There are good options for Celtic’s sporting director’s role. Here are three.

In two of the recent articles I’ve written I have focussed on what we should be doing better. The first was about urgency. Celtic need clarity on the manager and the football structure immediately, because drift is no longer acceptable. The season is over, the double has been won, and the club cannot treat survival as proof of planning.

The second was about Shaun Maloney and the sporting director role. Maloney may be intelligent. He may be a good coach. He may well have a future inside Celtic’s football structure. But giving him the sporting director job would be another lazy internal gamble from a club that has made far too many of them already.

So let’s ask the obvious question. Are there people out there who could do this job properly? Yes. Of course there are.

If Celtic were a serious modern football club, they would already have a shortlist of them. Not a list of former players. Not a list of people who interviewed well. Not a list of familiar faces who won’t ask too many awkward questions. A real list. A professional list. A list built around people who have actually done this work before.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I can give you three names immediately which stand out as obvious choices: Paul Mitchell, Dougie Freedman and Lee Dykes.

All three are miles more qualified for the job than Shaun Maloney. That is not a personal attack on Maloney. It is a statement of fact.

A sporting director at Celtic should not be learning the role on the job.

This is not a development placement. This is not a sentimental appointment. This is not a chance to see whether a clever football man can grow into something bigger.

Celtic need someone who already understands recruitment systems, scouting networks, data integration, squad succession, manager alignment, contract cycles, academy pathways and long-term football strategy.

That is the job. These three have evidence behind them.

Dougie Freedman is probably the most obvious Scottish name. He was appointed sporting director at Crystal Palace in 2017 and left in 2025 for Al-Diriyah in Saudi Arabia. During his time at Palace, he was credited with playing a major role in the club’s progress and had been linked with major recruitment roles elsewhere, including Manchester United and Newcastle.

Freedman’s Palace record is not theoretical. That club became known for smart recruitment, identifying and developing valuable players, and operating well in one of the most competitive leagues in the world. Even where budgets were limited, Palace managed to build a squad with serious assets and a coherent football identity.

That is relevant to Celtic. Very relevant.

Celtic need to buy well, develop well, sell well and replace well. Freedman has worked in an environment where recruitment had to be sharper than the clubs above them financially. He understands the British market. He understands player value. He understands what it means to operate without unlimited money.

Would he be gettable? Hard to say. He has gone to Saudi Arabia, and that probably means money is a factor. But he’s at a second tier team and if Celtic are serious, these are the conversations they should be having. Proper clubs ask. Proper clubs test the market. Proper clubs do not assume the answer is no before picking someone already in the building.

Lee Dykes represents the Brentford model.

If you’re going to aim high, this is where you do it.

He joined Brentford as head of recruitment in 2019 after working as sporting director at Bury, and later became technical director. Brentford’s recruitment approach under that structure is exactly the kind of serious, process-led operation Celtic should have studied years ago. Dykes himself has explained a multi-stage recruitment process involving data and scouting filtering tens of thousands of players into position-specific shortlists.

Read that again.

Data. Scouting. Process. Shortlists. Position-specific planning. That is almost exactly the menu of things Celtic need to modernise.

Brentford are one of the clubs Celtic should study if we are serious about football operations. They are not a sentimental club. They are not a club that recruits on vibes. They are not a club that sits around waiting for the manager to scream for help before trying to identify players.

They have built a system.

That system has allowed them to compete in a market where they should, in theory, be outgunned. They have bought cleverly, sold cleverly and kept moving forward. They are exactly the kind of operation Celtic should have been trying to emulate years ago.

Dykes would be an ambitious appointment. He would also be difficult to get, because Brentford are not mugs and he has a serious role there. But again, that is the point.

Celtic should be trying to appoint someone worth poaching.

Not someone easy. Someone good.

But of the three, Paul Mitchell is easily the standout and we’ve been linked with him a couple of times before and crazily gone for less impressive options. Lee Congerton. Mark Lawwell. Paul Tisdale. Madness, all of it.

Paul Mitchell is the best of these options because his CV is exceptional.

