I’d agree with that. But Mark Lawwell seems to have been instrumental in recommending Ange to Celtic. And worked with him a lot previously. He seems to be higher up the food chain there than Fergal Harkin.
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I was chatting to a Rangers fan Sunday evening who was fairly upbeat about things. He reckoned Celtic would need to spend most of the Champions League money just to keep Jota and CCV, so there wouldn’t be a lot left to strengthen on what they already have. I changed the subject fairly quickly when he told me what Supporters Club he was with, but is there much truth in what he was getting at?
the huns narrative has changed, at the start of the season it was the CL was worth 40m, now its they will be able to buy 2 loan players (approx 15m).
Celtic will be able to buy these 2 & another 2 or 3 1st team players on top of that
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They are losing 2 or 3 at the end of the season as well I think? He was putting a positive case forward talking about lads to come back from injury. Hopefully the Germans finish the job Thursday.
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There was some talk on Follow Follow the other day about the £40m being mythical and the real number is less than £20m and then with CCV and Jota (and Maeda who will cost very little) that would be all the money gone. But it must have been the CFO who negotiated their Sports Direct deal who did the maths because he forgot about the television money. The news had long spread by then anyway.
Ultimately the huns have a couple of chances of getting into the CL next season and the fact they’re guaranteed European group stage football will protect them from a potential collapse. But they’ll struggle to invest or to match Celtic’s investment. They got extraordinarily lucky with selling Patterson for stupid money which means they could avoid selling Morelos again maybe but hard to see him renewing and he only has 12 months left this summer I think.
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Think he’s putting a positive spin on it alright. Celtic’s outlay on Jota and CCV would be around £12mn combined alright, and Celtic also need to strengthen/buy another 3-4 players (another centre back, a left back, a centre midfielder, another wide player).
The huns could negotiate the qualifying rounds to get into the CL (assuming Celtic win the league) but it’ll be tricky and they could really do with the guaranteed windfall. Think @Rocko did an overview of their squad a while back and concluded that a lot of them are ageing and/or entering into final year of contracts. Goldson and Morelos are two of the key ones there, but he might be able to confirm. They seem to have improved their general management of the club and they’ve a technical director chap who seems quite clued in (Ross Wilson?). They’ve made some astute signings in the past few years, e.g. Glenn Kamara for £250k. But their more recent work has been dodgy - Sakala, despite his goal at the weekend, is clean useless and they spent £6mn on him. They went for headline loan deals in January that have backfired too (Ramsey and Diallo). I don’t think they can afford to make many mistakes.
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What did they pay for lundstrom? I don’t like how this guy is beginning to perform …he looks to really be finding his feet…
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I always figured the Patterson deal was so utterly bizarre that it was some kind of financial chicanery around Stevie.
Lundstrom is the first player I’d have from the huns.
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You’ll laugh but i think Patterson will turn out to be a snip at that price.
2m for corpus as the cherries get promoted
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When Ange Postecoglou comes into the Lennoxtown training centre on a weekday morning the Celtic manager says hello to his coaches, gives each of them a fist-pump or a high five, gets his breakfast and then disappears to his office. The staff have long since accepted that he isn’t going to eat or sit for the long chats with them.
When he and his backroom team are in their respective offices he rarely comes through to shoot the breeze. After a briefing session from a coach or scout he thanks them and soon leaves again. Nor is there any real discussion with his assistants on tactics or team selections, to the extent that before Celtic played at Livingston in March Postecoglou amused himself by coming to them and saying “name your team for Saturday” as if setting them a test. It wasn’t an act of consultation. As each of them responded he said “nope, you have eight out of 11” or “no, seven out of 11”. None of them picked the team that Postecoglou had decided on. And who called it right? The result was 3-1 for Celtic at a ground where they had not won since 2007.
That was one of what now stands at a 30-game unbeaten league run which has landed the Scottish Premiership in their enigmatic manager’s debut campaign. Beating Hearts on Saturday put them nine points clear of a Rangers team with only three games left and a vastly inferior goal difference they had no hope of overturning.
It is Celtic’s tenth title out of the last 11 but by far the most unexpected and a triumph for what fans christened “Ange-ball”. This time last year the club was a crippled mess which limped home 25 points behind a Rangers side which went through the campaign unbeaten. Celtic spent three months waiting for Eddie Howe to come as Neil Lennon’s replacement only for Howe to stun them by pulling out. Within days they had turned to Postecoglou, a little-known 56-year-old Greek-Australian managing Yokohama F Marinos in Japan. “I’m sure that Google got a helluva battering when my name came up with people trying to figure out who I am,” he said. There were echoes of the scepticism and cynicism when another major British club turned to the J-League to find a manager. For Arsene Wenger in 1996, read Postecoglou in 2021. Delighted Rangers fans mocked the appointment, certain this unknown would be a failure.
