Ange Postecoglou’s appointment and performance as Celtic manager has merited analysis and comment from Forbes Magazine.
Describing itself as a global media company focussing on business it isn’t the sort of publication that looks into the often crazy world of Scottish football, a soap opera with multiple threads running through it at the same time.
In a rare look in there are enough issues across Celtic at the moment to interest a business outsider with a new manager, new squad of players under the charge of a long established hierarchy who have never taken easily to change and reform.
Angeball promises to be a totally different approach to football from whatever Neil Lennon was attempting when he resigned in February with Celtic’s season in pieces.
Analysis has been key to Postecoglou’s work in the past but in a two horse race there is success or failure, there is little room for progression. Only Lennon in 2011 has been given a second chance by Celtic at winning the title in the last 25 years.
Assessing the dilemma facing Celtic under their new manager, Ben Darwin, of Gain Line Analytics told Forbes:
There’s two things you need. You need are a hiring process that is informed by what they actually want to do: do they want to win this year or next year? When we sit down with boards, we often ask them ‘why are you on this board?’
Are you on the board so you can tell your friends that you’re on the board? Would you be prepared for this club to go backward for two years and for you to be a pariah, in order for it to be successful after you leave? That stuff is really important and will manifest what the outcomes are for the organization over the long term.”
You need to have a singularity of vision. If the answer is to buy, then think of Manchester City: at least with them, you know what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to buy a title and reverse engineer cohesion.
It’s when you have multiple agendas within governance that the real problems start. The club will look like that on the field. The recent games where Celtic didn’t have a striker on the bench are an exact manifestation of the governance scenario that has taken place.
Generally, as a manager, it’s very hard to overcome that. At some point, he either has to have strength of character to suffer through this and then hope that governance will sort itself out, or whatever happens above happens and eventually they’ll have to find someone else and it keeps going. If they sacked Ange, it wouldn’t solve the problem.
Postecoglou is back in the spotlight at Motherwell on Saturday, fresh from the relief of his first domestic away win at Aberdeen a fortnight earlier.