to do is wait for an established candidate—someone who’s on your shortlist already, or someone you’ve looked at in the past—to stumble and fall in his current job and move quickly enough that you can bring him in.

There will be a lot of talk about not wanting to go for a manager who’s just been sacked, but the simple fact is managers lose their jobs at clubs for all sorts of reasons. Rodgers lost his job at Leicester, and very few of us had any doubt that he would be coming back to Celtic Park just as good a manager as the guy who left. If Ange lost his job at Spurs, would that be a barrier towards moving for him and bringing him back to Celtic Park? Not in the eyes of many supporters.

But there are guys whose trajectory is obvious and who the club should be keeping a close watch on regardless of what Rodgers’ future plans might be. There are two I want to talk about in this article. And this is not to say that Rodgers will decide to leave. This is not to say that Rodgers is a bad coach; Hell everyone knows how I feel about the man. It’s just that at a club like Celtic, we should always be thinking beyond the immediate horizon and looking at who might be available next.

One of these guys has had a great season. The other not so much. But I think the one who hasn’t had a great season has done very well, whilst the one who has had a good season has performed excellently.

The other night, Chris Davies got Birmingham promoted. He was Rodgers’ number two, and also worked as number two to Ange at Spurs. So he knows the Celtic bosses, and presumably the Celtic way of playing. He knew enough to go out and target Tomoki Iwata and make him one of the linchpins of his midfield. He’s done a very good job.

Now, Birmingham is a little bit of an outlier club because they’re well-funded, and Davies has definitely had money to spend. But I’m going to say this: a guy who can get a tune out of a defender like Ben Davies is someone we should be keeping an eye on. Getting him out of Birmingham will be incredibly difficult because they have their sights on being a Premiership club. But I think if the Celtic job was on offer, the last thing Chris Davies would do is turn it down.

He is one to watch. He is definitely a candidate and a comer. His star is on the rise, and I’m not the last person who is going to recommend that Celtic pay close attention to what happens to him in the Championship next season.

The next guy’s had a slightly more turbulent campaign—Kieran McKenna at Ipswich. Ipswich is his first club as manager, just as Birmingham is Davies’ first club. But like Davies has managed at Birmingham in his first season, McKenna got Ipswich promoted out of League One, and then he got them promoted again from the Championship to the Premier League.

Ipswich were a struggling, down-on-their-luck club until McKenna got in there. He has worked a minor miracle at that team, and the fact that they’re sitting third from bottom in the Premier League right now might seem like a blot on his copybook.

But when you think about how spectacularly outgunned Ipswich are at that level—when you think about how spectacularly outgunned they were in the Championship itself—being third bottom in the league ain’t no small thing, especially when your side is currently ahead of Southampton and Leicester.

Ipswich was not built for Premier League football. There’s no way they could have built that team for Premier League football. But although the disparity between them and every other side in the league was enormous, McKenna tried to play the right type of football. He had the right ideas.

He is a progressive thinker, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see him move on from Ipswich in the summer. It is no coincidence that he was linked with a number of top jobs as they came available in the last 12 months—because down south, chairmen know that McKenna is a comer. They know that McKenna has something, and that he, like Davies, is going to do big things in his career.

At the right club, either of these guys will thrive. With the right backing, either of them could be a huge success. Davies already looks like he could be a huge success at Birmingham. And only the financial gap between them and some of the clubs in League One skews the picture. In the Championship next season, that will be his proving ground—and that will tell us what he’s really got.

Likewise with Ipswich. They’re almost certainly going to be relegated—although if McKenna can work a miracle in the run-in, no one will be entirely surprised. It’s next season that will show what McKenna is really all about. And that may bring him to the attention of clubs who can offer him a sweeter financial package than Celtic can.

I want Rodgers to stay. I want Rodgers to sign a new deal, and I want him to commit his long-term future to this club.

That would be my first choice. But we would be crazy not to be thinking about the future, and we would be crazy not to be thinking about who might be next. And south of the border, these two are intriguing candidates. McKenna’s already got a growing and glowing reputation down there. And Davies—not only because of his growing stature, but because we know him so well and he knows us.

Davies in particular is the kind of appointment you could easily see us trying to make, based on our previous history and based on his knowledge of both Rodgers and Ange.

We’re not quite in the place where we have to take the hunt for the next manager seriously. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have names in mind. And I would be very surprised if Celtic weren’t already thinking in terms of these guys and others.