WILFRIED NANCY CELTIC MANAGER TALKS TAKE AN ALL-TOO FAMILIAR TWIST
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
After a weekend of almost total radio silence from the club, apart from, of course, the obligatory cheap shots at the Green Brigade and The Celtic Trust, it appears we finally have a couple of updates regarding Wilfried Nancy, Celtic Manager-in-waiting, supposedly.
As usual though, there’s good news and there’s bad news.
Predictably, Cost-Cutting Delays Wilfried Nancy Celtic Manager Deal
First the good news.
Stephen McGowan, one of the few truly reliable sources remaining in Scottish football mainstream journalist, provided a positive update last night. He said: “As far as I am led to believe, Wilfried Nancy will be Celtic’s next manager, unless something major has changed that I’m unaware of.”
So, an announcement should be forthcoming sometime this week then, right?
Surely the Celtic Board, desperate for any kind of PR win they can possibly find at the moment, would want to get the new man in, and unveiled as soon as possible, right?
Well, no. Not exactly.
This brings me to the bad news, and in typical Celtic Board fashion, it’s finances that are holding up this deal.
Another update circulated via various sources late last night, points to a delay of at least another week, for reasons all too predictable.
Cast your mind back to last week. It seemed like Nancy could be unveiled any moment, only for Columbus Crew’s director to drop the bombshell that Celtic hadn’t even made an official approach for their manager let alone offered him a deal.
Well, now it seems we have an update that explains this seeming disconnect between what the media have been hearing (The ACSOM Blog included), and the brutal reality presented by Columbus Crew.
As I outlined last week, for all the appointment of Nancy would not be universally popular, I do not buy into the assertion that he’s the cheap option. Celtic would, according to most sources, still have to hand over a significant seven-figure sum to released Nancy and his backroom team from their current Columbus Crew deals.
Last night’s report however claims that this obligatory compensation figure drops quite considerably on December 1st.
On one hand, I can kind of see the Celtic Board’s point here. Waiting one more week won’t be a deal breaker in terms of our season. Even if Nancy came in tomorrow, Martin O’Neill and Shaun Maloney would probably still take charge of this week’s trip to Rotterdam to play Feyenoord and the perhaps the following league game too.
However, there’s no denying that the sooner we get a new manager in the better. Saturday’s utterly turgid performance against St. Mirren, elevated only by a moment of individual genius from our captain Callum McGregor suggests the short term bounce we’ve seen under Martin O’Neill over the past 3 weeks may be nearing its end.
After the utter shambles of Friday’s aborted AGM, where the main source of fan anger was the perceived greed and refusal to invest necessary funds by the board, delaying the absolutely essential appointment of the new manager, even if it does end up saving Celtic a million quid, is not a good look right now.
Once again, it shows a board out of touch, fixated only on the balance sheet and completely incapable of “reading the room”.
Wilfried Nancy will walk into a firestorm if he does indeed arrive in Glasgow in early December. I just hope he’s ready for it.