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It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Brendan Rodgers returned to Celtic Park to restore his reputation in the eyes of the support. Deep down he might have pictured one day having a lounge at Parkhead named after him, who knows, maybe even a statue? Rodgers was meant to hoover up trophies like he always does and then ride off into the sunset, his place firmly secure as the second most decorated manager in the club’s history behind Jock Stein. Quitting before Hallowe’en and then getting body bagged by the man who enticed him to the club twice wasn’t part of the plan. Turns out hell hath no fury like an Irish billionaire scorned. Dermot Desmond ’s statement following the announcement Rodgers had quit wasn’t just scathing. You needed to slide into hazmat suit to read the nuclear release from the Parkhead kingpin. Rodgers compared his squad to a Honda Civic the other week. Desmond has launched his former friend right under the bus . And barely left him with a name. The Prodigal Son returned – only to get chucked out the house again. What an almighty mess. Desmond’s egregious statement might have been an attempt to shift all the blame on to Rodgers. But instead he’s turned the now former manager into a martyr. Rather than take the heat off himself and the board – he’s cranked it up a notch. A lot of punters were starting to feel Rodgers’s time was up at Celtic Park. Things had got a bit stale and clearly the relationship with Desmond and others on the board was damaging everyone. If the first statement was the only one on Monday night , plenty would have probably accepted it. This was inevitable on the back of the summer and the anonymous briefing against the boss – which is now not so anonymous. Desmond might have been fuming at his old friend but he could have bitten his lip and made it a dignified parting of the ways. Instead it wasn’t a resignation – it was a constructive dismissal, followed by a destructive flaming. To send out a complete character assassination of a guy who’d won 11 out of 13 trophies in his two spells, a manager who didn’t need to come to Celtic either time, smacked of desperation more than exasperation. It also reeks of contraction. Suggesting Celtic is bigger than one person is a heck of an irony, coming from the man with 34 per cent of the shares and 100 per cent of the say. A majority shareholder who hand picks his managers and who has set a de facto squad wage cap and perhaps has even recruited players he fancied seeing at the club himself. Desmond can – rightly – point to more than two decades of glory on his watch and a whack of money in the bank. The Irish tycoon does have a knack for picking top notch bosses, from O’Neill to Neil Lennon, Ange Postecoglou and then Rodgers twice. In a parallel world he’d have his own statue, maybe even next to a Rodgers one. But it ain’t going to happen when fans feel the club is being run by a distant dictator. Rodgers has his faults, and he can be high maintenance, but no one can accuse him of not doing his best to elevate Celtic. What was his big crime over the summer? Demanding better players? Resisting using the usual £2m transfer scatter gun? Rodgers returned to Celtic to rehabilitate his name in these parts – not to have it publicly eviscerated. Most punters will see through it though. They are well aware the problems that have crept up at Parkhead go way beyond any man in the dugout. It just seems a bid daft it all came to this. Celtic will struggle to ever get a better manager than Brendan Rodgers . A man who has more than 800 games in the tank and been a hit at just about everywhere he’s been. Sure, he’s not perfect and there has been some bumps. But they’ve all been relative. Rodgers raised the bar so high that any dip back to the norm was painfully noticeable. There were times across his both spells when things became more average. But that shouldn’t diminish the periods of his tenures when Celtic truly hit the heights. The Invincible Treble first time around, which included numerous thumping Old Firm wins. The stunning football of 2024, when he went a calendar year with just two defeats in a record breaking goalscoring title campaign. There were times when Celtic fans have been treated to something really special. The shockwaves from this second departure will take time to settle, but in time his legacy will be secure. The end isn’t the full story. Jock Stein got done dirty, Tommy Burns got emptied, others didn’t get the storybook finale but secured their places in history. Rodgers will go down as a serial winner who brought success to the club, who raised the standards and made the hoarding of trophies look far easier than it really was. Wait and see how much of a breeze it is for the next man. And just what will the next man think about all this? From the outside he’ll have seen a successful manager flayed in public for demanding higher standards. It might make one or two think twice about jumping on board. Desmond will no doubt have the final say but by attempting to ruin Rodgers’s reputation he may have only succeeded in damaging his own.
