From the outside looking in, leading Celtic to domestic success is little more than a jolly.

Certainly, that would be the received wisdom that emanates from the soundbites which routinely come from south of the border.

There is a perception that after eight months out of football following a difficult end to his time at Liverpool that Brendan Rodgers headed to Celtic to heal.

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But if delivering a Treble in his inaugural season allowed him to fall back in love with football, it was not without its own stresses and tensions as anyone who has felt the daily expectation of 60,000 supporters will testify.

“Celtic is one of the great clubs of the world,” said Rodgers. “There’s a pressure here that’s different. You have to win every game. There’s not a club in England that has that. You can go to Old Trafford as Liverpool manager and get a draw and it’s not a bad result.

“At Celtic, there’s an expectancy to win home and away. I’ve been 10 years as a manager now and I’ve done a lot of learning. The biggest thing you can have as a football manager is happiness and energy. Sometimes, if you are doing OK, people tend to want to move you. It’s the way it is.”

As Rodgers hones in on delivering his second title in the coming weeks and Celtic’s seventh consecutive championship, it is inevitable that there will be questions asked about his long-term future.

The 45-year-old could well write another chapter into Scottish football history if he succeeds in delivering a back-to-back treble, an unprecedented achievement.

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Even still, though, with four qualification rounds required from Celtic as they seek to negotiate their way into the group stages of the lucrative UEFA Champions League it is difficult to ignore the widening chasm that differentiates between the haves and have-nots at that level.

That the bar is perennially raised in Europe is impossible to ignore.

This season Celtic took third spot in their Champions League group and parachuted into a Europa League tie against Zenit St Petersburg. A solid showing in the Glasgow first-leg was offset by a disappointing defeat a week later but Rodgers was keen to highlight the resources behind the two clubs.

“The budgets and the financials are always going to be a major difficulty for us,” said Rodgers. “In the last 12 months, we have spent £7.4million and Zenit have spent £89m.

“The game is also about having good players. That’s always going to be a stumbling block for us here at Celtic. We don’t have the revenue streams for us to get in those types.”

Rodgers also believes that any British based coach still has to work far harder for respect than foreign managers. There has been insinuations that the work which almost led Liverpool to their first title in 24 years came down to the influence of Luis Suarez, something that Rodgers has bristled at.

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“People said, “Well, he had Luis Suarez”,’ he remarked. “I thought that was very discourteous, mainly to the rest of the players, because we had created a team and we had one team and it had one brain. Luis was the focal point of it but he will tell you himself that he couldn’t have done that without the adjustments of the others.

“If you equate what was said about me with what might be said about a foreign coach, then as an example Mauricio Pochettino has done a great job at Tottenham but they probably wouldn’t say, “It’s down to Harry Kane”. And it is the same with Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool with the contribution of Mo Salah. But for a British coach, there always has to be a catch.”

Rodgers end to his time at Anfield coincided with a difficult chapter in his personal life. The loss of both parents within a short time of one another and the breakdown of his marriage were played out publicly.

A change in his image was met with derisive claims of a mid-life crisis, with even Joey Barton jumping on the bandwagon when he first hooked up for his ill-fated Rangers stint.

Not that Rodgers peers over his shoulder too much.

“Before I got the Liverpool job, I lost both my parents in quick succession,” he said. “My mum was 53 and died on February 3, 2010. That summer, I got the Swansea job and my dad became ill. In November 2010, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and, less than a year later, he died.

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“You really reflect on mortality then in your life. I was looking at myself and thinking, “I don’t want to die this young, I have my own children”. This probably happens to many people. Just because you are a football manager, it doesn’t make you any different.

“Losing them was a tough moment. I was thinking, “Died at 53, died at 59, I don’t want to go down this route. So I’ve got to get healthy. I’ve got to be presentable. I’ve got to change”.

“That’s when I lost three stone. I wanted to get fit and give myself the best chance. I wanted to be around as long as I possibly could for my own children.

“The stuff people said didn’t bother me. You have to laugh. I was going through a divorce and anyone who is going through that will tell you the difficulties of it. I was going through a period of life where I had a look at myself. I had lost my parents. There were things that were happening in my life where I was finding comfort in different ways.

“People have a narrative for you. You will either be charismatic or arrogant. You will either have a really good personality or you’re too confident. You smile right or you don’t smile right because you’ve had your teeth done.”