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Just fifteen minutes after the club released the announcement of Brendan Rodgers' shock departure via a brief short statement, the bombshell landed, courtesy of the major shareholder, with whiskers twitching in apparent fury.

Through 551-words, key investor Dermot Desmond savaged his old chum.

The man he convinced to join the team when Rangers were getting uppity in that period and needed putting in their place. Plus the figure he once more turned to after Ange Postecoglou departed to another club in the summer of 2023.

Such was the ferocity of Desmond's critique, the jaw-dropping return of the former boss was practically an secondary note.

Two decades after his departure from the organization, and after much of his latter years was dedicated to an unending circuit of appearances and the performance of all his past successes at Celtic, O'Neill is back in the manager's seat.

Currently - and maybe for a while. Considering things he has said recently, O'Neill has been keen to secure another job. He'll see this one as the ultimate opportunity, a gift from the club's legacy, a homecoming to the place where he enjoyed such success and adulation.

Would he relinquish it easily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic could possibly make a call to contact their ex-manager, but O'Neill will act as a balm for the time being.

All-out Attempt at Reputation Destruction'

The new manager's return - however strange as it is - can be set aside because the biggest shocking moment was the harsh way Desmond wrote of the former manager.

This constituted a full-blooded attempt at defamation, a branding of Rodgers as untrustful, a perpetrator of untruths, a disseminator of falsehoods; disruptive, deceptive and unjustifiable. "One individual's desire for self-interest at the cost of others," stated he.

For somebody who prizes decorum and sets high importance in business being done with discretion, if not outright secrecy, here was another example of how abnormal situations have grown at the club.

Desmond, the club's most powerful presence, moves in the margins. The remote leader, the one with the power to take all the major decisions he wants without having the obligation of explaining them in any open setting.

He never participate in team AGMs, dispatching his offspring, Ross, instead. He rarely, if ever, gives interviews about Celtic unless they're glowing in nature. And even then, he's reluctant to communicate.

He has been known on an occasion or two to defend the organization with private messages to news outlets, but no statement is heard in public.

It's exactly how he's wanted it to be. And that's exactly what he went against when going all-out attack on the manager on Monday.

The official line from the club is that he resigned, but reading his invective, line by line, you have to wonder why did he allow it to get this far down the line?

If Rodgers is culpable of every one of the accusations that the shareholder is claiming he's responsible for, then it's fair to inquire why was the manager not dismissed?

He has charged him of spinning information in open forums that did not tally with the facts.

He claims Rodgers' words "played a part to a hostile atmosphere around the team and encouraged hostility towards individuals of the management and the board. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been entirely unwarranted and improper."

Such an remarkable allegation, indeed. Lawyers might be mobilising as we discuss.

His Aspirations Conflicted with Celtic's Strategy Again

To return to better times, they were tight, Dermot and Brendan. The manager praised Desmond at every turn, expressed gratitude to him every chance. Brendan deferred to him and, really, to nobody else.

This was the figure who drew the criticism when his comeback happened, after the previous manager.

It was the most controversial appointment, the return of the prodigal son for a few or, as some other Celtic fans would have described it, the arrival of the unapologetic figure, who left them in the lurch for Leicester.

Desmond had his back. Gradually, the manager turned on the charm, achieved the wins and the honors, and an uneasy truce with the fans became a love-in once more.

There was always - always - going to be a moment when his ambition clashed with the club's operational approach, though.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it transpired once more, with bells on, recently. Rodgers spoke openly about the slow way the team went about their player acquisitions, the interminable delay for prospects to be landed, then missed, as was too often the case as far as he was believed.

Repeatedly he stated about the need for what he called "flexibility" in the market. The fans concurred with him.

Even when the club spent unprecedented sums of funds in a calendar year on the expensive Arne Engels, the £9m Adam Idah and the significant further acquisition - all of whom have performed well to date, with Idah since having left - Rodgers demanded more and more and, oftentimes, he expressed this in openly.

He planted a controversy about a internal disunity inside the team and then distanced himself. When asked about his comments at his next media briefing he would typically minimize it and nearly reverse what he stated.

Lack of cohesion? Not at all, everybody is aligned, he'd say. It looked like he was engaging in a risky strategy.

Earlier this year there was a report in a newspaper that allegedly originated from a insider close to the organization. It claimed that Rodgers was harming Celtic with his public outbursts and that his real motivation was managing his departure plan.

He didn't want to be there and he was engineering his way out, that was the tone of the article.

Supporters were enraged. They now saw him as akin to a sacrificial figure who might be carried out on his honor because his directors did not back his plans to achieve triumph.

This disclosure was poisonous, of course, and it was intended to hurt him, which it accomplished. He demanded for an inquiry and for the guilty person to be dismissed. Whether there was a probe then we learned no more about it.

At that point it was plain the manager was shedding the support of the people above him.

The regular {gripes