CELTIC BOARD, THE S*N NEWSPAPER SEEK TO BLAME BRENDAN RODGERS FOR CURRENT CRISIS
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- Sep 6
- 3 min read
I’ve often written on here about the culture of narrative-management that prevails at Rangers. Say what you will about that team, their supporters or their current manager, but one thing they have always been good at is getting the Scottish press to dance to their tune.
Celtic it seems, tried yesterday to adopt similar tactics. Someone high up in the club, I won’t say who, but there’s plenty of speculation on line which I am sure you can read yourselves, spoke to The S*n newspaper.
As usual, with the conservative, greed-driven mindset, prevalent in the Celtic boardroom and indeed in so many people in positions of power across the world these days, as soon as things go wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.
Celtic Board, The S*n Working Behind the Scenes to Undermine Manager
According to The S*n, a “Celtic Insider” told them that Brendan Rodgers is trying to “engineer his way out” of the club by exacerbating the current situation and openly speaking about it in the media.
The report states: “Senior figures inside the club believe Rodgers is engineering his exit.
“What he’s said in public has torn the club apart. On and off the record discussions are creating division throughout the club.
“He’s the only manager in the club’s history who has repeatedly questioned things.”
Now, I actually laughed the first time I read this. I had to stop and ask myself, is this for real, do The Celtic Board, The S*n or anyone else for that matter truly believe that Celtic fans are either naïve or stupid enough to buy this.
The Board are the ones "tearing the club apart" at the moment. Not the manager. The board are the ones who ignored the opinions of the manager and his staff when told that we needed more, and better quality signings in sooner, to make the Champions League.
That ignorance has now cost the club 40 million pounds and probably devalued the board's own shareholdings considerably in the process.
Plenty of managers have asked difficult questions of Celtic in past, and have usually been forced to leave when they didn’t get the answers they wanted. Ange Postecoglou said as much in the weeks leading up to his departure. Rodgers himself admitted at the end of his first spell managing Celtic that he had “taken the club as far as he was allowed to”.
To put it another way: how many times do you change the same part in a washing machine before you accept that the entire thing is broken and needs to be ripped out and replaced?
The Celtic Board think that fans will read this guff, buy it, and suddenly turn on the manager.
They are gravely mistaken and even more incompetent than I believed them to be if they truly think that the average Celtic supporter will side with them, and a hive of utter scum and villainy like The S*n newspaper.
We are not stupid; we see right through these attempts at passing the buck.
Rodgers is not blameless in all this. Not at all. In fact, I think his tactical inflexibility is appalling as has been his treatment of both Shin Yamada and Hayato Inamura since they arrived.
Those are minor issues though, and ones that could easily be corrected through proper communication.
For the last 10 years or more, the same problem has persisted at Celtic: failing to build on a position of strength because our board hoard cash like it’s going out of fashion.
Managers have come and gone, but the board has largely remained the same as has their arrogant, contemptuous attitude to any kind of serious engagement with fans.
The management culture at Celtic right now is top heavy, poorly resourced and utterly toxic. Even if they did manage to engineer an early exit for Rodgers, what next?
Fans won’t accept a “yes man” being brought in. We will not accept this continued managed decline, to a point where we can’t even reliably skelp Rangers anymore.
Change is coming, the board can either engage or continue futile attempts at deflection and distraction like this. They are only prolonging the inevitable.