Last summer Celtic’s long-standing chief executive, Peter Lawwell, stepped down only for his successor, Dominic McKay, to be such a bad fit he lasted 72 days. The club had no head of recruitment and key players Odsonne Edouard, Kristoffer Ajer and Ryan Christie got the transfers they wanted. Rangers looked dominant under Steven Gerrard and seemed sure to win this season’s Premiership and with it a £30 million windfall from near-certain entry to the 2022-23 Champions League group stage. Celtic fans were gathering outside Parkhead for regular protests against their own board. “He’s walking into a mission impossible job,” said Chris Sutton of Postecoglou.
There are no Celtic protests now, only mass worship of Postecoglou and a team which won the Premier Sports Cup in December and now has a double. The board’s huge gamble paid off. Better still, for the connoisseurs within their support, their new leader has done it with his way and with style. Celtic at their best have been exhilarating and expressive, playing at a breathless tempo which has often swept teams away by half-time including Rangers when they came to Parkhead in February.
At the end of his first week of training last July Celtic released a clip of their new manager mic’d up and barking at his players: “We never stop. We stop at half time and we stop at the end of the game when we celebrate. If the opposition wants to stop that’s good for us.” Sometimes these lines can seem clichéd or corny but from Postecoglou it was an accurate declaration of what he was all about.
Postecoglou was born in Athens 1965. When he was five his family emigrated by boat to begin a new life in Melbourne. His parents’ sacrifice and determination shaped his character and when his father, Jim, died in 2018 Postecoglou spoke movingly about how he had been the most important figure in his life and especially his football. The bond between them was close even if there was tough love from father to son. “My dad never told me he loved me, he didn’t give me cuddles,” Postecoglou said. “He was my biggest critic all the time. I am a totally different father, I kiss and cuddle my kids every day and tell them I love them, which is terrible because I am making them too soft…”
Celtic fought back from behind against Hearts to win on Saturday
Jim and Ange would devour British football together, watching Match of the Day on Australian television. He sought his father’s approval throughout a playing career in Australia and then in management, always setting out his teams to play in an attractive style with the ball mainly on the ground which would appeal to Jim. In his first job he coached South Melbourne to two Australian titles before another two with Brisbane Roar. He managed Australia at the 2014 World Cup and qualified for the following one in Russia before resigning and moving to Japan where he won the J-League with Yokohama F Marinos. That club is partly owned by the City Group, with which Celtic has connections via Manchester City.
Last summer’s turbulence at Celtic and too shallow a squad meant teething troubles were inevitable. There were early setbacks in the league and eliminations from the Champions, Europa and Conference Leagues in July, November and February respectively. But Celtic have not lost a Premiership game since September and from the last three Old Firm league games they took seven points to Rangers’ one. His recruitment has been extraordinary and it really has been his, as his time in the J-League gave him the insight and confidence to sign strikers Kyogo Furuhashi and Daizen Maeda and midfielders Reo Hatate and Yosuke Ideguchi. Just as Wenger was initially doubted for signing so many Frenchman, so some wondered whether Postecoglou’s Japanese imports would cope with the rigours of Scottish football.
In fact they have been particularly successful as have on-loan pair Cameron Carter-Vickers from Tottenham and Jota from Benfica. Joe Hart, Josip Juranovic, Carl Starfelt, Liel Abada and Giorgos Giakoumakis also arrived to make huge contributions. Postecoglou’s judgement has been so unerring that Matt O’Riley arrived for £1.5 million from League One MK Dons and was instantly impressive.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst replaced Gerrard at Rangers and they started spilling points. Celtic’s league form remained relentless and Postecoglou’s credibility grew. He may keep his distance from his staff and have no interest in being one of the boys but they now understand him well enough not to take it personally. He isn’t into socialising and admitted he can sit through a long-haul flight without saying a word to the passenger in the seat beside him. “It totally uneases people, particularly players,” he said, joking that at his previous teams they would shuffle boarding passes to avoid getting “the death seat” beside him. Yet at Celtic his coaches do feel that they have his respect. There have been examples of personal generosity towards them and as he won four consecutive manager of the month awards he took the unusual step of insisting some of the coaching, analysis or other backroom staff were prominent beside him in the publicity photographs.
Around Parkhead and Glasgow he is stopped for selfies from Celtic fans who adore him. Some identify with his own history as an immigrant and believe that he “gets” Celtic. He has said of the supporters who flock to watch his side: “I’m sure a lot of them walked in with some problems in their life. For this 95 minutes we made them forget that and feel good and that’s something special.”
On Christmas morning some fans posted pictures on social media of them wearing their presents: Postecoglou-style black sweaters. The manager and the club have been a perfect fit.
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You might imagine Steve McQueen in The Great Escape , endlessly bouncing a baseball off the walls in the solitary confinement of his cell, but Ange Postecoglou had no problem passing the hours when he arrived from Japan 11 months ago. A period of self-isolation in a hotel room due to the Covid rules in place back then gave the Australian plenty of time to perfect the plans that have taken Celtic to the brink of regaining the Scottish Premiership title from rivals Rangers.
