7 hours ago
15
Thank heavens Midtjylland and their dinky little 12,000-seater stadium brought a welcome dose of reality to proceedings. For a moment there, in the wake of a drawn-out League Cup semi-final win over an abysmal, 10-man Rangers, it actually felt like people were starting to talk seriously about Martin O’Neill being given the Celtic manager’s job on a permanent basis.
Shame on all of them. This is no slight on O’Neill, by the way. There has been a certain comfort in seeing him back in the old routine at the Parkhead outfit, doing his jumping jack bit on the touchline and holding court in those press conferences in his trademark style - only with an added ‘aren’t I an old dodderer now?’ comedy routine.
He certainly calmed troubled waters in the wake of Brendan Rodgers’ overdue yet spectacularly poisonous departure. He managed to achieve something his predecessor had evidently forgotten how to do – and beat their biggest rivals.
What’s more, he has put the club back on an even keel, of sorts, and in a better position to plot some kind of functional way forward.
However, nothing changes the fact he is a 73-year-old man who had been out of management for six years ahead of major shareholder Dermot Desmond giving him the call.
In Shaun Maloney, he is being assisted by a fellow with nothing on his CV to suggest he has what it takes to coach Celtic and who had settled, himself, for a backroom role related to preparing younger players for first-team level.
Martin O'Neill has steadied the ship at Celtic after being named interim manager
Shaun Maloney gives Anthony Ralston instructions during their Euro loss to Midtjylland
That they are where they are is not a result of them being a long-term solution to the fix Celtic are in. It’s a symptom of what an absolute mess the entire organisation has become and Thursday’s 3-1 Europa League hammering in the Danish town of Herning midweek brought that into sharp focus.
Midtjylland could have won by more. They should have won by more. Now that last term – with that close-fought play-off loss to Bayern Munich for a place in the last 16 of the Champions League – has been shown to be an outlier, it should serve as a stark reminder to those at the head of Celtic of what is now required.
They are back to being down among the dead men in European terms. Complete non-entities. A club whose record at that level over the past decade or more is a total embarrassment.
And if that, coupled with what unfolded before their eyes a few days ago, doesn’t tell Desmond and the board that they need to use this opportunity to completely revolutionise the whole footballing operation, they’re in a bigger pickle than even the most vehement of their critics in the ultras section thinks.
Celtic don’t just need a new manager. They need a whole new plan, a whole new way of working, and a proper joined-up approach. A way of ensuring that the ambitions and promises of those at the head of the tree are something other than just empty rubbish.
Desmond, in a now infamous interview in 2020, stated that ‘Europe is so important as a yardstick of our football progression’. Celtic haven’t won a knockout tie in UEFA competition proper since 2004. Their roll call of European shame over the last decade or so is long and getting longer – with all sorts of nonsense from Maribor and Cluj to Ferencvaros and the Sparta Prague reserve team having taken them apart at that level.
Michael ‘Mr Invisible’ Nicholson, who has shown little to justify his promotion to CEO, is regularly pilloried for stating that his aim is for Celtic to be ‘world-class in everything we do’.
How can he say that with a straight face when he considers where his club is right now? According to the last set of financial figures, released in September, the first-team wage bill was the highest it had been in the club’s history in the year ending June 30, 2025. In the previous three years, a total of £77.5m had been invested in the squad.
And what is there to show for it? That motley crew ripped to pieces by Midtjylland and currently nine points behind Hearts in the Premiership. There’s plenty of money being spent at Celtic. It’s just being spent on all the wrong things.
Major shareholder Dermot Desmond insists European football is the yardstick for Celtic
Celtic CEO Nicholson (middle) with chairman Peter Lawwell and financial officer Chris McKay
Take the case of the last full-time manager. He was the highest-paid in the history of the club as well. Yet, why did anyone ever believe he was going to be a success? It was impossible, right from the start, to figure out why Rodgers was ever brought back.
He left in acrimonious circumstances first time round, slinging mud at the directors’ box, because the board weren’t willing to spend the sums he wanted on the players he wanted. The odds of that happening again somewhere down the line were incredibly high.
Only, it became worse than anyone imagined. In his first season, the club bought pretty much an entire team of players that he clearly didn’t want to use. Just before he left, much the same thing happened again.
The whole reason he returned was to re-establish Celtic in Europe. His reign ended in the wake of possibly the club’s worst-ever defeat in that arena at the hands of Kairat Almaty.
As for what remains of the club’s transfer policy, who knows? Does anyone have a handle on what it is any longer? The current squad is an unbalanced mish-mash of allsorts.
No one outside the building seems to have a clue what lesser-spotted head of football operations Paul Tisdale actually does. A fair few inside probably don’t either. There is a real lack of information on what Celtic’s scouting and recruitment operation really entails.
Desmond, of course, has to take responsibility for this. He brought Rodgers back against the wishes of many in the Celtic family. He certainly ought to take a little more of a background role when it comes to recruiting the next head coach – or at least countenance how he has to fit into a wider structure.
Fresh blood and fresh ideas are needed in the boardroom. That is absolutely clear. Tisdale has said next to nothing since arriving and there is a strong case to be made for the club considering something along the lines of a sporting director, responsible for creating a solid ethos throughout the place.
Head of Football Operations Paul Tisdale has kept a low profile at Celtic
As for the youth department, it has been underperforming big-time. Like other areas of the club in recent years, it has reeked of a ‘jobs for the boys’ mentality. It needs someone to put it under the microscope as well.
There has been talk that one of the main candidates Celtic are looking at may not be available until next month. If that means O’Neill and Maloney stay at the helm beyond the impending international break, that’s fine.
No great harm will surely come to the place in domestic terms until then. O’Neill is a relatively safe pair of hands.
However, these weeks until the next permanent appointment must be used profitably by those at the head of the club. They need a rethink of how they are doing things. They also need a different kind of manager to Rodgers.
He was always going to be The Big Cheese and failed, unsurprisingly, in the end.
The next guy needs to be just one important part of a much bigger picture - and that’s a club that finally wakes up to where it is in the grand scheme of things and shows a willingness to modernise and change.
