So Virgil Van Dijk looks as if he’s moving. It’s not a surprise. He’s a class player, and we knew it before everyone else in the country. You could tell from his earliest games that this was a top footballer, the sort who would go far.
His Premiership success has surprised no-one. Nor has the idea that top clubs now want to take him. That adds up to three things; first, it is an affirmation of our club’s ability to spot, nurture and sell on talent. Second, it makes it easier for us to continue attracting top class talent to the club and third, and possibly most important, it’s worth money to us.
In more ways than one.
Nobody now believes Southampton overpaid for Virgil. They will make a healthy profit from Virgil. It would have hurt our rep had he flopped and they made a loss.
He is the second major player to get a second move, to a bigger club, with Victor Wanyama already at Spurs. For us to have seen these players leave Celtic Park and go on to top tier clubs does us immense credit. It increases our chances of getting a blockbuster fee for Moussa Dembele eventually.
It also gets us an extra chunk of change in the here and now.
This could be worth somewhere between £2 million and £6 million. Those are huge numbers when you get right down to it. Over on Sevco sites they are projecting a transfer budget of around £3 million; this is a bonus to us, this is cash on top of a profit we’ve already made on Virgil. This is the kind of deal they would kill and die for.
It comes at a time where there is a serious, heavy, discussion going on over on their sites about the scale of the problems they face in improving the team. They have a squad full of strict third raters and every single negative news story about how dreadful they are makes matters worse.
They have one potential saleable asset in the team … one. His name is Barrie McKay, and he’s not worth a fraction of the £6 million fee the media talked about earlier this year.
We might net that same sum, for doing nothing at all. We won’t lose a thing from it, it’s all gain for us, all good times on top of those we already enjoy.
That has to hurt when they watch it. Even in their heyday they never had it so easy, never had it going quite like this. Unchallenged in the domestic sphere, money pouring in, the club moving forward on all fronts, with purpose, with resolve.
Everything they did over there was an illusion. When Murray took a whole £50 million of debt off the books a lot of us couldn’t believe that was legit; it was, but he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, moving trouble from one place to another, filling a black hole with the elements of something else, and creating a brand new one in its place.
No wonder their fans are regressing back to hate.
This must be sickening for them.
I am loving their pain.
Does that make me a bad person?