As well as the significant miracle of winning a league and Scottish Cup double, Martin O’Neill and Shaun Maloney have started to address the gaping chasm that is the recruitment side of the club. So much has happened this season that it’s easy to forget we dismissed our Head of Football operations in January, leaving only a skeleton of the scouting system he put in place.
Martin and Shaun arrived in January completely blind to recruitment plans, where any legacy objectives were no longer relevant and with no time whatsoever to assess the very scant options before them. Assessments of the January recruits were duly made after the players pulled on their Celtic training kits and resulted in few first team appearances.
As well as a manager, we need to appoint a Head of Football Operations and a bevvy of scouts. We also need a chairman and there are new non-exec director vacancies to fill. All this while, by their own admission, the board got the appointment of the last two permanent managers badly wrong. Dermot Desmond’s ‘don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out’ communication on the departure of Brendan Rodgers, and the sacking of Wilfried Nancy after eight games attest to that.
Any of these problems are problematic, having all of them, even more so. But all is not lost. My mind was made up on Nancy during the Dundee United defeat at Tannadice in December. I always knew what to expect from Rodgers (still cannot understand how he was appointed in 2023). We have not had a sustainable forward model since Ange Postecolou left for London.
There are lots of reasons why we’ve won every league since then: Celtic are a winning machine and their direct competitors are more attuned to the role of losers. What we now have, is an opportunity to go again. Avoid a third consecutive unfathomably bad permanent managerial appointment, recruit good recruiters, and we might just kick on.
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