You have to laugh at all the stuff people said about what I was doing. I’d lost both my parents and I had to look at myself
Brendan Rodgers on his supposed ‘mid-life crisis’, breaking records at Celtic and being tempted back to the Premier League
Award-winning Londonbased Mail on Sunday Chief Sports Writer OLIVER HOLT visited Celtic’s Lennoxtown training HQ to sit down with manager Brendan Rodgers — and he opened up on a variety of topics, including how his parents’ early deaths forced him to make a radical lifestyle change
THE snow that closed some of the roads near Celtic’s training ground a week before has melted away and all Brendan Rodgers can see when he looks out of the long window of his first floor office is a sea of green. The green of the pitches where he works with his players, cajoling and improving them and, beyond, the rugged green wall of the Campsie Fells, rising sharply above Lennoxtown.
It is only ten miles north of Glasgow but it feels isolated and peaceful, like somewhere you might escape to. Maybe there was something of that in his decision to move here in May 2016, eight months after he parted company with Liverpool. It was a pilgrimage, too. Celtic was the club Rodgers supported as a boy. Managing them was his dream job. It would take a lot to prise him away.
But that is what I ask him about anyway. That is what the English always want to know when they talk to successful managers in Scotland. When are you coming south? When are you coming back to the big time? When are you going to challenge yourself in the Premier League again? When are you going to give yourself a proper shot at succeeding in Europe?
It is patronising, of course, particularly when you are putting it to the boss of a club as big, as proud and as culturally significant as Celtic, a club who sit ten points clear of Rangers at the top of the Scottish Premiership and whose 69-game domestic unbeaten run only ended in December.
And it is arrogant. Many consider Scottish football to be blissfully free of much of the artifice, posturing and hubris that blights the English game. Rodgers has done a fabulous job since he took over at Celtic Park. He is popular with the fans and has the full support of the board. He is in a football nirvana.
BUT however you disguise it, the subtext is always there. A few weeks ago, as Arsene Wenger staggered through another run of bad results at Arsenal, it was said that Rodgers was being considered as his replacement. So, as we sit in his office, the line of questioning conforms to type: you’ve had some fun up here, Brendan, you’ve cleared your mind. So is now the time to break for the border?
Rodgers had heard the Arsenal rumours. ‘It’s nice people think you can manage clubs of that esteem,’ he says.
Everyone is pleased when their good work is recognised. But even though ambition burns brightly in him, he is not about to go starryeyed about the Arsenal job or any other club that may try to tempt him away.
‘If you’re happy, ultimately that’s all that matters,’ says Rodgers. ‘The money’s irrelevant. You can have “X” amount of pounds in your bank every month but if you’re not happy and you’re not finding peace in what you’re doing, it doesn’t really matter. I love the Premier League, the quality of the players, the quality of the coaches. There are great challenges. But there are arms and legs flying off managers down there.
‘You can come here and my genuine love is improving people and making them better, helping the club improve and getting the chance to develop and win things and see people improve. Or do you go somewhere where you might have six games? That wouldn’t make me happy. So it’s catch 22.
‘I came here because I was asked by the major shareholder, Dermot Desmond, to be the architect of the club. I don’t have to control absolutely everything because it is very difficult to do that now in the modern game. I don’t need that.
‘But I just want to work with good people that have one vision for the team and the club and that is what I have here. I’m not in any rush to come away from that.
‘Celtic is one of the great clubs of the world. There’s a pressure here that’s different. You have to win every game. There’s not a club in England that has that. You can go to Old Trafford as Liverpool manager and get a draw and it’s not a bad result. At Celtic, there’s an expectancy to win home and away. I’ve been ten years as a manager now and I’ve done a lot of learning. The biggest thing you can have as a football manager is happiness and energy. Sometimes, if you are doing okay, people tend to want to move you. It’s the way it is. ‘But I’m in a position where I’m in my dream job. As a guy from Northern Ireland who supported Celtic and worked in football, I’m living my dream here. I want to work through until I’m 60 and get to a thousand games and I probably know I won’t do the other 500-odd games here at Celtic. ‘I know how quickly it can all change. I nearly won the title at Liverpool and everybody’s saying: “Sign him up”, then very quickly I was out. Now I stay calm with it and never be complacent and do the best I can for the club. Winning is winning as a football manager and wherever that is, that feeling doesn’t change.’ It should not be a surprise that Rodgers is being linked with a top-six club in England, even though it has almost become the norm now to skate over the brilliant work he did at Liverpool, where he brought the club to within an inch of their first league title for 24 years. People say now that that success was all down to the genius of one great player. Rodgers smiles when I mention that theory.
‘People said: “Well, he had Luis Suarez”,’ he says. ‘I thought that was very discourteous, mainly to the rest of the players, because we had created a team and we had one team and it had one brain. Luis was the focal point of it but he will tell you himself that he couldn’t have done that without the adjustments of the others.
