It was Sir David Murray, the Rangers chairman, who famously declared the need to “occasionally change the menu” in order to keep Old Firm supporters hungry and light on their feet. At Celtic, the arrival of Tony Mowbray as the new manager has certainly had that effect. There is now a stampede of interest among the Celtic Park legions in Mowbray's imminent efforts to build a new Celtic.

Yet Mowbray and Celtic's 52,000 season-ticket holders may be about to feel the cold blast of reality. Even if the new manager is given £7million to spend over these next few months it will seem a trifling amount in the context of where Mowbray is expected to take Celtic. The club's supporters and directors, on top of assuming domestic success, wouldn't mind seeing Mowbray leading Celtic into the last 16 - at least - of the 2009-10 Champions League, and perchance a foray to the last eight of that tournament.

Mowbray will very quickly have to get his head around the implausible nature of life at Celtic. The club boasts one of the greatest fanbases in European football yet that social phenomenon is hard to translate into success due to the financial straits of the Scottish game. Mowbray will need ingenuity to make Celtic a force.

Some people have spent the past 24 hours comparing the arrival of Mowbray at Celtic with that of Martin O'Neill nine years ago, yet the parallels could hardly be more contrasting. O'Neill, who went on to discover what relative penury was at the club, was still able to indulge himself with an initial splurge of spending, such as in the £6million he spent to rescue Chris Sutton from Chelsea. Today, the mere suggestion of Mowbray being able to make such a signing is laughable.

Instead, what Mowbray will have to do is make a raft of choice signings in the £1.5million category, or, as Paul Le Guen attempted at Rangers, even go scrounging to Manchester United or Arsenal for loan deals for talented 20-year-olds who aren't yet ready to step into the breach at Old Trafford or the Emirates. This will just be one aspect of the creative thinking that will be key to Mowbray's success.

The new Celtic manager told us: “I will look to get in some Bosmans.' There may be some technically gifted players out there who will feel the appeal of coming to a big club like Celtic.”

That is certainly an aspect that greatly appeals to the Celtic board - signing new players for no transfer fee. Even in this category, though, Mowbray may or may not be wise to heed the pessimistic words of Gordon Strachan, his predecessor.

Strachan came close to claiming that the transfer market was virtually unworkable for a Celtic manager. It seemed a needlessly dour outlook, yet in Strachan's case it was born of bitter experience.

The former Celtic manager claimed that, first, the club could not afford to make a £5million signing for a player, and second, that even in the case of “Bosmans” Celtic were regularly gazumped by counter-bidders who, viewing Celtic's offer of £15,000-a-week in salary for a player, would simply offer double that wage and snatch him from their grasp.

One such instance of this was Szabolcs Huszti, Hannover 96's gifted Hungarian winger, who was due to fall out of contract at the German club last season, and whom Celtic tracked for months while preparing to make an offer. With almost contemptuous ease, Zenit St Petersburg strode forth with their sacks of roubles and took Huszti to Russia, instantly making him a multimillionaire.

“It is an incredibly difficult market to operate in,” Strachan said in March as his Celtic reign neared its end.

There is an eeriness, too, about Mowbray's predictable words promising style and flair from his Celtic team, given that Strachan made an identical pitch - and subsequently failed to live up to it - when he too walked through the Celtic Park door for his first day in office in 2005.

Having blurted out how much he admired Barcelona's style and how he drew inspiration from that, Mowbray, quickly realising he had made a tabloid faux pas, immediately tried to talk reporters out of making a great hoo-ha about his comment.

There was fat chance of that. Given yesterday morning's backpage headlines, Mowbray has already made himself a hostage to fortune over his Barça comment, notwithstanding the fact that the papers made much more of it than was deserved.

It will be another lesson to be learnt in the intense context of Celtic. Strachan, too, promised “an enjoyable style - football as it should be played” at Celtic but, as good as players like Gary Caldwell, Scott Brown and Paul Hartley are, none of them are Lionel Messi. They are just good Scottish footballers who are expected to punch above their weight.

Mowbray has his work cut out. He may already have a sense of how difficult his task is.