Sam Allardyce has never been shy when it comes to giving the his opinions but his takedown of Celtic’s appointment of Wilfried Nancy landed with force earlier this week.
Speaking with trademark candour, Allardyce painted a picture of a board swayed by laptops and PowerPoints rather than football intelligence, dismissing Nancy as sounding “like a schoolteacher” and questioning the very criteria Celtic used to hire him while speaking to Footy Accumulators Podcast.
“Oh God no, sounds like a schoolteacher – he probably is a schoolteacher somewhere,” he scoffed, before unleashing a broadside at the Parkhead hierarchy.
“If the owners of the football club don’t look further than the laptop, they are so out of order.
“It’s stupid picking a manager if you don’t look beyond a laptop.”
For Allardyce, the contrast between the modern “sophisticated coaching” sales pitch and the real business of managing a football club could not be starker. H
e invoked Martin O’Neill, praised as a Clough-esq man-manager who understood how to run both the dressing room and the wider club.
Nancy, in his eyes, is part of a new wave who arrive armed with “a great big glowing presentation” - but little proof they can handle the realities of winning in Glasgow.
And for Rangers supporters watching on, the irony is impossible to ignore this is the exact critique Allardyce levelled at Russell Martin before the former Ibrox boss was removed in October.
Before Danny Röhl’s arrival picked up Rangers form and the mood at Ibrox, Allardyce had already sounded the alarm about Martin’s ideological rigidity.
To Footy Accumulators he offered a prescient assessment: “A good game is getting through the lines as quickly as possible.
“Everyone wants to play attractive football now, and that’s Russell Martin’s style.
“But his main objective should be to win. It’s perceived he can’t play any other way.”
He warned that Southampton, and later Rangers, suffered from the same flaw: possession for possession’s sake, often fatally executed in dangerous areas.
He continued: “Most goals conceded by his teams are due to the goalkeeper or centre half giving it away too cheaply.
“In the history of football, losing the ball in your own third was a firm ‘no’. You’d be dropped for it.”
Allardyce finished his Celtic critique with a resigned shrug: “Time will tell.”
But for a manager with a career built on diagnosing footballing realities faster than club boards, the message was clear.
Celtic’s appointment is a gamble built on theory rather than evidence.
Rangers, meanwhile, have already lived through their own experiment with a philosophy-first coach.
Allardyce’s earlier warnings proved prophetic. Now he’s predicting Celtic may be heading down the same blind alley.
And if he’s right, the consequences of that misjudgement won’t be confined to a boardroom sting. They could reshape the title race – in Rangers favour.