3 Kieran McKenna replacements Ipswich Town must consider ASAP if he leaves for Celtic | OneFootball

Celtic are on the hunt for a new manager and Ipswich's Kieran McKenna could be in their sights. Here are three replacements they should consider.

Celtic are on the lookout for a new manager following the departure of Brendan Rodgers, and Ipswich Town's Kieran McKenna is in their sights, as per TalkSPORT.

Ipswich Town's return to the Championship following relegation at the end of last season hasn't gone according to plan so far, but their manager Kieran McKenna remains widely admired, having masterminded their two successive promotions from League One to the Premier League in the first place.

This success means that his name is routinely mentioned whenever a bigger job comes up, and there have been rumours that Celtic are extremely interested in prying him from Portman Road following the resignation of Brendan Rodgers after Celtic's defeat to Hearts last weekend.

This would be a huge disruption to Ipswich's season, so here are three replacements who could be quickly drafted in to ensure that the interruption is kept to a minimum.

Gary O'Neil

Former Bournemouth and Wolves manager Gary O'Neil has been out of work since getting sacked by Wolves in December 2024. At the time, his team were in 19th place in the Premier League.

O'Neil's managerial career started at The Vitality Stadium a couple of years earlier, when he was appointed as the Bournemouth manager following the sacking of Scott Parker. O'Neil led his team to safety that season, and the Cherries finished 2022-23 in 15th place in the Premier League, but this wasn't enough, and he was sacked shortly after the end of the season.

His time at Wolves was mixed. His first season there ended with the team in 14th place in the Premier League, but the following season started badly. But Wolves find themselves now in very much the same situation as they were when they replaced him, so there are questions to answer over whether the problems at Molineux could be more institutional than anything to do with the manager himself.

Furthermore, while all of O'Neil's managerial experience has come in the top flight, he had a ton of experience at this level as a player, having played in the second tier for Portsmouth, Walsall, Cardiff, Middlesbrough, West Ham, QPR, Norwich, Bristol City and Bolton. He'd be a ready replacement, should Celtic persuade Kieran McKenna to leave Portman Road.

Lee Carsley

All managerial appointments are a gamble to some extent or other, but that gamble feels all the greater when an appointee has little recent experience in the club game.

Lee Carsley hasn't coached in a club environment since a brief spell as the caretaker-manager at Birmingham City in 2017, but his achievements since then have certainly been noteworthy. As the head coach of the England under-21s, he has taken his team to two successive Under-21 European Championship titles, and having achieved that much in that position he may feel that now would be the right time to return to the club game.

So appointing Carsley would be the biggest gamble out of these three, but the rewards could be huge. He has considerable experience of working with younger players, which could be beneficial to a club such as Ipswich Town, which has to sell in order to stay competitive, and Ipswich have a reputation for thinking outside the box when it comes to managerial hiring, as could be seen when they plucked McKenna from the Manchester United coaching staff.

Michael Carrick

Former England international Michael Carrick couldn't have started his managerial career under greater pressure, as a caretaker at Manchester United following the sacking of Jose Mourinho in November 2021. He won two and drew the other one of his three matches in charge at Old Trafford, and Middlesbrough subsequently hired him as their new manager in October 2022.

Boro were only one point from the Championship's relegation places when he was appointed into the position, but by the end of the 2022-23 season they'd finished fourth in the table before getting narrowly beaten by Coventry City in the semi-finals of the play-offs.

The two seasons that followed produced diminishing returns. They finished 8th and were four points from a play-off place at the end of the 2023-24 season, and last season were well-placed for another shot at the play-offs before tailing off to finish 10th. This was enough to cost him his job.

But Carrick is experienced managing at this level following almost three years with Middlesbrough, and he's been in pressured environments both as a player and as a manager. And the turnaround that he brought about in Boro during that 2022-23 season could certainly turn some heads at Portman Road, given the position in which Ipswich currently find themselves.