If Eddie Howe joins Celtic they will be getting more than a manager. They’ll be bringing in a philosophy and a modern way of working.
The last decade may have been fantastically successful domestically but in European terms Celtic have been repeatedly exposed by no more than adequate continental sides with turnover less than a third of the £70-100m that Celtic have regularly generate.
All of the names don’t need recalled but Sparta Prague and Ferencvaros have undermined the current season more than any domestic opponent.
Critical to the success that Howe delivered to Bournemouth was Richard Hughes. Glasgow born, Italian raised and football educated in England seems like the perfect background for a key role in reviving Celtic out of the lethargy of recent times.
The drive, ambition and purpose that Brendan Rodgers brought in 2016 had started to fizzle out by the time Youssouf Mulumbu arrived two years later, the consequences have been felt painfully this season.
Celtic can’t match the wages on offer in the EPL but off the park they can be a match in terms of recruitment, player development, analysis and fitness.
In 2019 Hughes gave the Bournemouth website a look into his behind-the-scenes role in ensuring a team is on the park every game to compete with the richest clubs in the world:
The role is primarily heading up the recruitment department and having a structure in place which can put players in front of Eddie and his staff, allowing them to make decisions that are going to help in the recruitment of players.
Eddie has a high-pressure job that takes up so much of his time, managing a Premier League team, so you need the right people in the right places to minimise the amount of time dedicated to doing the other important parts of the job, recruitment in this case.
I’m hopefully loading his gun to fire as many good bullets as possible, that’s what I see my main job as. Then I act as the liaison when he makes his mind up, working alongside chief executive Neill Blake in delivering that. There are other layers to it of course and it becomes all consuming and 24/7 if you allow it to.
Describing how he found himself in his role he explained:
I didn’t necessarily have ambitions to work in the recruitment side of things when I was a player. I was a student of the game, loved analysing the game and loved having an opinion and sharing it with people – and I’ve found myself doing all that in recruitment.
Ever since then I’ve had very little chance to come up for air because it’s been one window after another and I’ve learned that it’s a job that never really sleeps, when one window shuts you’re preparing for the next one, especially when you’re working for a manager who’s as demanding for progression as Eddie is.
We’ve expanded the recruitment department, we scout more widely than we did. We’ve doubled, close to trebled in numbers, though it is still not a huge department for a Premier League club. That cohesion between us all and the fact that we’ve all worked together for a period of time, know the manager as well as people in our position can, it puts us in a good position hopefully to allow Eddie to make more good decisions than bad ones.
That’s the thing about recruitment, you’re dealing with humans and human performance so all you can do is to be as knowledgeable as possible, have as much information as possible and hope that you make more good decisions than bad.
The next step is upto Celtic.
CLICK HERE for the full article on the Bournemouth website.
