Is Brendan Rodgers the last Celtic “manager”? And do we want that?

There is always controversy whenever the question of a brand-new Celtic management structure is raised and in particular, when that question revolves around whether or not we should have a manager or a head coach.

These are very distinctive roles, very different. The structure you need to put in place for each of them is also fundamentally different.

There are people both for and against the head coach concept. Certainly, it is a limiting one. It narrows the field of candidates because most bosses in the modern game still won’t come into a job where their control over transfers is minimal.

There are managers who’ve grown used to working within that system, but I would bet they’re not complete creatures of it. I’d bet the system still makes more allowances for them than they make for it.

And I’m going to go on the record right now and say that I am not its biggest fan. I have pushed very hard on the idea of the manager as architect. That means he ultimately makes all the key decisions, and that his needs are central to the success or failure of the club. I don’t believe the head coach theory is as robust as the idea that you bring in the best man for the job and trust him to have control.

I’m a movie fan, as everyone knows, and the so-called “director’s era” in Hollywood remains the greatest single era in the history of filmmaking.

It produced some of the most artistic and commercially successful movies ever made. These are the films that filmmakers and fans will still be talking about 50 to 100 years from now. These classics are the greatest movies ever made. And it’s not for nothing that the whole era is viewed as a golden age.

It was a time of complete creative control, when the director was the auteur. Every major decision about a film was made by the director. He alone picked the cast. He worked directly with the screenwriter.

He made the decisions on lighting, on sound, on editing. The whole film became the canvas on which he painted his masterpiece. And that’s why the films of that era are among the greatest ever made. Many of those directors were visionary geniuses, and their work has stood the test of time. They wanted for nothing.

They became superstars in their own right.

And that’s where the problem started.

They got egotistical. They overindulged. A bunch of them took that creative control and made disastrous flops.

One of them—Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate—destroyed its studio. That film marked the end of the era. It had become an age of excess and madness—cocaine, wild parties, hubris. Some of these guys got so lost in the idea of their own brilliance that they spiralled out of control and nearly took the whole show down with them.

Even the best of them, like Francis Ford Coppola, lost their way in the chaos. And all of that coincided with the rise of a young wunderkind named Steven Spielberg, who made a studio film that blew everything else out of the water. Pun intended—because the movie was Jaws. Not long after, another studio film made George Lucas a household name with Star Wars, giving birth, literally, to the summer blockbuster. The director’s era was over almost as soon as it began. The studios retook control.

The same fear as ended the directors era haunts football clubs who give total command to certain types of managers. The idea of the manager as architect works the same way as Hollywood studios indulging directors. You’re talking about massive sums of money being entrusted to one individual, and that makes people nervous. Because when failure comes, it comes at enormous cost.

This is why the head coach model has gained so much ground. Clubs spending millions on scouting, analytics and development started to question whether trusting one man’s instincts was a stupid risk. So more and more of them stopped giving managers full authority over transfers. And to an extent, I understand that.

Spielberg and Lucas proved that great directors could still make great films under a studio system. That there was no need to give them full control.

Likewise, a new generation of managers has emerged who work well within systems where data modellers and scouting departments produce lists of players to suit a club-wide strategy—one which sometimes has little or nothing to do with the direct requirements of the man in the dugout.

A lot of people believe this is the system Celtic should adopt. There are prominent voices in the Celtic fan media who don’t believe in the so-called “guru” manager.

They reject the manager-as-architect concept entirely. They advocate for a structure built around the long-term needs of the club rather than the short-term ambitions of any particular boss. Some have even gone as far as to suggest that if the backroom team is right, it doesn’t really matter who you have in the dugout.

Now, I’m not saying they believe you can stick Derek McInnes in there and get the same results you’d get from Brendan Rodgers or Ange Postecoglou… but they’re not far off it. They think that if you hire someone with the right philosophy—front-foot, attacking football—and get the infrastructure right, you can basically give him a squad to suit that style, without any input from him, and still expect results.

