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Just a quarter of an hour after Celtic issued the announcement of their manager's surprising resignation via a brief short statement, the bombshell landed, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent fury.

Through 551-words, key investor Dermot Desmond savaged his former ally.

This individual he persuaded to join the club when their rivals were getting uppity in 2016 and required being back in a box. And the figure he once more relied on after the previous manager departed to another club in the summer of 2023.

So intense was the severity of his critique, the astonishing comeback of the former boss was almost an after-thought.

Twenty years after his exit from the organization, and after a large part of his recent life was given over to an continuous circuit of public speaking engagements and the playing of all his past successes at Celtic, O'Neill is returned in the manager's seat.

For now - and perhaps for a time. Considering things he has said recently, he has been keen to secure a new position. He'll view this one as the perfect opportunity, a present from the Celtic Gods, a homecoming to the place where he experienced such success and adulation.

Would he relinquish it easily? It seems unlikely. Celtic might well make a call to sound out their ex-manager, but O'Neill will serve as a balm for the time being.

All-out Effort at Character Assassination

O'Neill's reappearance - however strange as it is - can be parked because the most significant 'wow!' moment was the harsh way the shareholder wrote of the former manager.

This constituted a forceful attempt at character assassination, a branding of him as untrustful, a perpetrator of falsehoods, a spreader of misinformation; disruptive, misleading and unjustifiable. "A single person's wish for self-preservation at the cost of others," wrote he.

For somebody who values decorum and sets high importance in business being conducted with confidentiality, if not complete secrecy, here was another illustration of how unusual situations have grown at Celtic.

The major figure, the organization's most powerful figure, moves in the background. The absentee totem, the individual with the authority to take all the important calls he wants without having the responsibility of explaining them in any open setting.

He never participate in team annual meetings, dispatching his offspring, his son, in his place. He rarely, if ever, gives media talks about the team unless they're glowing in tone. And even then, he's slow to speak out.

He has been known on an rare moment to support the organization with confidential missives to media organisations, but no statement is heard in public.

It's exactly how he's preferred it to remain. And that's just what he contradicted when going all-out attack on the manager on Monday.

The official line from the club is that Rodgers stepped down, but reviewing Desmond's criticism, carefully, you have to wonder why did he permit it to get such a critical point?

If Rodgers is guilty of all of the things that Desmond is claiming he's responsible for, then it's fair to ask why was the coach not dismissed?

He has accused him of spinning things in open forums that did not tally with reality.

He claims Rodgers' words "have contributed to a toxic atmosphere around the club and fuelled hostility towards individuals of the management and the directors. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their families, has been entirely unjustified and improper."

What an remarkable charge, that is. Legal representatives might be mobilising as we discuss.

His Ambition Conflicted with the Club's Model Once More'

To return to better times, they were tight, the two men. Rodgers lauded the shareholder at all opportunities, expressed gratitude to him whenever possible. Brendan deferred to Dermot and, really, to nobody else.

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

It was the most divisive hiring, the reappearance of the prodigal son for a few or, as some other Celtic fans would have put it, the arrival of the unapologetic figure, who departed in the lurch for another club.

Desmond had Rodgers' support. Gradually, the manager turned on the persuasion, delivered the victories and the honors, and an fragile truce with the fans turned into a love-in once more.

It was inevitable - consistently - going to be a moment when his ambition came in contact with the club's business model, though.

It happened in his initial tenure and it transpired once more, with added intensity, over the last year. He spoke openly about the sluggish way the team went about their player acquisitions, the endless delay for targets to be secured, then not landed, as was too often the case as far as he was believed.

Time and again he spoke about the need for what he termed "flexibility" in the market. The fans concurred with him.

Despite the club splurged unprecedented sums of money in a twelve-month period on the £11m Arne Engels, the costly Adam Idah and the £6m Auston Trusty - all of whom have performed well so far, with one since having left - the manager pushed for increased resources and, oftentimes, he did it in public.

He set a controversy about a internal disunity inside the club and then walked away. When asked about his remarks at his subsequent media briefing he would usually minimize it and nearly contradict what he stated.

Internal issues? Not at all, everybody is aligned, he'd say. It looked like he was playing a risky game.

Earlier this year there was a report in a publication that purportedly originated from a source associated with the organization. It said that Rodgers was damaging Celtic with his open criticisms and that his real motivation was managing his departure plan.

He desired not to be present and he was engineering his exit, this was the implication of the article.

Supporters were angered. They then viewed him as akin to a martyr who might be carried out on his shield because his directors did not back his vision to bring success.

This disclosure was poisonous, of course, and it was intended to hurt him, which it did. He demanded for an investigation and for the guilty person to be dismissed. Whether there was a examination then we learned nothing further about it.

By then it was plain the manager was shedding the support of the people above him.

The regular {gripes