Strachan’s nonsense about development is contradicted by his own Celtic record.

Regular readers know where I am by now on The Hunting of Brendan Rodgers.

I’ve been writing a piece on it, and it’s nearly done.

I never ceased to be amazed at the level of vitriol he has to take, but that is not the only place it manifests itself. Gordon Strachan said something the other day which, on the surface, sounds perfectly reasonable. A manager’s job, he said, is to develop players.

Nobody is going to argue with that in principle.

Of course, a manager should improve footballers. Of course he should coach them, shape them, sharpen them and try to get more out of them than they arrived with. That is part of the job. It is not some controversial idea.

But context matters. It always does.

Because Strachan was not making a general coaching point in a vacuum. He was having another wee dig at Brendan Rodgers. He was implying, again, that Rodgers should have done more with what he was given at Celtic.

Strachan was suggesting that instead of complaining about recruitment, instead of demanding higher standards, Rodgers should simply have rolled up his sleeves and developed the players who were put in front of him.

That sounds neat, almost wise. It even sounds old-school in that slightly comforting way football people like. The problem is that it falls apart the moment you test it against Strachan’s own Celtic career.

Because Strachan, for all his success at Celtic, did not build that success by turning a conveyor belt of punts into first-team stars. He did not take a pile of substandard projects and alchemise them into Champions League footballers. Whatever mantra he preaches now, he did not prove that coaching alone can overcome bad recruitment.

In fact, his own record proves almost exactly the opposite.

Strachan’s best Celtic work came with players who were already good enough, already established, or already close to being ready.

Artur Boruc was a serious goalkeeper. Shunsuke Nakamura was a genuine elite talent and for a while I reckon we had the best free kick taker in the world. Scott McDonald arrived from Motherwell already knowing the Scottish game. Gary Caldwell, Lee Naylor, Paul Hartley, Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, Andreas Hinkel, Barry Robson and others were signed to play. They were not speculative development projects. They were first-team footballers, brought in because Celtic needed them to make an immediate impact.

Some of them were excellent. Some were useful. Many were limited but functional. Some faded. That is football. But they were not examples of Strachan turning raw material into finished articles. They were examples of Celtic signing players who were ready to go.

Then you look at the other category. The punts. The projects. The fringe signings. The ones who were supposed to have upside. The ones who were not obvious first-team starters. That is where the argument gets very interesting … and where Strachan’s piety sounds idiotic.

Jeremie Aliadiere came from Arsenal on loan. He made two appearances. Adam Virgo arrived from Brighton in a deal which looked strange at the time and worse with every passing month. He made 12 appearances. Du Wei came in as an international defender with a bit of intrigue attached to him and left with one of the most infamous single appearances in modern Celtic history. One game. That was it.

Evander Sno was probably the closest thing Strachan had to a genuine young development punt who actually got a proper chance. He made 28 appearances. But even there, he never became a Celtic mainstay. He never became the player people hoped he might become. He got minutes, yes, but he did not become evidence of some great developmental masterplan.

Koki Mizuno made 10 appearances. Ben Hutchinson made a handful. Paddy McCourt, who would later become a cult figure, made only five under Strachan. Niall McGinn, signed as a young prospect, did not make a competitive appearance under him. Milan Misun made none. Willo Flood, signed in that baffling January window, made five. Marc Crosas had genuine ability and got 22 appearances, but even he was never fully trusted. He came from Barcelona’s system, had technique, had composure, and yet Strachan never really committed to him as a central piece.

Then there were the youth punts and reserve signings who barely troubled the first-team picture at all.

Tomislav Pavlov, Laurence Gaughan, Luca Santonocito, Matty Hughes, Filip Twardzik, Patrik Twardzik. Names on squad lists. Names on transfer summaries. Not names who became Celtic first-team players under Gordon Strachan.

So, what are we actually talking about here?

Once you strip out the obvious first-team signings, Strachan’s record with development punts is not especially impressive. In truth, it is pretty thin. Most of them vanished. Many were barely used. Most were moved on, ignored, loaned out or forgotten.

That does not make Strachan a bad manager.

His record at Celtic speaks for itself. Three league titles in four years is not nothing. Last 16 qualification in the Champions League is not nothing. Big nights, big results, trophies, consistency. Nobody serious is trying to erase that.

No, he’s definitely not a bad manager. He may be a bullshit artist or a hypocrite and I would have no trouble labelling him either based on that record. He should certainly be careful about lecturing other managers on what they ought to do with poor recruitment.

