Celtic has yet to spend any money during this transfer window.
Which is partly because that window has only officially been open since Friday.
Deals can be done before that – look across town for one example – but the formalities can’t really be set in stone until 9 June.
So we’re three days in, and two of those were Saturday and Sunday.
On top of that, everyone at Celtic is on holiday right now, and a well earned one at that. Our players don’t report back for pre-season training for another week, and a week after that they fly out to Linz for the first friendly matches. Will we have a signing in place before pre-season training kicks off? We’ll see, I suppose. Expect at least one deal out of the club this week though, as Gary Mackay Steven prepares to depart for England.
It is a continuing credit to our club that the only news stories about transfer targets have been recycled crap from last year and January.
Note the re-emergence of Liverpool’s youth player Gomez.
Note the constant links to Italian Fabio Borrini.
Note the total silence which has fallen over the Jonny Hayes rumours.
Any tenuous link is enough for a headline.
The Patrick Roberts story definitely has legs; there is work going on behind the scenes on that one, and it’s got so far that a lot of people aren’t shy about dropping hints. Kieran has dropped some big ones today by suggesting that he and his mucker are in close contact all the time.
I like that; it’s another brick in the wall, another advantage we have over the rest of his suitors.
Patrick himself has dropped a massive one in changing his Twitter handle, to reflect the number he would most definitely be wearing at Celtic Park.
We continue to work away, but in typical Celtic fashion we do it quietly, respectfully, instead of conducting business through the media. Did you notice that there’s been no official (or even off the record – “sources tell us”) word out of Parkhead on a single one of these stories? Not even the Hayes ones, which everyone seemed to be talking about?
When we signed Dembele last year that came out of the clear blue sky. The work we’d put in was obviously enormous, but until shortly before the deal was done there was total silence on it. His name never once came up in the transfer rumours. The same applied to Scott Sinclair; the formalities took longer than we’d have liked, but all the leg-work was finished before the papers had a sniff of that. Likewise with Gamboa and Eboue …
Celtic never broadcasts.
They just get on with the business.
I trust that the first bit of business, now that the international game is done, will be getting Armstrong’s signature on a piece of paper committing him to five more years at Celtic Park. To me that’s the most important thing we can do at this moment in time.
It helps, too, that no key players will be departing. That should keep the majority of us from stressing at every headline linking Leigh Griffiths to Newcastle or other such nonsense.
Whatever else we’re doing, we’re not wasting time talking to the papers.
Which means not only are we behaving in a thoroughly professional manner, but we’re sufficiently sure of the calibre of the players we’re after not to require any advance spin from the hacks. Bear in mind, we’re talking about bringing in footballers good enough to get into the Invincibles Team here.
Not everyone is pitching so high.
Have you ever known the press to find so many “experts” in foreign countries to offer encouragement about signings in your life?
No, me neither.
But then unlike ourselves, some clubs do still have season tickets to sell.
Nice of the media to lend them a helping hand, right?