The day the Martin O’Neill fairytale truly began still stirs every Celtic supporter | OneFootball

The summer of 2000 changed Celtic forever – we look back at the day the O’Neill era announced itself and why that transformation still resonates with every supporter who lived through it.

Martin O’Neill takes his place in the Celtic dugout at the start of the 2000-01 season. (Photo: SNS Group)

The late 1990s had been a peculiar kind of purgatory for Celtic supporters. The club was undeniably alive – crowds were good, the stadium was rebuilt, the board had ambition – but on the pitch there was a grinding, almost institutional inability to pull clear of Rangers in the title race. John Barnes had arrived with great fanfare and departed before February. Kenny Dalglish steadied the ship with quiet dignity but could not change the fundamental dynamic. By the time Celtic confirmed Martin O’Neill as manager in June 2000, there was a real hunger among supporters – not just for trophies, but for a particular feeling that had been absent for too long.

That feeling was certainty. The sense that Celtic, when they crossed the white line, would impose themselves on a match rather than wait and hope. It had been missing. Everyone knew it. And when O’Neill was unveiled, there was something in the directness of the man – the Northern Irishman who had played the game hard, managed with conviction at Leicester City, and didn’t seem remotely interested in the diplomatic fog that had surrounded the club – that made supporters believe it might return.

The appointment itself felt like a statement. O’Neill had taken Leicester to two League Cup victories and established them as a genuine mid-table Premier League force with limited resources. He was a proven winner, but more than that, he was a man with an evident appetite for a fight. Celtic, in the summer of 2000, needed exactly that.

THE FIRST MORNING OF THE REST OF IT

What O’Neill did in those opening months of the 2000-01 season went beyond the tactical or the structural. He arrived and, almost immediately, the atmosphere around the club changed. Training was harder. Standards were clearer. Players who had drifted – for whatever mixture of reasons – found that drifting was no longer tolerated. And the recruitment was sharp: Chris Sutton arrived from Chelsea for £6 million to partner the already-formidable Henrik Larsson, Alan Thompson came from Aston Villa, Joos Valgaeren from Roda JC to anchor the defence. None of these were cheap gestures. They were considered, purposeful signings designed to address specific weaknesses.

The opening day of that league season – Celtic at home, Sutton making his debut, Larsson already back fit after his horrific broken leg the previous spring – carried a weight of expectation that felt different from the summers before. This wasn’t cautious optimism. This was the beginning of something, and most supporters in the ground could sense it.

Celtic beat Dundee United 2-1 in that opening fixture. It was not a rout, and it was not entirely comfortable. But the performance had a directness, a physical presence and a clarity of intent that had been conspicuously absent. Sutton was magnificent – abrasive, clever, willing to do the ugly work that gives a striker like Larsson the space to be devastating. The partnership was obvious within minutes. “The two of them together,” one supporter is said to have remarked at half-time, “look like they’ve been playing together for years.”

O’Neill himself, in the technical area, was a sight in itself. Intense, animated, never passive. He was not a manager who sat back and observed. He was involved in every moment, every decision, and the players responded to it. You could see it in the body language of men who, twelve months earlier, had looked uncertain at times about what was expected of them.

The season that followed was historic. Celtic won the treble – the league, the Scottish Cup, the League Cup – and did so with a swagger that the club had not displayed in years. The title was won by a margin of fifteen points from Rangers. Fifteen. In any other context that might seem routine. After the previous half-decade, it felt like the ground had shifted beneath the Scottish game.

WHY IT STILL MATTERS

What O’Neill gave Celtic in that first season, and across the five years that followed, was more than trophies. He gave the club a renewed sense of its own identity. As Callum McGregor has said of O’Neill’s capacity to unify, he pulled the club together when it was fractured – and that was as true in 2000 as it has been in more recent memory.

The scale of the transformation O’Neill oversaw is worth measuring against the longer sweep of Celtic’s history. Celtic have a habit of decisive turning points – moments when a new figure arrives and the club’s fortunes pivot sharply upwards. Jock Stein in 1965 is the supreme example. O’Neill’s arrival in 2000 belongs in the same tradition, if not quite at the same elevation. Both men found a club that had been underperforming relative to its support and potential. Both men changed the culture first, and the results followed.

The journey to Seville in 2003 – the UEFA Cup final, one of the defining nights in the club’s modern history – flows directly from the foundation O’Neill built in that first summer. It does not happen without the treble of 2001. The treble does not happen without the appointments of Sutton, Thompson and Valgaeren. And those appointments do not happen without a manager who knew exactly what he wanted and had the force of personality to get it. O’Neill’s ongoing connection to the club – his contribution to Celtic’s planning and future direction – is a measure of how deeply he remains part of the fabric.

The summer of 2000 was not just a new appointment. It was the beginning of a new chapter – and the opening page of that chapter still reads as clearly as anything in Celtic’s recent history.

Eamon Brennan