Postecoglou has provided clarity from the chaos he came into. At the time, the team had trailed home 25 points behind Rangers, the board had failed to land Eddie Howe as manager and key players were entering the final year of their contracts, Kristoffer Ajer, Ryan Christie and Odsonne Édouard had made it clear they wanted to leave, so some fans might even have envied Postecoglou his spell of enforced solitude.
Despite his success in Australia and Japan, the 56-year-old was perceived as a left-field candidate plucked from relative obscurity after the public rejection by Howe. Yet a year later and Postecoglou is a double manager of the year, having added the Scottish Football Writers’ Association award to the PFA Scotland accolade he received last weekend.
The manger said he knew Furuhashi “would make a hell of an impact” at Celtic
On Friday afternoon, he made time for an in-depth discussion of how that transformation has taken place and reflected that the period alone before he could meet his new players and staff in person was the calm before the storm. “You understand there’s a massive responsibility as manager of this club and know there’s a fairly major rebuild needed,” he said.
“I got my head round that pretty early. I had a week of isolation in the hotel room, where I could exorcise all my demons and any doubts I had in terms of the enormity of it. Once I got here, I didn’t have time to think about it too much because what happens then is it becomes overwhelming if you think about everything you need to do.
“There was no doubt the beginning was going to be really rocky in one way or another because it was going to take time to embed the football style, but I just had to stay disciplined through that to make sure I took every step I thought we needed to take to get to a position where we were going to be competitive this year.
“I had no time to waste. There wasn’t a time when I could sit back and take in the landscape of what we needed to do. As soon as I got appointed, even before I got to the UK, when I was still in Japan, I’d started mapping out the steps we needed to take. The blueprint was there, but putting that into practice was going to be the challenging bit.”
First, Postecoglou dealt with the departures in the straight-talking fashion we have all since become accustomed to. Ajer, Christie and Édouard would get their moves, provided there was no sulking from their side. Nevertheless, he acknowledges it was “a juggling act” trying to simultaneously sign replacements. He also backed himself to get most of the new arrivals right and has had a high “hit” rate from his signings. That was crucial in winning over sceptics, whether inside the club or among the support.
Postecoglou says his signings have bedded in quickly because he has a clear idea of where they fit into his style of play
“I was confident we could build something, but my feeling was we couldn’t go 12 months without some sort of success. I had to use every moment to make sure we gave ourselves a chance of success this year, in one form or another, to then give me the opportunity to build what I want to build and to gain the trust and confidence of the people in the club and who support it.
“The key part of that was I was always going to be judged on the players I brought in. That’s where people probably make their first judgment on you as a new manager coming in because you could put into practice your words. We brought in Kyogo [Furuhashi] and Liel Abada and they hit the ground running, which helped me to be able to continue that process.”
He is not surprised that most of his signings have been successful and says that stems from having a clear idea of how they will fit into how he wants to play. “It’s not an exact science and it’s not always about the money — there’s plenty of clubs around the world spend a hell of a lot of money and don’t get it right. The reason I was confident was because I had a clear idea of the kind of football we wanted to play and I am pretty good at identifying the type of players who will fit into my system, which means I can eliminate a lot.
“You might have five or six players, and how do you distinguish when they are all good players and have something to offer? I have always backed myself that more often than not — not always — I will get it right because I see them fitting into a style of play and system that’s super clear to me. I was confident, for example, that Kyogo would make a hell of an impact here because I knew he would fit my style of football, I knew the kind of player he was. Without it being a 100 per cent guarantee, there was a good chance of success there and that would then buy me the faith and trust of people to continue on.”
Postecoglou emigrated from Greece to Australia with his parents and sister as a five-year-old and that has shaped his life since. Moving from his adopted country to Japan and then from there to Scotland has been handled with the same curiosity.
“I’ve always felt the need to challenge myself and take on uncharted territory or take myself out of a comfort zone,” he explained. “I don’t know where that comes from, but I’ve never sought security or some sort of comfortable existence at any stage. Every time I have moved it’s not been because I’ve been unhappy or on edge, it’s more because I have felt the need to conquer something new and not be fearful of that.
“We emigrated to Australia when I was five and I could imagine how difficult that journey would have been for my parents when they went to a country where they didn’t know the language, didn’t know a soul. This is back in 1970 when there’s no internet or anything like that, so you don’t have information about where you’re going. I guess my father had that in him, that he was going to pursue an opportunity, as uncertain as it was, and that’s a little bit in me. I love new challenges, I love going to different countries and experiencing different cultures and working with different types of players. I really enjoy that.
“I probably don’t coach my best if I get comfortable. I love that little bit of the unknown, it tends to bring out the best of me. That will always be in me: where’s the next leap I can make? I haven’t had too many stumbles along the way.
“If I have a major stumble at some point, it may realign my vision of what the next step is, but I’m enjoying it at the moment and at this club I’ve just scratched the surface. It’s the first year of trying to build something that will be special.”
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This may interest some of the heads here
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Hail Hail big @mick_jones.
Didn’t I tell you Celtic would win the league when you wondered if it was possible at the start of the season?
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