Martin O’Neill rarely put a foot wrong during his time at Celtic, but there was one signing he admitted to never seeing eye-to-eye with.
O’Neill joined Celtic in 2000 and spent five wonderful years at Parkhead, winning everything there was to win, as well as go on a run to the UEFA Cup final in 2003.
During that time, O’Neill signed plenty of Celtic stars which included the likes of Chris Sutton and Neil Lennon.
However, for every success story, there is one that didn’t quite hit the heights, and one player was someone that the Irishman struggled to form a connection with.
Martin O’Neill struggled to form a connection with Juninho
Juninho is the only World Cup winner to play for Celtic and his arrival in 2004 was a huge coup.
The Brazilian tormented O’Neill during his Leicester City days for Middlesbrough and Atletico Madrid, but couldn’t transfer that to Scottish football.
His only goal came against Hearts before leaving to return to Brazil after one season, and O’Neill admitted that he struggled to get the best out of him.
Speaking to the Press Box podcast in February 2025, he said: “Deep down, if I was thinking about it, I felt that the signing of Juninho was going to be risky in the sense that he didn’t cost anything, he was out of contract, he’d just been freed by Middlesbrough, which seems really strange because considering some years earlier he had been a phenomenal player.
“I felt he was never really up to speed. Again, signing someone who has maybe not had a proper pre-season. But we signed him for nothing, so he never actually cost the football club other than six or seven months’ wages or something like that. I was hoping to get more out of him, so I think I was probably a bit more disappointed with myself because we never really got on so famously.
“He just wasn’t for us. He didn’t play well enough.”
Juninho criticised Martin O’Neill for failed Celtic spell
Some things just aren’t meant to be and in the case of Juninho and Celtic, it was never going to work.
O’Neill gave his side of the story in 2025, but the former midfielder was equally as critical after his departure in April 2005.
“I still don’t know why Celtic bought me, I started that first match against Rangers without understanding what was expected of me because O’Neill had ignored me,” he told Sky Sports.
He was aggressive, impolite and he humiliated me, saying the way I played football was not the way it was meant to be played.
“He wanted to take away my respect in front of everyone else.”
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