STAGNATION IS LAST THING BRENDAN NEEDS

IF you want to get left behind, try standing still. It’s as true in football as in any other business. Brendan Rodgers knows it. So do Celtic supporters, many of whom have spent long enough complaining loudly about £60million worth of Champions League income accruing interest instead of elite talent.

When the manager personally airs concerns over potential backsliding at Celtic Park, it must be a worry to followers of the double Treble winners.

Whatever pleasure they take from Rodgers joining in their calls for greater investment will be offset by the knowledge that, if he’s going public, the former Liverpool boss may already have lost a private argument or two.

He wouldn’t be the first manager who sought to circumvent obstacles encountered behind closed doors by throwing a few lines to the fans. It often works, too.

In a summer when they’ve lost Stuart Armstrong but gained — at a cost of some £9m — former loan signing odsonne Edouard, there are still plenty of deals to be done. In and out of Glasgow. It’s surely unthinkable that Celtic will

not commit some serious wages, plus possibly a mid-sized transfer fee, to at least one major signing — maybe Jason Denayer on loan, or John McGinn after a proper bid — between now and the close of the transfer window. Right?

After all, that’s what successful clubs do. Retain their best talent when they can, replace where necessary, then add strength to see off the renewed threat of all challengers.

And Celtic have been nothing if not successful these past two seasons.

Stagnation is certainly not a state that has been associated with Scotland’s champions during the Rodgers era. Not yet, anyway.

When it was suggested to the Celtic manager yesterday that his team risked just such a fate, however, he did not dismiss such talk as the work of wicked outside agitators peddling a disruptive agenda. Far from it.

‘Absolutely, 150 per cent,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

Now, if you’ll excuse an injection of perspective to the debate, let’s accept that a degree of tension between boardroom and bootroom is part of the alchemy that makes a football club work.

Kept within the margin of safety, it’s as essential to success as a seasoned centre-half.

Let it get too loose and coaches waste fortunes on whims. Crank it up too tight and, well, something will eventually snap. Celtic are a well-run club, on and off the park. And no one would liken the current state of play to the dreariness of the Ronny Deila years. Their position at the top of Scottish football remains pretty solid. one of the more attentionseeking turf accountants even grabbed some cheap headlines by revealing that, one game into the new league season, they’d already paid out on Celtic retaining the Premiership title. But Rodgers isn’t in this just to see the Scottish league flag flying over Celtic Park. He came to Scotland in order to rebuild his reputation. And that means doing more than just beating a rookie rival and some impoverished also-rans in a two-and-a-half-horse race. The Champions League must become something more than a very lucrative torture chamber for Celtic if they and their manager are to regain lost standing in the game. This is what drives Rodgers. The thought of falling short for want of playing talent, of not getting the tools to finish the job, is the kind of thing that has clearly been worrying him for some time. Way back at the start of July, when the World Cup was diverting attention and everyone else was too chilled to fret about the season ahead, Rodgers was already dropping the message in. The setting was a hotel on the outskirts of Dublin, a Friday press conference to promote the lowest of low-key friendlies against Shamrock Rovers. Not once but twice, Rodgers turned the conversation voluntarily towards the subject of finance, noting: ‘To improve us, the reality is that there has to be investment. ‘The players here have developed very well, players who have been fantastic for me for two years. To bring someone in who is ahead of them is going to take money.’ Put those and other similar comments together with yesterday’s chat and, well, you see a pattern developing. Rodgers is a man who chooses his words carefully. And you can be certain that the latest message will have been received. As for how Celtic respond? Well, there is goodwill aplenty towards a manager who has worked wonders. But guarantees are hard to come by. Especially in the business of football.