Mitchell has worked across serious football environments: MK Dons, Southampton, Tottenham Hotspur, RB Leipzig, Red Bull, Monaco and Newcastle United. Newcastle’s own announcement when appointing him said he joined RB Leipzig as head of recruitment and club development, combining traditional scouting with data-driven analysis, before becoming technical director in Red Bull’s global football division.

It also noted that at Monaco he devised and implemented a long-term development plan, transforming the club’s performance and profile, while also improving Cercle Brugge within the wider ownership structure.

That is exactly the kind of CV Celtic should be looking for.

Mitchell has not merely worked in recruitment. He has worked in different football cultures, different leagues, different ownership structures and different operational models. He has worked in clubs that develop players, trade players, use data, scout aggressively and think ahead. He has worked inside the Red Bull ecosystem, which remains one of the most important models in modern football for identifying, developing and moving talent through a structure.

This is the kind of person who could walk into Celtic and know within a week where the bodies are buried.

He would not need six months to understand that the recruitment process is too slow. He would not need a year to realise that succession planning is inadequate. He would not need to be told that the academy-to-first-team pathway is broken, that the club has no proper football identity beyond whichever manager happens to be in the building, or that the transfer operation too often behaves like it has just been surprised by a window opening.

He would know. Because he has seen proper systems. He has worked in them. He has helped build them. That is the difference between appointing someone like Mitchell and appointing someone like Maloney.

Maloney might be able to speak well about football and knows the inside of this club. Mitchell has lived inside the machinery of modern football. Celtic do not need someone who can describe what a good football operation should look like. We need someone who has actually operated inside one. Preferably several.

Mitchell also offers something Celtic desperately need: independence.

He is not a creature of the current Celtic structure. He is not someone raised inside the boardroom culture. He is not beholden to the old way of doing things. He would arrive with external credibility, a serious football background and a track record that should give him the authority to challenge people who badly need challenged.

That matters. One of the reasons internal appointments are so attractive to this board is that internal people are easier to manage.

They know the politics. They know where the lines are. They know who not to upset. They are less likely to walk into the room and ask why a club of Celtic’s size is still operating like a third-rate bowling club in key areas.

That is precisely why we need someone from outside.

A proper sporting director should not be there to make the board feel comfortable. He should be there to make the football department elite. Mitchell is the kind of appointment that would show Celtic are finally serious.

Freedman would be serious too. Dykes would be serious. There are others across Europe who would fit the same broad profile.

People from Brighton, Brentford, Salzburg, Leipzig, Benfica, Sporting, AZ Alkmaar, Union Saint-Gilloise and similar clubs should be studied.

But Mitchell is the obvious best-in-class candidate among these three because he has the deepest and most varied experience. Southampton, Spurs, Leipzig, Monaco, Newcastle. Development clubs. Premier League clubs. European clubs. Multi-club structures. Recruitment environments. Sporting director responsibility.

That is a proper football-operations career.

Compare that with Shaun Maloney. Again, this is not personal. Maloney may have a role at Celtic. A pathway role. A development role. A technical role under someone experienced. Fine. I would have no problem with that.

But sporting director? No. Not when people like Mitchell exist. Not when people like Freedman are gettable. Not when people like Dykes are out there right now. Not when football is full of people who have actually done the job.

The sporting director appointment is not some administrative tweak.

It is one of the most important decisions Celtic can make this summer. Get it right and the club starts to modernise. Get it wrong and we are setting up the next crisis before the last one has even cooled.

That is why the Maloney story was so alarming.

It suggests the board still thinks in terms of familiarity rather than expertise. It suggests they still believe internal convenience can substitute for elite competence. It suggests they have learned nothing from a season that came within inches of disaster.

If Celtic want to show they understand what nearly happened, they should not be interviewing clever former players and hoping to be dazzled.

They should be chasing people who have built things.

Paul Mitchell has built things. Dougie Freedman has built things. Lee Dykes has helped build one of the smartest recruitment operations in English football.

That is the level. That is where Celtic should be shopping.

Because if we are serious about becoming the club we claim to be, then we have to stop asking who is available, familiar and easy.

We have to start asking who is excellent. And of the names we have discussed, Paul Mitchell is the clearest answer.

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