Celtic must not discard our on-loan players until the next manager judges them.

There is a tendency at Celtic, especially in seasons like this one, to sort players very quickly into categories. Good enough. Not good enough. Useful. Dead wood. Stay. Go.

We do it because football is ruthless, because emotion runs high, and because when a team is underperforming the temptation is always to start throwing names overboard and asking questions later. But football is rarely that simple.

A player who does not fit one manager’s system is not automatically a bad player. This is a theme we cover often on this blog. Signings should fit the manager’s style or they are a waste of money.

But by the same token, a player who looks out of place in one setup might look entirely different in another. We’ve seen this often enough over the years, and I think it matters right now as we start looking at the squad the next manager is going to inherit.

That brings me to Luis Palma.

His loan ends at the end of the campaign and he has made it clear that he wants a second chance at Celtic. A lot of supporters will dismiss that idea immediately, because under Brendan Rodgers he never looked like a natural fit. Neither Nancy nor O’Neill brought him home from his loan spell early.

Under Rodgers he was in and out, never really trusted and he never truly nailed down a role, and there were too many games where you looked at him and thought he was slightly out of rhythm with the team around him.

But that does not mean there is no future for him here.

It may simply mean there was no future for him in that particular system. That distinction matters, and it matters a lot more than people think.

Rodgers, as we know, liked very specific things from wide players. He liked pace, power, intensity, directness, and he wanted players who could contribute to a certain type of pressing game and a certain type of attacking shape.

Palma has qualities, but he is not really that player. He is more of a technician, more of a creator, someone who likes to receive the ball, work angles, deliver quality from deeper or slightly more central areas, and play with a bit of subtlety rather than simply blast past full-backs. If you are asking him to be a different type of winger than the one he naturally is, then you are always going to end up disappointed.

And that, for me, is the key point here. We have to stop looking at footballers in terms of whether they “worked” in one manager’s setup and start asking more intelligent questions: what sort of footballer are they? What is their best role, as opposed to their best position, and under what kind of manager might they work?

Because the next manager is not necessarily going to want the same things Brendan Rodgers wanted. In fact, we’re all pretty much agreed that this style of play is awful and it’s got to change dramatically if we’re to succeed next season.

That is where Palma becomes interesting again.

If Celtic appoint a coach who wants more aggression in possession, more combination play, more technical quality between the lines, and a slightly different use of the wide areas, then Palma might suddenly become a very useful player to have around.

If the next boss wants one of his wide men to drift, to create, to link play rather than simply stretch the pitch with speed, then Palma may fit that role far better than he ever fitted Rodgers’ version of it.

That is not fantasy. It is not making excuses for his previously poor displays. That is simply recognising that systems shape careers.

We’ve seen players written off too early before. We’ve seen players look lost under one manager and useful under another. The modern game is too tactical, too system-dependent, for us to be talking about every squad decision in absolute terms.

And with Palma, there are enough raw materials there to at least justify a second look.

He has technical quality. He can cross a ball and see a pass. The guy has a bit of imagination.

In the right side, in the right setup, with the right instructions, those are not small things. Those are assets. He also scores goals.

The question is not whether he is the answer to all our problems, because no one person will provide that. The question is whether he might still have something to offer a different version of Celtic than the one we’ve been watching.

I think the answer to that is yes.

Now, that does not mean he should automatically stay. It does not mean the next manager should build around him. It does not mean we should avoid signing better players because Luis Palma wants another crack at it.

But it does mean that writing him off completely, before we even know who the next coach is going to be and what kind of football that coach wants to play, seems premature.

And if we are being honest, there is a wider lesson in that.

Too much of our recruitment in recent years has looked disconnected from the manager’s actual needs. Too many players have come in who felt like “opportunities” rather than solutions.

A lot of our signings have been made in a vacuum, without enough thought about role, shape, function and fit.

That is how you end up with players sitting on the margins, not because they are useless, but because they were bought for a version of Celtic that never really existed in the first place.

Palma might be one of those players. If so, that is not really an indictment of him. It is an indictment of the way this club has done business.

And that is why his situation is worth revisiting now.

Because if the next manager is someone with a different tactical outlook, someone who sees football through a slightly different lens, then the squad we think we know may start to look different.

Some players who were peripheral may suddenly seem more relevant.

Some who were awkward fits may become useful options.

Many who looked like mistakes may simply have been miscast.

Palma falls squarely into that category for me, and, as an afterthought, so does Nawrocki. I know he has barely featured, and under Rodgers he clearly was not trusted in the way he needed to be trusted if he was ever going to establish himself.

But again, that does not automatically mean there is no Celtic future there. It may simply mean he did not fit what Rodgers wanted from his central defenders. A new manager with a different approach, one who values other attributes, might look at him and see something Rodgers did not. The same basic logic applies.

So, before we start throwing names onto the discard pile, it might be worth waiting to see what kind of manager comes through the door first. Because players do not exist in isolation. They exist inside systems, and those systems can change everything.

Luis Palma may never make it at Celtic. That remains a very real possibility.

But he may also be one of those players whose future depends less on what he is, and more on what the next manager wants Celtic to become, and that, right now, is reason enough not to close the book on him just yet.

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