Celtic boss Brendan Rodgers has dealt with wantaway players at Liverpool.
The final few months of Brendan Rodgers career as Liverpool manager were not pretty.
What proved to be the beginning of the end of Rodgers’ tenure was the Raheem Sterling transfer saga and power struggle.
Sterling made clear he wanted out. Rodgers wanted to keep him. To summarise, Rodgers did not get his way, and Liverpool sold Sterling for £49 million to Manchester City.
The current Celtic boss is currently embroiled with a public war of words with defender Dedryck Boyata. Rodgers will be all too aware of how this can play out.
Keeping Boyata may now no longer be viable, after Rodgers criticised him, making clear Boyata is on strike, despite the centre-back’s protestations he is injured.
Whatever happens to Boyata, stay or go, Brendan Rodgers will want to be seen as getting what he wants.
In the past he lost the power struggle with Raheem Sterling, a year after giving up on being able to keep Luis Suarez.
Boyata is different. He does not have a European giant chasing his signature, and time is running out to sell the Belgian abroad.
That makes it so much tougher for Boyata to get what he wants, and there is a real risk that Rodgers decides to show who is boss and ‘let him rot’ in the development squad.
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