Because when Strachan was handed good players, he used them. When he inherited good players, he benefited from them. Aiden McGeady and Stephen McManus both became major figures under him, and he deserves credit for helping them grow. That part is real. He trusted them and played them and helped them mature.

But again, those players were not random punts pulled from nowhere. McGeady was already one of the best young talents in Scottish football. McManus had already been around the first-team picture before Strachan arrived.

Strachan helped them on, certainly, but he did not discover them in a cupboard and build them from scratch. When the club gave him Adam Virgo, Du Wei, Aliadiere, Mizuno, Hutchinson, Flood, Misun and the rest, he did not produce miracles.

Strachan did not wave a coaching wand and turn them into Celtic players. He did what managers usually do when they are handed players who are not up to it.

He stopped picking them. That is the part which matters in this Rodgers debate.

Because there is a limit to what development can do. A good manager can improve a player. A great manager can improve a squad. But no manager can turn every inadequate signing into something useful. Coaching is not sorcery. It is not some magical force that transforms poor recruitment into elite performance.

If the raw materials are wrong, the finished product will be wrong as well.

And to be blunt, no Celtic manager in my living memory has ever had to work under the condition that they played every footballer “the system” signed for them. Nobody would take the job, especially when you look at how much dreck that system has produced. Not one Celtic manager has worked with every mad punt, every crap player plucked from the lower leagues of Korea and elsewhere. Nor should they.

Had Rodgers even tried to work with those players who were thrown at him in the summer we would be in a far worse state than we’re in right now. Look at Shin Yamada. To give Rodgers that as a replacement to Kyogo is an insult, and not just to the manager but to the rest of the squad who had expected a quality signing.

Rodgers’ argument, at its core, was never that he should not have to develop players. That was never the point. Rodgers has developed players throughout his career.

He improved players at Swansea. He improved players at Liverpool and at Leicester. Without question, he improved players at Celtic. You only have to look at the players who performed at their best under him to know that.

The argument was about standards.

Celtic were not handing him a squad full of high-upside young players with obvious first-team potential. They were handing him junk, someone else’s idea of what a Celtic player should be. Players who were not ready, not suitable, or not good enough. They were asking him to compete in Europe, win trophies, manage expectations, deliver results and somehow pretend that inadequate recruitment was simply a coaching challenge.

That is not a serious football strategy and we should not pretend that it is.

Strachan’s own Celtic career shows the difference between recruitment that supports a manager and recruitment that burdens him.

When Celtic signed players ready to play, Strachan used them. When Celtic signed players who could genuinely contribute, they became part of successful teams. Look at two in particular; Paul Hartley and Barry Robson. Not flashy, not fancy. Grafters. First team footballers instantly, guys whose contributions won us trophies.

But when the club signed speculative punts, most of them did not become anything under Strachan, just as they failed to make the grade with every manager who came after him. For him to lecture Celtic bosses past or future with this garbage insults our intelligence and theirs.

When he says a manager’s job is to develop players, the answer is simple: yes, Gordon, it is.

But it is also the club’s job to provide players worth developing. And when the club gave you the tools that could do the job you used them. When it came to those who couldn’t cut it, you booted them as quickly as Rodgers did any of the junk this board gave him.

A manager can polish talent. He cannot, to use an ugly expression, turn dogshit into diamonds. A manager can make a good player better. He can sometimes make an average player useful. He can find a role for someone others have missed.

But if the recruitment operation hands him dreck and then tells him to build a serious team out of it, that’s not asking him for development but to turn water into wine.

And Strachan knows it, because he lived it.

He was not picking Du Wei every week. Nor was he building the team around Adam Virgo. He was not patiently moulding Willo Flood into the future of Celtic’s midfield. Nor was he giving Koki Mizuno two seasons of regular football because “a manager’s job is to develop players.”

He judged them. He used some briefly. Then he moved on.

That is what managers do.

So perhaps we can stop pretending this is some profound insight into coaching. It is not.

It is another sly shot at Rodgers from a man who should understand better than most that recruitment defines the boundaries within which a manager works. But of course, Strachan is also much more and much less than that; he is another useful idiot carrying the board’s message because they are too gutless to admit that this is what our summer looks like.

Development matters. Of course it does.

But the idea that Rodgers should have quietly accepted every downgrade, every punt, every failed project and every boardroom compromise, then simply coached his way through the consequences, is absurd.

Strachan never did that himself. No Celtic boss ever has. He relied on good players and trusted the ones who could contribute. He discarded the ones who could not. That is not a criticism of him. It is the rebuttal to his latest rubbish.

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