Eddie Howe will not come to Celtic because Dermot Desmond will not pay for his coaching team – he wouldn’t do it last time, and he won’t do it this time…

The Eddie Howe to Celtic story is doing the rounds again this week.

And once again, not one person running with it has bothered to ask the only question that actually matters.

Who is paying for it?

Because that is where this story died the last time, and that is exactly where it will die again.

Let me take you back to 2021.

Celtic went after Howe in the wreckage of the ten in a row season, and he was the board’s number one target.

The talks dragged on for weeks.

Weeks.

And then the whole thing collapsed in on itself.

And it didn’t collapse because Howe went cold on the idea of managing Celtic.

From what I heard at the time, and it’s never left me, it collapsed over his coaching team.

The stumbling block in 2021 was the price of the men he wanted with him

Howe wanted to arrive with his own staff, the people he had worked alongside for years at Bournemouth.

That is not an outrageous ask from a manager of his standing, it is the most normal request in the whole of football.

Celtic balked at the cost of it, or so I’ve always understood.

A club that had just handed away a title it held for a decade decided a full coaching staff was an extravagance.

So Howe walked away.

A few months later he was the manager of Newcastle, and the rest of it you already know.

He sat across a table from these people, saw precisely how they operate, and how little they were ever willing to part with.

Five years on from all of that, they are considerably worse rather than better.

There is not a chance in hell that Desmond is paying Newcastle money for a manager

Howe was on Premier League wages at St James’ Park.

He ended a silverware drought there that had lasted generations.

He still got binned in July anyway, because that is what tends to happen at clubs with actual ambition.

Does that sound to you like a man about to drop down two levels for a pay cut and an argument about his assistants?

Now have a think about what Celtic pay a manager.

Then have a think about which absent meddling golfer signs off on his assistants too.

Do you honestly believe he is putting his name to a Premier League salary and a full five-man coaching staff?

The latest version comes from Marvin Bartley, who played under Howe for four years at Bournemouth and then at Burnley. He is the manager at Stenhousemuir these days, and he still speaks to his old boss.

Here is what he said on Clyde 1 Superscoreboard, as reported by the Scottish Sun:

I wouldn’t be as surprised as others if Eddie Howe ended up at Celtic.

Yes he’s from the south of England but he loves that big club feel.

Celtic are a different level to them.

I don’t think his next move will be based purely on finances, it will be the size of the club and the project and if he’s going to be given all the keys to go and sign the players he wants and not be told who to sign.

He needs to be a manager, he won’t accept being a head coach.

Now, I’ve no reason at all to doubt a word of that.

Bartley knows the man, and I don’t.

But the bit about the keys is the bit every single one of them skipped past in the rush to get a headline out.

Read what Bartley actually said, because he has just explained why Howe will never work for this board

Full control of the football operation.

The final say on every transfer.

A manager, not a head coach.

Read that list back and tell me which one of those things Dermot Desmond is handing over.

Go on then, have a go and pick one out for me.

This is a club where the principal shareholder appoints the manager himself.

This is a club that built its entire recruitment model so that no manager ever gets the keys.

Does that sound like a boardroom about to hand Eddie Howe the keys to the kingdom?

Marvin Bartley didn’t make the case for Howe coming to Celtic.

He made the case against it, and I don’t think he even realised he was doing it.

In fairness to the man, he is dead right about the size of the club.

Celtic are a far bigger institution than Newcastle and always will be.

And he’s right that Howe likes it up here – the golf courses will still be sitting there whoever the manager is.

But liking a place is not the same thing as working in it.

So why on earth would the man fancy it now?

He will go back to management in England, and he’ll go back inside the year.

Some Premier League club will sack a manager in October and Howe will be the first name on their list.

That is where this one ends, and everybody in the game knows it.

The silence out of Celtic Park tells you the rest – O’Neill will be on that training ground next week

There has been no announcement of any kind from our football club.

No statement, no thank you, no ‘the club would like to place on record’.

Which means there is no change coming.

The board backed him after three straight defeats, two of them to the Ibrox side.

They are not walking that back seven days later.

Anybody clinging to the Howe story is clinging to it because the alternative is looking at what we’ve actually got.

We all know what direction this season is headed in.

And we know because we know exactly how this club operates.

Nobody is coming to save us.

Not Eddie Howe, not anybody.

Dream on…

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