When Tony Bloom trained his sights on winning a league title with Hearts inside ten years people marvelled at his chutzpah. If Rangers and Celtic fail to fix their issues in the last week of the window the smartest man in British football will start to look hopelessly unambitious.
So long as Hearts toil to beat St Mirren or Motherwell it’s too soon to expect them to start duffing up the Old Firm on a regular basis. For Club Brugge and Kairat Almaty the timing could hardly be better.
The Champions League pretensions of Glasgow’s big two dangle by a thread and unless they pull off coefficient boosting wins in Belgium and Kazakhstan they’ll be forced to settle for Europa League football. Maybe that’s their level anyway.
Russell Martin and Brendan Rodgers seem to spend every press conference now tackling speculation over their futures. Glasgow’s bitter rivals clash do battle next weekend and, if either pitches up for Ibrox on the back of a play-off exit from the Champions League, there’s more of that to come.
Addressing the boos which pockmarked the 3-1 defeat to Club Brugge Martin says the new owners of Rangers are ‘really calm’ about things.
The same can’t be said of fans on message boards and WhatsApp chat groups who’ve lost patience with the first permanent Ibrox boss to win three of his first nine games. Most never wanted him there in the first place and another chaotic day in Paisley did nothing to endear the former Scotland defender to a frustrated base who’ve seen enough of their team playing slow, possession based football, giving up chances and creating next to nothing in attack.
Going with two wingers and no recognised striker against St Mirren was a bold move which backfired. Stephen Robinson’s side have now made life a living hell for Celtic, Hearts and Rangers and, at some point, they might actually get some credit for that.
Trailing 1-0 after a woeful first half Martin changed shape and chucked one sub after another on to the pitch. Channelling his inner Alexander Isaac, Hamza Igamane effectively brought his Rangers career to an end when he refused to go on and left it to young Findlay Curtis to conjure up more shots on target than the rest of the team combined.
American owners could be Martin’s saving grace. When directors were Rangers men besieged by unhappy supporters every time they left the house, it was easier to bin the man picking the team than it was to don a fake beard and sunglasses whenever they went for a pint of milk at the local Co-Op.
As soon as the Champions League disappeared over the horizon and they lost the first Celtic game of the season Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Michael Beale and Philippe Clement were living on borrowed time. Eventually three were sacked in a quest to appease supporters and let the men in the boardroom look their fellow fans in the eye
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Tony Bloom's Hearts punt is a devilishly difficult bet worth taking
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The national-team ticking time-bomb the SFA must do more to address
Anger might have less impact on Andrew Cavenagh if he spends his weekends on a Philadelphia golf course. A gap of 3300 miles allows an owner to put some distance between himself and the annual demands to frog march the manager out the door with a box under his arm before the first day of autumn. The distance might even persuade him to find the very idea an absurd over-reaction.
He’d be right on that, of course, but Glasgow is not – and never has been – a rational footballing landscape and the thousands of empty seats in the top deck of the Broomloan Stand against Club Brugge might make it difficult to turn a rubber ear to the unrest forever. Losing Champions League income is one thing; losing the financial backing of fans quite another.
Where the problems at Rangers are placed squarely at the door of the manager, Brendan Rodgers has done a capable job of diverting blame in another direction.
The Irish Sea offers less protection for Celtic’s controlling shareholder than the Atlantic does for his opposite number at Ibrox, but it’s far enough to insulate Dermot Desmond from the flak aimed at his fellow directors during the 0-0 draw with Kairat.
Rodgers has played down talk of a rift with the Celtic board. In terms of the key decisions, the Parkhead board effectively consists of one man in Dublin with 34% of the shares and 100% of the say and, while Rodgers claims to want the same things as the man who hired him they seem to differ on the best way to get there. The manager favours a braver approach to spending on players while Desmond made his fortune by seeking value for money and securing a return on his investments.
At Celtic that means targeting significant talent for insignificant sums of money while filling the squad with players the manager seems lukewarm towards, at best. If a player they like is deemed to be over-priced, they don’t sign him. Even when the cash is there to do the deal without making a dent in the bottom line.
There was similar exasperation when Adam Idah and Nicholas Kuhn were the only signings of the winter window in January 2024, a club statement acknowledging the ‘inherent inefficiencies of holding excess cash’ and ‘the importance of investing in strengthening the team to deliver football success.’
It makes no sense to leave the money in the bank and they will spend money in the coming days on a four year deal for winger Michel Ange-Balikwisha while talks are on the go for Uruguayan left back Marcelo Saracchi. A striker and a second winger seem likely on top of that.
Why they left all this activity until it was too late to field their new arrivals in their biggest games of the season is the bigger question.
Transfers are a bit like selling a house. Most deals are part of a chain, reliant on the pieces falling into place elsewhere and agents playing ball. None of that really explains why a club cautious by nature seems prepared to gamble on qualification for a competition worth half of their annual turnover.
From Nir Bitton in central defence to Liam Scales filling in at left back needless punts happen too often to be regarded as a one off. The apparent reluctance to spend big until they secure group stage football only contributes to the failure to get there in the first place.
If being a little better than Rangers is Celtic’s ambition then they’re doing fine. If they aspire to be a Champions League team with a continental profile the current window has been less than ideal.
At this point you’d give Rodgers and his side a higher chance of finding a way to the promised land than their bitter rivals. If the Europa League is where both teams finish up they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
