Nancy worked with Montreal’s academy, eventually moving up to assistant and then head coach there before becoming Columbus Crew head coach. He won the Canadian Championship with Montreal and the MLS Cup and Leagues Cup with Columbus Crew.
He says long-term assistant Kwame Ampadu will “challenge” and “support” Celtic’s players and added: “He’s wise, for me this is so important.”
And Nancy is “confident” he will be able to get his style across at the reigning champions and suggested he would seek “nuances” rather than big changes.
“My style of play is about the way I live,” he explained. “I like to be proactive in my life, I like to discover things. I like to try things.
“Football is about relations between players. We don’t play tennis, we don’t play golf. We need, I call it non-verbal communication. We need to run together to score goals, we need to run together to defend the goal.
“We want to take care of the ball. I want proactive football. I want the idea to manipulate the opposition to gain speed and attack the box. When we have difficult moments, we have to be strong together and resilient.
“We all want to win. We have to prepare ourselves to be able to find solutions when we’re going to face problems.”
Nancy cited the “joy and confidence of the players” under O’Neill, who returned to the Celtic dugout after 20 years.
“I just met Martin,” Nancy said. “I didn’t know him, obviously, personally. I knew him as a coach and what guy, simple as that, what a guy – humble, genuine and also we had a really good discussion, I wanted to ask him advice on certain things and we shared some stuff.”
