How Unrecoverable Collapse Resulted in a Savage Separation for Rodgers & Celtic

Merely fifteen minutes after Celtic issued the announcement of Brendan Rodgers' surprising resignation via a brief five-paragraph statement, the bombshell arrived, from Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent anger.

In 551-words, major shareholder Desmond savaged his former ally.

The man he persuaded to join the team when their rivals were gaining ground in that period and needed putting in their place. Plus the figure he once more turned to after the previous manager left for another club in the summer of 2023.

So intense was the ferocity of Desmond's takedown, the jaw-dropping return of the former boss was almost an secondary note.

Twenty years after his exit from the club, and after a large part of his recent life was given over to an continuous circuit of appearances and the playing of all his past successes at the team, Martin O'Neill is returned in the dugout.

For now - and perhaps for a while. Considering comments he has expressed recently, O'Neill has been keen to secure another job. He'll see this one as the ultimate opportunity, a gift from the Celtic Gods, a homecoming to the environment where he experienced such success and praise.

Will he relinquish it readily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic could possibly reach out to contact Postecoglou, but O'Neill will serve as a soothing presence for the moment.

'Full-blooded Attempt at Reputation Destruction'

O'Neill's return - however strange as it may be - can be parked because the most significant shocking moment was the brutal way the shareholder wrote of the former manager.

This constituted a full-blooded attempt at defamation, a branding of him as untrustful, a perpetrator of untruths, a disseminator of misinformation; divisive, misleading and unacceptable. "One individual's wish for self-preservation at the cost of others," wrote he.

For a person who prizes propriety and places great store in business being done with confidentiality, if not outright privacy, this was a further illustration of how abnormal situations have become at the club.

The major figure, the club's most powerful figure, moves in the margins. The remote leader, the individual with the authority to take all the important calls he pleases without having the obligation of explaining them in any open setting.

He does not attend team annual meetings, sending his offspring, Ross, instead. He seldom, if ever, gives media talks about the team unless they're glowing in tone. And still, he's slow to communicate.

He has been known on an rare moment to defend the club with private messages to news outlets, but nothing is made in the open.

It's exactly how he's preferred it to be. And it's just what he contradicted when going full thermonuclear on the manager on Monday.

The official line from the club is that Rodgers stepped down, but reviewing Desmond's invective, line by line, one must question why did he allow it to reach this far down the line?

Assuming Rodgers is culpable of every one of the accusations that Desmond is alleging he's responsible for, then it is reasonable to ask why had been the coach not dismissed?

He has accused him of distorting things in open forums that did not tally with reality.

He says Rodgers' statements "have contributed to a hostile environment around the team and encouraged hostility towards members of the management and the directors. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been entirely unjustified and improper."

What an extraordinary allegation, that is. Legal representatives might be mobilising as we speak.

'Rodgers' Aspirations Conflicted with Celtic's Model Again

To return to better days, they were tight, the two men. The manager praised Desmond at all opportunities, expressed gratitude to him whenever possible. Rodgers respected him and, truly, to nobody else.

This was the figure who drew the heat when Rodgers' comeback occurred, post-Postecoglou.

It was the most divisive appointment, the reappearance of the prodigal son for a few or, as some other supporters would have put it, the return of the unapologetic figure, who departed in the difficulty for Leicester.

Desmond had his back. Gradually, Rodgers turned on the persuasion, delivered the wins and the honors, and an fragile truce with the supporters became a affectionate relationship once more.

There was always - consistently - going to be a point when Rodgers' goals clashed with the club's business model, though.

This occurred in his first incarnation and it transpired again, with added intensity, recently. He spoke openly about the slow process the team conducted their player acquisitions, the interminable waiting for targets to be landed, then not landed, as was too often the situation as far as he was believed.

Time and again he spoke about the necessity for what he termed "agility" in the market. Supporters concurred with him.

Even when the organization splurged record amounts of money in a twelve-month period on the expensive one signing, the £9m Adam Idah and the significant Auston Trusty - none of whom have performed well to date, with Idah since having left - the manager demanded increased resources and, oftentimes, he did it in public.

He planted a controversy about a internal disunity within the club and then distanced himself. Upon questioning about his remarks at his next news conference he would usually downplay it and almost contradict what he said.

Lack of cohesion? No, no, all are united, he'd say. It looked like he was engaging in a dangerous strategy.

A few months back there was a story in a newspaper that allegedly came from a source associated with the organization. It said that Rodgers was damaging the team with his public outbursts and that his true aim was managing his departure plan.

He desired not to be there and he was engineering his way out, that was the implication of the story.

The fans were enraged. They now viewed him as similar to a martyr who might be removed on his shield because his board members wouldn't back his vision to bring triumph.

This disclosure was poisonous, of course, and it was meant to harm him, which it did. He demanded for an inquiry and for the guilty person to be dismissed. Whether there was a examination then we learned nothing further about it.

At that point it was plain the manager was shedding the backing of the people in charge.

The regular {gripes