Did Celtic really get £7.5m for him?
It’s quite bizarre really. He easily could have left at the end of the year grumbling about the Board to the press and the fans would be completely on his side.
Must be lacking a bit of EQ.
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Fine sentiments. I’m just wondering if this chancer is actually eligible for the COTY contest.
I’d be honoured to nominate the cunt should he pass the nomination process.
Can we get a Neil Lennon smiley please?
He only works in big leagues.
The age old problem for Celtic - big club, small league.
While Benitez is managing in a big league, he’s with a small club so you’d never know, he might be tempted.
Very good article from David Walsh
PREMIER LEAGUE | DAVID WALSH
march 3 2019, 12:01am, the sunday times
Cold-hearted opportunism trumped sentimental talk of boyhood allegiance for Bredan Rodgers when Leicester City job came up — and Celtic fans won’t forget
david walsh, chief sports writer
At the turn of the century Middlesbrough signed Alen Boksic. They paid Lazio £2.5m for a player who had played in two Champions League finals, winning one with Marseilles. Boksic did not come cheaply. In the dressing room it was believed he was on £63,000 a week. That was £63k after tax. It was widely believed Boksic was then the Premier League’s highest earner.
In his three years at the club the Croatia striker scored some terrific goals and delivered moments that showed Boro fans the player he had once been. Alas, Boksic took the money without ever giving of himself. During running drills at training he did not so much excuse himself as walk nonchalantly to one side. The local newspaper ran a story that he’d had six viruses over his time at Boro, all of which coincided with tough away games.
One morning in January 2003 the Boro players turned up for training and the space where Alen had sat for more than two and a half seasons was empty. Nobody knew he had left. There were no goodbyes, no promises to keep in touch, and since then no postcards from the Dalmatian coast. Michael Ricketts arrived from Bolton and was told to sit where Boksic had sat.
End of the dream: the hostility towards Brendan Rodgers from Celtic fans has been intense and hateful
End of the dream: the hostility towards Brendan Rodgers from Celtic fans has been intense and hateful
On Monday last week Brendan Rodgers supervised first-team training at Celtic. Like Boksic, Rodgers had given two-and-a-half years to the club. After training ended Rodgers left and never came back. No goodbyes, no explanation to his players about why he had to depart at such a pivotal moment and, of course, no hanging around to explain to fans who wouldn’t have understood anyway. The difference between Boksic and Rodgers is this: Middlesbrough’s fans knew what they were getting with Boksic. At Celtic Park it was different. They believed Brendan Rodgers when he told them he had been born into a Celtic-family in County Antrim, they lapped it up when he assured them Celtic was not just another step on his managerial ladder. “Dream job,” was the phrase he used.
Hell hath no fury like that of duped and jilted football fans and the hostility towards Rodgers from those who previously lionised him has been intense and hateful. Time will pass, people move on and find new things to fret about, but there is a good chance Rodgers, an extraordinarily successful Celtic manager, will never, ever, be welcomed back to Celtic Park. His record in domestic competitions was close to perfect. Seven potential trophies became seven actual trophies. Two league titles, two Scottish cups, three League Cups, and in his time at the club Celtic won 24 consecutive domestic cup games. It is so easy in football to have one slip, one night when the preparation isn’t right and the team gets beaten by a pumped-up underdog. Rodgers never let that happen.
It is true that his team played football that was easy to watch. Celtic fans liked that. Most of all, though, they loved him because he could not resist telling them that he was of their tribe. Their dream of winning 10 consecutive Scottish league titles was his dream and, now on seven, he could help them to realise it. Inside the club, the view of Rodgers was not quite so adoring. His first season was outstanding and the team had competed well in the Champions League, twice drawing with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. Since then, the team have remained dominant in domestic competition but have performed less well in the Champions League, failing to qualify for the group stages this year.
Hearing Rodgers complain about Celtic having nothing like the resources of Zenit Saint Petersburg or Valencia irritated some at the club, especially when the moaning came soon after Celtic had agreed to pay a record £9m for the Paris Saint-Germain striker Odsonne Edouard. During Rodgers’ time at the club, Celtic’s wage bill doubled.
It was noted too that while he complained about European rivals with more funds, his recruitment of new players had been far from prudent. They smiled to themselves too about how he never mentioned the huge advantage he enjoyed over his Scottish rivals in terms of resources. Aberdeen twice finished second in the SPL with their top-earning player on £2,500-a-week.
They look at the first-team squad Rodgers has left behind and, counting all the loan-signings, the overall number runs to 37, which means several of them can’t actually train with the first team. All that would have been forgiven and forgotten had Rodgers chosen to leave Celtic in the right way. At 46 he is probably too young to have known Paul Simon’s song “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” but it seems like he was guided by it: “You just slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan/you don’t need to be coy, Roy, just get yourself free/Hop on the bus, Gus, you don’t need to discuss much/Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.”
Rodgers’ choice was straightforward. Stay until the end of the season, help Celtic win the domestic treble for the third consecutive season and then explain that it was time to move on. People would have been disappointed but understanding. They would have felt respected and wished him well. Now, the phrase on the banner is damning: “Never a Celt, Always a fraud.”
At first the word out of Leicester was that the club were prepared to wait until the end of the season if that’s what it would take to get their man. Rodgers insists this was not the case, that Leicester weren’t prepared to wait. Either way, this matters not a whit. Rodgers had a choice and he chose to leave Celtic with 11 games of their season remaining. He chose to exit his boyhood club and his dream job by the back door.
