Forget Neil Lennon - Celtic's next manager decision should be obvious after brutal Rangers defeats

You can only assume that Martin O’Neill never took to the quiet life after he retired back in 2019. After all, if he wanted peace and tranquillity, he would never have agreed to thrust himself back into the madhouse of Glaswegian football. Unfortunately for him, then, he might be put back out to pasture soon enough – after three successive defeats, two of them to Rangers, Celtic look increasingly likely to look for someone else to sit in the hottest seat in Scotland.

Just 12 games ago, O’Neill won the Premiership with a thrilling last-day victory over an upstart Hearts side that had threatened to break the Old Firm’s longstanding duopoly. But Celtic managers are often defined not by their most recent success, but by their most recent humiliation. Between the capitulation against LASK in Champions League qualifying and 1-0 and 3-0 losses to their old rivals, O’Neill now has overseen several humiliations since the title win. That usually means trouble.

The question seems to be when O’Neill will leave rather than if, but that itself begets an obvious follow-up question: Who will take over? If the odds makers have the right idea, the answer might raise some eyebrows – because Neil Lennon has been installed as the front-runner for the job.

Why bringing Neil Lennon back would be a mistake for Celtic

Dealing in absolutes is seldom a smart idea when discussing football. So often, players seemingly destined for stardom fizzle out, and unheralded managers prove to be inspired appointments – but it’s desperately hard to see how Lennon could possibly be the best option once O’Neill heads back towards retirement.

Lennon is a Celtic legend and has overseen some tremendous successes during his previous two spells in charge at Parkhead – but by the standards of modern football, his achievements, which include five Premiership titles, are ancient history.

There is a good reason that Lennon was sacked in February 2021, with Celtic a massive 18 points adrift of Rangers as they mounted one of the worst title defences in living memory. There is a good reason that he lasted just seven months at Omonia Nicosia after that, and just three months in Romania with Rapid Bucharest. There is a reason that those are the only two jobs he was able to find between 2021 and 2025, when he took charge at Dunfermline.

Lennon has, by most sensible standards, done a fine job at his current club. He inherited a relegation battle, kept his side afloat, and then led them to a thoroughly respectable fourth-placed finish last season. It’s been something of a balm for his reputation in many ways, but one has to wonder whether the head coach of the fourth-best side in the Championship is the best that Celtic can do.

Especially when everything went so spectacularly wrong last time around. The question that’s begged by the idea of bringing him back goes like this: What’s changed since 2021? How has he improved as a coach and as a tactician? Why would it be any different now? That’s three different questions dressed in a trench coat, granted, but they all demand one answer and it’s difficult to see why anyone at Celtic would be fully convinced by any reply Lennon could make.

The idea of reappointing Lennon seems especially strange given that Celtic are currently feeling the ill-effects of going for a blast from the past whose ideas were perhaps a bit out of date. Lennon is nearly 20 years younger than O’Neill, admittedly, but he doesn’t given the impression of being a coach at the cutting edge. He’d be a hire based on history, sentiment, and the perception that he’d kick some backsides back into shape. Maybe he would – but it didn’t work for O’Neill, at least for any length of time.

Lennon isn’t the only candidate for the Celtic job – but makes a strange favourite

What Celtic really seem to need isn’t an old warhorse to come in a knock some heads together, but a more modern coach who knows how to handle the high press – because the current squad certainly can’t.

Recent results owe plenty to poor recruitment over the course of several seasons, but also to a lack of technical quality and tactical nous in the side. It’s something that shows up against the lesser lights of the Premiership, and which becomes glaringly obvious against teams who are even a little more organised.

A few names are being thrown around, most of them coming with question marks of one sort or another: Shaun Maloney, Robbie Keane, even Thomas Frank. Coaches who have patchy track records, or who have performed well but done so in odd corners of the footballing globe. Just how much do you trust a good spell in the Israeli league, really?

What it all boils down to is finding a coach who has the right ideas and who can communicate them to the squad. A coach who understands the strategic flow of the modern game at the highest level. A coach who can cobble a pretty poorly-assembled squad together into a cohesive unit, ideally with methods which are more up-to-date than getting them to do laps after a mistake in training.

Maybe that’s Maloney, although if he would be the right choice one must wonder why he isn’t influencing results more positively already as O’Neill’s assistant. Maybe that’s Keane, although heaven knows how his work in Hungary would translate. Maybe it’s Frank, despite the mess he made of the Tottenham Hotspur job. Maybe it’s a less well-known coach working his way up through the ranks the hard way.

And yes, maybe it’s Lennon. Stranger things have happened and more distant starts have aligned. But going back to Lennon for a third tilt at the job feels a little bit desperate – and reeks of a board out of fresh ideas.