‘If you equate what was said about me with what might be said about a foreign coach, then as an example Mauricio Pochettino has done a great job at Tottenham but they probably wouldn’t say: “It’s down to Harry Kane”. And it is the same with Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool with the contribution of Mo Salah. But for a British coach, there always has to be a catch.’
Those who witnessed some of the flowing, fluid, football his team played and watched the way they dismantled opponents and sensed the togetherness that Rodgers built in the squad and saw the fervour it unleashed on Merseyside, do not find it odd that Rodgers is back in fashion and back in demand in the Premier League.
If anything, it is strange that it did not happen sooner. Perhaps it was because, when things started to fade at Liverpool, some sought to discredit Rodgers with personal attacks. They said the success had changed him. They mocked the fact that he had his teeth whitened.
They said he had a tan. They noted his divorce and his new relationship. They said he had lost weight. They said he was selfimportant. These are hardly crimes against humanity but they were used to discredit Rodgers, to make him appear shallow. When the cameras from the ‘Being: Liverpool’ documentary panned round his living room and settled on a portrait of Rodgers, it added fuel to the bonfire of his vanities. ‘I heard all that,’ he says. ‘But to lead a big club, you have to have belief. You have to have the optimism that you go in each day and improve and be happy. When you have been coaching since you were 20 and working your way through from having no playing career, you have to have a certain level of confidence. Otherwise, how can the players take their lead from you?’ Joey Barton was one of those who joined in the fun. Soon after Rodgers arrived in Glasgow, Barton was signed by Rangers and was asked if he had bumped into him. ‘The places he goes and the places I go probably differ,’ said Barton. ‘With the tan and the teeth and all that. They’re not the kind of establishments I rock up at. I’m not having a mid-life crisis.’ Rodgers, 45, smiles at that, too. He did not respond at the time and he does not respond directly now. But he does lend an insight into what was happening in his personal life at the time.
HE recalls: ‘Before I got the Liverpool job, I lost both my parents in quick succession. My mum was 53 and died on February 3, 2010. That summer, I got the Swansea job and my dad became ill. In November 2010, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and, less than a year later, he died.
‘You really reflect on mortality then in your life. I was looking at myself and thinking: “I don’t want to die this young, I have my own children”. This probably happens to many people. Just because you are a football manager, it doesn’t make you any different.
‘Losing them was a tough moment. I was thinking: “Died at 53, died at 59, I don’t want to go down this route. So I’ve got to get healthy. I’ve got to be presentable. I’ve got to change”. That’s when I lost three stone. I wanted to get fit and give myself the best chance. I wanted to be around as long as I possibly could for my own children.
‘The stuff people said didn’t bother me. You have to laugh. I was going through a divorce and anyone who is going through that will tell you the difficulties of it. I was going through a period of life where I had a look at myself. I had lost my parents. There were things that were happening in my life where I was finding comfort in different ways.
‘There’s a period where you look and you think: “Right, I’ve got to do something here, I’ve got to look after myself. My mum and dad have passed away and you are spending so much time looking after everyone else, you have to look after your own health”.
‘But it fits around what people want to say. People have a narrative for you. You will either be charismatic or arrogant. You will either have a really good personality or you’re too confident. You smile right or you don’t smile right because you’ve had your teeth done. As if I was the only one that had my teeth done.’
Rodgers is self-aware enough to laugh along with some of those who lampoon him. He is a fan of the comedian, Darren Farley, who has mastered an impersonation of Rodgers that often centres on his description of Kolo Toure as ‘a beautiful, beautiful human being’. Rodgers shared a stage with Farley at a Celtic event recently.
‘Even if I didn’t want to see his routine, I don’t have much choice,’ says Rodgers. ‘My brother’s always sending me clips of him doing his impersonations of me.’
‘YOU NEED TO BE CONFIDENT, HOW ELSE CAN YOU LEAD THE PLAYERS?
At some point in the next few weeks, Rodgers will win his second Scottish title and a new round of questions will begin about whether he already has his head pressed up against a glass ceiling north of the border. Celtic were knocked out of the Europa League by Zenit St Petersburg last month, a defeat that underlined Celtic’s place in the European order.
‘The budgets and the financials are always going to be a major difficulty for us,’ says Rodgers. ‘In the last 12 months, we have spent £7.4million and Zenit have spent £89m. The game is also about having good players. That’s always going to be a stumbling block for us here at Celtic. We don’t have the revenue streams for us to get in those types.’
Reality says that, however much Rodgers loves Celtic, the time will come when he needs a fresh challenge. ‘There will be a time at Celtic where I’ve done everything I possibly can here,’ he says.
‘And between the club and I, we will look at it and see where we’re at. I have to do the best with the resources we have here. That’s not a lack of ambition. That’s me at a club where I have a sense of happiness every day.’
I forgot to ask Rodgers about that portrait that hung on his wall at his Liverpool home. It turns out he had not commissioned it, which was always the impression given. It was a gift from a charity for the disabled that he had forged close links with while he was Swansea boss. It had sentimental value. Sometimes, even in football, things are not quite what they seem.