He should be a success at Leicester, at least in the short to medium term. There will be slogans on the changing room walls, plenty of talk of values and honesty and everybody being in it together. Leicester’s players will enjoy the tactics and the one-to-one conversations because Rodgers is good at these.
They should be wary, though, in Leicester. Paul Simon was right. There are 50 ways to leave your lover.
Rodgers chose the wrong way.
Ah im in two minds about this.
He has a point, and rogers shouldn’t have left like that, and he always gave me the impression of being his own greatest fan, but if Celtic, or almost any other football club got a better offer for more (or less) money for any player, manager, or member of staff, their feet wouldnt touch the ground.
Honestly though , i just cant see where people find the energy for all the hate. He’s gone, I never warmed overly to him (l liked ronnie more tbh), but wish him well, and the club moves on.
The football establishment will do all they can to prevent celtic winning ten in a row in any case.
Practice what you preach, there’s plenty of instances where money has not been everything to footballers and managers. I get and understand Rodgers being unhappy with the board and their lack of ambition, that he had taken Celtic as far as he could - Leicester would have waited, he could have seen out the remaining two and bit months and but he didn’t. He’s a self-centred egomaniac and I hope his managerial career goes to pot and his current wife leaves him and takes him for everything he’s got.
It’s a bit like a relationship, if you ever loved or respected a partner then you would not have left them on the terms Rodgers did.
On the other side of it, that’s a two way thing. A club can accept an offer for someone but they can’t make them leave, Lawwell found that out with Bobo Balde.
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It’s a good article but I would take issue with the completely false picture it paints re the board, the rising wage bill, short term signings and other failings are 100% the failings of the board and the the reason Rodgers left.
It seems to be putting the blame at the wage bill and resources at Rodger’s foot. I’m not sure how much control Rodgers had over this. We have a huge bloated squad at present which is the main reason for the high wage bill - take Scott Allan for example - he could have gone at the start of the season, he was not in the manager’s plans. We refused to sell him to Hibs out of spite because they would not be held to ransom as we tried to take them for a ride regarding John McGinn - a terrific player who would have been a mainstay for Celtic for years.
I don’t think the loan signings and short-term nature of them are anything to do with Rodgers, we embarked on this path under Deila with the likes of Denayer and Roberts because the board were too interested in their share value and dividends to invest in players. I fully understand why Rodgers left but I’ll never excuse the manner he departed in.
Rodgers deserves every bit of grief he gets for the manner of his departure but our board are crooks and villains and I am very wary of the rewriting of events to paint Rodgers as a villain for the boards failings.
Nothing has changed, Lawwell has to go.
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Davie Provan actually had a good take on it how Lawwell is the real winner in all of this and that’s the biggest danger for Celtic long term.
stephen Bradley
lock the thread
i dont know Rocko
Dan Macdonnell put together a reasonable effort in the indo the other day where he made some very decent points that sleepwalking to another “treble” must present no challenge to a man like Rodgers and if a premier league team like Leicester comes a long with decent potential he is right to jump.
Its probably a difficult concept for fans of celtic / rangers, etc to realise that the competitions that they compete in no and respect no longer really hold any weight or signifigance outside the goldfish bowl that they swim inside
. I mean 10 in a row scottish leagues? i mean come on for a club of that size who need to compete against team like Hamilton and Motherwell how can it even carry weight at this stage?
Rodgers is doing the right thing IMHO, fans always will see it differently , jesus you should have been in the dundalk mob the other night when ronan finn went down a few times - look these fellas are professionals, being professioal means you say the right things to get the job done and then you move on when a better opportunity comes up, and he did that…
what probably has celtic fans so sore is the relaisation that whilst on the cusp of what they rightly feel is their greatest achivements the fella they trusted in managing them has left to a mediocre PL team , the reality will take a while to sink in id say but Rodgers decision is just really a personification of the fact the no one really cares or values the treble treble… and getting leicster in the top 10 next season is a bigger deal
its sad, it is , i remember in the 90s and celtic coming fifth behind hibs- and then the resurgence in the latter part of that decade, its hard to believe how 20 years later how the respect football have for scottish competition has dropped…
he made the right call @Rocko
lets just face it they possibility of a team winning 10 - 15 leagues in a row or a treble “treble” (FFS) shows that the competition is dead
celtic could win 20 in a row really,
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David Walsh essentially saying Glasgow Celtic fans are a gullible lot who don’t understand that soccer is a business.
Coming from a Tom Humphries and Sky cycling team fan, I’ll pass on what that fraud has to say #zerocredibility
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I think rather than getting angry with Brendan Rodgers, Celtic supporters should be angry at the lack of regulation in association football which has enabled a hyper version of the capitalist wealth inequality we see in wider society, both between leagues and within leagues.
I don’t blame anybody for leaving any team in professional sport. Players, and indeed managers, are fodder, and they are more than entitled to maximise their earnings while they can.
But the sort of wealth inequality that has been allowed pervade in association football could well end up eating the game if something is not done about it - and something won’t be done about it.
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Good luck trying to convince Glasgow Celtic fans, still basking in the glory of a 0-6 away win at the likes of financial powerhouses like St Johnstone or Hamilton Academicsl of your wealth inequality in soccer theory.
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