Rodgers didn’t torch the place. He just refused to pretend it wasn’t already burning

It’s the same story, isn’t it? Brendan Rodgers, The Sequel…

One day, Brendan Rodgers is the golden child, the architect of domestic domination, the man who brought respectability back to Celtic in Europe. The next, he’s the pantomime villain, the snake in the grass, the ego that poisoned the well.

That’s the bedtime story the largest Celtic shareholder was reading to the support last night, “Once upon a time, there was a bad man who broke his promises and made everyone sad.”

And somewhere in a wood-panelled office, an unfortunate PR intern goes against everything they’d learned over four years of an expensive education and hits send on a statement, one so drenched in self-preservation it probably should have been wrapped in cling film.

But that’s not the truth is it? That’s the cover story…

The real story, the one with sweat and cigarette ash on the pages, is this, the so-called toxicity didn’t start with Brendan Rodgers. It started when he had the temerity to suggest that Celtic act like a serious football club again, not a family-run nostalgia project with a spreadsheet fetish, and crucially he also gave us plebs a peek behind the curtain.

You could smell this weeks ago, months ago even, that faint but unmistakable whiff of fear coming from the executive floor. Rodgers was asking questions they didn’t want to answer. Questions about modernisation, control, and ambition. The kind of questions that make men who sit on the Celtic board sweat through their golf shirts and corduroys.

So, they did what the board always do. They briefed. They leaked. They weaponised, “sources close to the club.” And they built their story brick by brick, Rodgers the egotist. Rodgers the disruptor. Rodgers the problem.

Continues on the next page…