Celtic’s failure to recruit properly this season is the crux of all our problems under Brendan Rodgers.
Injury problems since August have forced the Celtic manager to play players who would otherwise have been shipped out and the personnel that brought in last summer to bolster the squad are nowhere to be seen.
So how can the recruitment be so bad? How can a club like Celtic spend vast amounts of cash on players who are clearly not good enough? Who is responsible?
Whilst we ask the questions we will never get the proper answers to, Ian Dougan from popular Celtic podcast, The Cynic, pretty much sums up the club’s approach to how we recruit players.
Dougan said [The Cynic], “The further you get into this, the more the two seasons under Ange Postecoglou look like an aberration.
“We didn’t do anything with a modern structure, we didn’t put in a strategy. We basically upgraded Dudu Dahan to Frank Trimboli and our director of football became Ange’s knowledge of the Japanese market.
“I think we’re sort of like, ‘God this feels like the COVID season, doesn’t it?’ because essentially it’s the same sort of behaviours again.
“It’s the same people in the boardroom, it’s the same owner. Fair enough, Lawwell is in the chairman chair rather than the chief executive chair. But it’s the same things happening all over again.
“And if we don’t address these things, we’re going to continue to end up with outcomes like this. Can we really say we have done all of the things to be our best? We absolutely haven’t.
“And that is where the Celtic fans are perfectly entitled to be raging about this situation.”
And that is how it seems like Celtic do their recruitment. On the advice of agents, largely. And if that’s the case, they almost certainly fluked it when Ange Postecoglou walked in the building in 2021.
The Australian’s in-depth knowledge of the Japanese market saved Celtic’s season in 2021/22 and now that that’s gone, we are back to the early days of pre-Brendan Rodgers and looking like we are making the same Nadir Ciftci-type mistakes all over again with a rudderless recruitment team.
Depressing isn’t it?
