It wasn’t quite the explosive press conference that some Celtic fans had perhaps expected.
There were no thinly veiled pops at the board or throwing the toys out of the pram. But there was a diplomatic acknowledgement from Brendan Rodgers that his Treble-chasing squad looks undeniably lighter after shipping five out and adding just two fresh faces.
The green-and-white faithful are understandably in uproar after the club sanctioned Kyogo’s £10million exit to Rennes without having a ready-made replacement lined up. Rodgers understands those boiling frustrations after missing out on top targets like Mathias Kvistgaarden and Kelechi Iheanacho.
But the Parkhead boss refused to get riled up or deflect any heat onto the under-fire board or recruitment department – instead putting his full focus on getting the best out of his squad for the remainder of the campaign. While upset punters have vented their fury on social media, it’s easy to forget that Celts did conduct some smart business in January with the captures of Jota and Premier League veteran Jeffrey Schlupp. Kieran Tierney has also been teed up for the summer, so it’s not been a disastrous window by any means.
Yet it could have been better. Rodgers knows that, but you won’t see the Northern Irishman throwing anyone under the bus. He said: “Listen, I don’t want to pin blame on anyone here. I think as a collective, it wasn’t ideal how it ended for us. So what we have to do, as a club, is now go away and look at that, like we’ll do every window.
“I think you look around, of course there wasn’t a great deal happening, but certainly all I was concerned about was for Celtic and what I needed to happen here. So we’ll look into that and move forward. There are so many different facets to the transfer and obviously the identification of a player, then convincing the player to come, which in the main is never a problem for here.
“But no, we just weren’t quite able to get a deal done on that front. It’s something that we as a club will go away, we’ll review the whole process and then look to be better again in the summer.
“We’ve done some really, really good business in the window. probably one or two things that didn’t quite drop for us that we would have liked, but however it ends, you know the squad you have and fundamentally, we’re here to develop the players that are here for the rest of the season. Jota is a fantastic player for us and we can see that even in these early stages, so really excited to work with him. We bring in Jeffrey and I’m delighted to have him here.”
Watch Brendan Rodgers’ press conference in FULL via our video player at the top of this article.