There’s a somewhat irritating, and wrong-headed, media narrative developing over our signing of Moussa Dembele.
According to this theory, we’ve lucked upon a major talent, who was available for a modest fee and who, through sheer good fortune, we’re going to sell later on for millions of pounds. This is nothing more than, if you’ll pardon the pun, a rub of the green.
Cobblers. All of it.
Moussa Dembele is a young kid, who’s been playing at a very high level in football, for a few years now. He scored more than a dozen goals in the English Championship last year, and that brought him to the attention of top clubs in England and abroad.
Moussa was always going to move from Fulham in the summer.
There was heavy interest from other clubs, including Spurs. They had money on the table, they had even agreed a transfer fee. Fulham would obviously have preferred he go there, because we were able to get him for a song whereas they would have had to pay real money.
But Moussa had the final say. It was the player who decided Celtic was where he wanted to be. Part of that was the attraction of first team football – he would certainly have cracked the Spurs squad eventually, and maybe quickly, but Celtic Park guaranteed it – but there had to be more than that. There had to be a greater reason than that.
And there was, of course.
The attraction was Celtic itself.
We underestimate that at times, how big our club is. All the way through the hunt for a manager I kept on hearing that no top boss would come to Scotland. When we went for Scott Sinclair even I wondered if we could attract someone of that calibre. We managed both, but it’s clear that Moussa is the real coup, that he is the star signing.
This is not an accident, and it wasn’t luck. Moussa was carefully selected. Brendan clearly knew who he was getting because his first decision, on the day the player was signed, was to move our 40 plus goal a season striker, Leigh Griffiths, wide to accommodate him up through the middle. Our manager had no misgivings, none whatsoever, about making him the focus of the team.
He knew. Celtic knew.
We threw the kid in at the deep end in the Champions League qualifiers, and he stepped up to take the most important penalty at Celtic Park in years. We talked a lot about the courage the player showed, but we don’t talk enough about the faith the manager had in him to let him take it. There were just no doubts at all.
The player justified all that faith, and in particular during the Sevco games and in the Manchester City match. His reputation was already sky-high after the Champions League draw but it has clearly been hugely enhanced by his performances for the French Under 21 team. Last night he scored a double, including a wonderful free kick, against the English.
We are lucky to have this guy, but we weren’t lucky to sign him. Luck had nothing whatsoever to do with this. We moved fast and we moved well to get a player who was already attracting top club’s attention, but more than that, somebody at Celtic did one Hell of a sales job, making sure the player knew exactly who he was signing for, what the vision was and how serious we were about making it happen. He was sold on the greatness of our club.
The best way we can show him he did the right thing is to build the next team around him.
To keep him here as long as possible.
And with Brendan running the show, you know what?
I think that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
In Brendan We Trust.