Would Askou survive Nancy’s start at Celtic? Well, he kind of already did.

There’s a funny thing about time in football, and Celtic fans know it well. Time softens the edges, sands down the rage, and leaves you staring at something you once despised with a kind of reluctant curiosity. Not forgiveness. Never that.

But maybe understanding.

And so here we are, with Wilfried Nancy on the brink of another job, another chapter, another set of supporters about to convince themselves that this time it’ll be different. Celtic fans could tell them a thing or two.

But maybe not some of the things that we think.

I’ll be honest. I struggled with even hearing that name for a while. There was too much frustration tied up in it. Too many afternoons where Celtic felt like a ghost of themselves, drifting through games rather than commanding them.

His record was unacceptable. His departure was necessary. That much has not changed.

But if I strip away the emotion, even just for a moment, I can see why the wider football world is not quite as scathing. Across various football platforms and analytical circles, Nancy is often described as principled, even idealistic.

There is talk of a coach committed to a system. Someone who values structure, positional play and long-term development over quick fixes. They speak about his calm demeanour, his insistence on building from the back, his belief in controlling games through possession rather than chaos.

In another environment, with different expectations, that might be admirable.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think his problem at Celtic was arrogance. I think it was something worse. He misread the room.

Scottish football is not a laboratory. This is not a place where you get endless time and patience to gently implement a philosophy while everyone nods along politely. It is raw and emotional. It demands immediacy.

At Celtic, you don’t get the luxury of “eventual progress.”

You either deliver, or you are swallowed whole.

That is where Nancy went wrong.

There is a recurring criticism you will find if you dig into fan discussions and commentary from that period. He underestimated the league. Not openly, not in a way that always made headlines, but subtly, through decisions, through approach, through a kind of tactical naivety.

There was a sense that if Celtic just played “his way” well enough, everything else would fall into place. But Scottish opposition does not work like that.

Teams do not roll over because your passing triangles look nice on a tactics board. They press and fight and disrupt. They turn games ugly. Too often, Nancy’s Celtic looked surprised by that, as if they had not quite prepared for the sheer graft required just to earn the right to play.

I remember watching those matches and thinking that this was not just about quality. It was about understanding where you are.

That understanding never fully arrived. He never sounded to me like a man who “got it”, a man who understood where he was or what was expected of him here.

Now here’s where it gets interesting, because right now a lot of our supporters are right behind the idea of a certain manager getting the job.

You know what I’ve learned? His start there was not terribly different from the start Nancy made at Celtic. Different club, different expectations, different scale entirely, but there are familiar patterns just the same. This guy did not win any of his first five league games. In fact, he ended up with only one win from his first eight.

(Nancy, of course, managed two wins in his Celtic tenure; six of his eight games were in the league, where he won twice.)

Strip away the names and the different badge, and tell me that doesn’t sound familiar.

And this is the question Celtic fans need to ask themselves now.

Would we have accepted that start at Celtic?

Because the guy we’re talking about, and the one a lot of people now want to be the next Celtic manager is Askou. These people talk about the football Motherwell play. They talk about his ideas and the way his team has improved. They talk about the brilliant result at Ibrox as if it should change the whole conversation.

But if he had walked into Celtic and failed to win any of his first five games, would those same people have been patient?

Would they have said, “give it time, the ideas are good”?

Would they have accepted one wins in eight?

I don’t believe that for a second. Because none of us was prepared to.

That’s the thread that ties Nancy and Askou together. It is not that they are identical. They are not. It is not that their situations are exactly the same. They weren’t.

But both arrived with ideas. Both tried to impose a way of playing and both had early periods where the results did not match the theory.

And Scottish football has a way of exposing that. It punishes rigidity and slow adaptation. It punishes managers who think philosophy alone is enough.

I’m not saying either man lacks intelligence or coaching ability. That would be lazy. The reality is far more nuanced, and frankly more uncomfortable.

They may both be good coaches. But being a good coach is not the same as being the right coach for Celtic. That is the point.

Because Motherwell did not sack Askou. It stuck by him. He got time to develop his ideas and he was able to bed them in. Nancy got no such time at Celtic and the next manager isn’t going to either. If Askou started like that he’d be in real trouble before his feet were even properly under his desk.

I think about Nancy trying to implement his style at Celtic, and I see someone trying to apply a framework that required time, patience and a certain type of player, none of which he consistently had.

I think about Askou at Motherwell, trying to establish control in games where control is often a luxury you earn through grit first and tactics second. He too needed a certain type of player to do what he needed done. At Celtic, he would get the players this board deemed it right that he should have. Does he get that?

Does he know what the pressure is like, what the expectations are like, what the demands are, any better than Nancy did?

Understanding your club, really understanding it, is non-negotiable.

At Celtic, that means understanding the demand for dominance. It means recognising that every dropped point is not just a statistic, but a talking point for weeks, something that puts an early manager under real scrutiny. It means appreciating that playing beautifully means nothing if you are not winning consistently.

At Motherwell, the demands are different. The resources are different. The pressure is different. A difficult start can be survived there in a way it cannot be survived at Celtic. And nobody is giving this guy any awards for finishing fourth, even at Motherwell, where the so-called best manager in the league wasn’t considered good enough to make the shortlist.

That is not arrogance. That is reality, and that is why the Askou talk bothers me.

Not because he has done nothing good. He clearly has. Not because Motherwell have not improved. They have. Not because he cannot coach. He obviously can. But because the same Celtic support that turned on Nancy for those early results would do the same to him in a heartbeat because at Motherwell they will give you time because there are no expectations that you will set the world on fire.

At Celtic you do not get one wins in eight league games and keep on going. You do not survive no wins in the first five league matches.

This is where the comparison becomes useful. Nancy’s problem was not simply that he lost games. It was that he looked, at times, like a man who had not taken the full measure of the club he was managing.

Askou’s early Motherwell spell raised similar questions. Different scale, yes. Different pressure, absolutely. But still, there was that uneasy feeling of a manager and an environment not quite aligned at first.

Now, as Nancy edges towards another opportunity, I can already see the narrative forming elsewhere. Fresh start. New context. A chance to prove himself. Maybe it will work. Football is full of second acts that make fools of our certainty.

But success somewhere else would not rewrite what happened here. It would not change the missteps, the misunderstandings or the sense that Celtic were being managed by someone who had not quite grasped the challenge.

The same principle applies to Askou.

Even if he goes somewhere else and succeeds, even if he proves to be a very good coach, that does not automatically make him the right man for Celtic.

That is the lesson in all of this.

Football clubs come with history, pressure, identity and expectation. You do not just arrive and impose yourself. You arrive and learn the place first.

If that learning curve is too slow, the consequences come quickly.

I wanted Nancy to succeed. I really did. Because when Celtic are strong, everything feels right in the world. But wanting something does not make it so.

And now, when I listen to people talk about Askou as if he is the obvious next step, I keep coming back to the same question. Would we have accepted his start at Motherwell if it had happened here?

Because his ideas are, in their own way, just as radical as those Nancy was trying to adopt.

If he can bed them in early, fine. If not that’d be a whole other conversation.

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