According to a sensational report from Duncan Castles in the Daily Record, Brendan Rodgers suggested to Moussa Dembele in the summer of 2018 that he would take him to Leicester City or Newcastle United in the future in an attempt to keep him at Celtic last summer.
The report looks like a work of sensationalism to us, and there is no way that Rodgers could have predicted that Leicester City or Newcastle United could have wanted him at the beginning of the season.
To go with that, some of the details in the report also talks about the personal text messages exchanges between Rodgers and Dembele and how one didn’t reply to another. Now we don’t know how a third party can come to know about such personal things. Maybe Castles is working for MI6 as an undercover and has access to details on everyone’s personal phones.
What the report talks mostly about is the relationship between Dembele and Rodgers and how it got strained. There is some truth in that as Dembele has been making his point of view known on social media about Rodgers and it is clear that both of them didn’t share the best of relationship at the time of Dembele’s departure to Lyon.
It is clear that things took a downturn last summer as Rodgers had to sanction a move for the striker on the last day of the transfer window. Rodgers had said, ”The whole episode was disappointing – and I’ll say a bit on it and then that will be it then, because it’s been a bit one-way. But then there was a line that was overstepped, from a behaviour perspective, and I’ve been in these situations enough times to know if you can pull it back or not.”
Maybe Castles knows that Celtic fans are against Rodgers at this point and a story like this might make shockwaves. If Rodgers gave an offer to Dembele to stick with Celtic with a view to take him to either Newcastle or Leicester in the future then why was the same not reported last summer when things went down between the two.
It’s clear that the writer is trying to catch on the nerves of the Celtic fans which currently has a negative sentiment about Rodgers. Dembele was even active on Twitter when Rodgers went on to join Leicester City and posted some cryptic messages which indicated that he knew Rodgers wasn’t the messiah as many Celtic fans thought him to be.