I’ve always had my doubts about that. There’s a reason the top managers are expensive and in demand. There’s a reason we’ve lost two of them to the English Premier League in recent years.

Their quality is recognised. It’s what attracted us to them in the first place. You need a track record. And it just so happens that our last two managers have both been architects. They were never going to accept a system where someone else built the team for them. We tried that, briefly, with Brendan. He didn’t like it. We didn’t like it. And the guy who tried to impose those players on him is no longer at Celtic Park.

It’s not only Mark Lawwell and that grotesque failed experiment that makes me wary, although his was a particularly shocking example. He had no clue what he was doing. That summer’s signing strategy made no sense. Few of the players signed that year were of any use to Celtic. It was a scheme entirely operated by someone with no clear vision, no coherent policy, and no understanding of what was actually required—except that certain players ticked boxes on a spreadsheet.

In a team supposedly being built on pace and power—Rodgers’ watchwords—he signed players without one or the other. A couple of them didn’t have either. To sign three wide players was absurd. To sign so many central defenders was lazy. To bring in central midfielders when that was already the strongest part of the team showed a total lack of understanding. It did not meet the manager’s needs in any way, shape or form.

Look, it’s obvious which side of the argument I’m on.

But the concept of a system, a structure, isn’t completely daft. It’s not a total loser. If it’s built properly and if the manager has real input into it, then you can create a hybrid model that gives you the best of both worlds. This is exactly what the studios did when they gave Spielberg and Lucas enough autonomy to put their own mark on the films they wanted to make … but within strict boundaries and budgets set above their heads.

I will never subscribe to a system that reduces the manager to a glorified trainer. But I understand why a multi-million-pound operation might not want to leave everything at the sharp end in the hands of a single individual with his own failings.

The Ibrox club is clearly going all-in on the extreme version of the head coach concept. A model where the manager has little to no input at all.

That was the article I wrote last night—the one I said might bleed into this one. In fact, I think writing that piece first enhances this one.

Because you’re looking at a version of this system we tried already—and which Rodgers rejected. I can’t imagine that it’ll work at Ibrox any better than it would have worked at Celtic Park. It’s a system where the manager is cut out of the signing process entirely and is left to do little more than pick the team and tactics.

It won’t work. That should be obvious.

And for all that, I do believe Celtic does need a professionalised structure. It needs a football department that’s separate from the rest of the club.

But that’s not what the proponents of the head coach model are advocating. That too takes power away from the centre—from the moneymen. In a proper setup, the Football Department is given a budget, and it can be spent as it sees fit, with the manager at the centre of the process.

If you build that system correctly, then the risk when changing managers is reduced. But it also means those who’ve traditionally run the club give up a chunk of their own power. And I understand why the board might not want to do that.

I wonder if there aren’t a few on it who think that when Rodgers goes, they can simply revert to the head coach model and let someone else sign the players. The Lawwell experiment was no accident; someone at the club saw that as a prospective policy. The failure of it will not have dissuaded them.

That’s why this debate is important. Because Rodgers will not give up an ounce of control to a system like that. Ange made that clear from day one too, but in his second season, when he ceded too much control to the bean counters and to the Lawwell model, we barely made a good signing. Rodgers was wholly unimpressed when he saw what it had handed him, but at the outset he probably thought it could work.

His rejection of it and the subsequent departure of Lawwell Jnr should have scared us off ever going down that road again.

I fear it hasn’t. I fear we’re going to get stuck with a version of the Ibrox model if Rodgers doesn’t sign a new deal. I think it’s the explicit way the next manager will be expected to work, and that rules out a bunch of top tier candidates who will not come near such a system far less operate within it. So, the time to make the argument, to have the debate, and for fans to make clear what they want and expect is now.

Because it’ll be too late to make our voices heard once they’re sitting round that boardroom table making the decision.