Brendan Rodgers has no excuses over Celtic’s January transfer signings.
The Irishman returned to Celtic in June with Marco Tilio and Odin Thiago Holm the first signings of the new regime.
Project after project arrived at the club as Aaron Mooy retired with Jota and Carl Starfelt sold on.
At one stage Rodgers admitted that the squad was weaker than the one that had ended last season, as the clock ticked down towards the end of August there were no sign of a change in policy with Maik Nawrocki the most experienced arrival as the hoops geared up for a Champions League challenge.
Two years earlier Ange Postecoglou’s rebuild was based around Starfelt, Kyogo Furuhashi, Joe Hart, Josip Juranovic and Giorgos Giakoumakis who were all time served pros that made a big impact on a double winning season.
So far only Luis Palma has made an impact on the season, the January window is just over five weeks away with Sutton noting that Rodgers has now taken ownership of recruitment.
In the Daily Record the former hoops striker explains:
Celtic’s AGM this week was pretty standard fare but the biggest takeaway for once didn’t come from the directors.
It came from Brendan Rodgers – and his insistence he had the final say on all signings. That is the way it should be but there has been a sort of grey area around Celtic’s transfer activity, and not just in Rodgers’ second spell in charge.
It gets painted by some that the manager is somehow given the players to work with and he just gets on with the job of coaching them.
That has been a sharp contrast to the Ange Postecoglou era, where he was adamant that any player coming in was fully his man and that he’d stand or fall on his transfers. In fairness, he got an awful lot right in the market so it was never an issue.
But with Rodgers it all felt a little hazy when it came to recruitment. You go back to his first time at the helm when he talked about having a million wingers when Maryan Shved was signed by the club.
Even in the summer there was a sense Celtic were hoovering up all these prospects for the manager to get on with it. But that has now been put to bed.
Rodgers says he has the final say on all incomings. He’s taken it on his shoulders and he can now be judged on the players he brings in. And that is fair enough.
By the end of January the mysteries and grey areas over recruitment should be cleared up.
He did say previously that it was his job to improve players he’d been given…so this seems to be a big change in recruitment policy…I’ll wait with interest to see how it pans out.
Call me old fashioned but that’s the way that it should be…
A manager is there to manage and that’s it –
Jock Stein made Celtic FC Champions of Europe without any Directors of Football / Heads of Recruitment etc etc !
Hope Sutton is correct.
My immediate thought was that nothing had changed,
and that BR was simply confirming his position.
He was quoted in the summer: ‘I work with the players I’m given’,
but I would still have expected him to have the final yes/no decision
on players put forward by Lawwell.
It’s something totally different though, for the manager to INSTRUCT Lawwell
to go and sign X, Y, or Z.
Just hope Sutton’s interpretation is accurate,
and that we do – finally – see proof during the January signing window.
Editor: From attending the AGM it looks like Rodgers has very much been brought into line, he has no logical reason to be praising Lawwell’s Recruitment which started on July 1 or the signing of Bernabei if you want to credit him for that one.