Congratulations to the media outlets who finally got to write their “Celtic snubbed” story. I know some of them have waited all summer for it.
One of the things I do enjoy about the way our club does business is how it leaves us insulated against the nonsense of the media.
More often than not, we do an immense amount of work on deals before they ever pop up in the public domain; when they do they are usually almost totally in the bag.
There’s no room for misinterpretation.
But our media always manages to find something, some thread to pull on, that will let them write the stories they really want to write and the famous “Celtic snubbed” story is always popular.
And tonight they’ve got theirs with the news that Jason Denayer is off to Turkey instead of returning to Celtic Park. That has to be a snub, right?
Except, well, no … and the thing is, nobody with a scintilla of understanding about what happened here actually believes that it was.
We’ve just fought a war with City over Patrick Roberts’ desire to return to Celtic Park. It was always stretching credibility to think Jason Denayer would be allowed to come back here after they put so many obstacles in our way over his team-mate.
Celtic wanted Denayer to come for a second season when his first loan deal ended … City knocked it on the head although they player was willing, even keen, to come back for another crack at it.
City’s reasons are perfectly understandable by the way and in this case they are even more obvious. As Paul67 over on CQN pointed out, whoever we sign will, when all our defenders are fit, be in a competition for places with half a dozen players. Unless Jason has been promised first team football week in week out there’s even less imperative for City to do the deal.
Denayer did not “snub” Celtic. He didn’t turn down the move. City are the ones who decided this was a non-starter, as I said in the previous piece, but salient details like this clearly aren’t seen as terribly important at the headquarters of Scotland’s leading branch of decorative bog-roll.
I know it galls them that a kid like Roberts wants to play here. I know it does their heads in that the highest profile deals in Scotland this season are the ones we’ve closed, but can they not keep their bitterness out of their headlines?
They’ve waited a whole summer to write this story, so I guess it’s petty to judge them on it. But no more petty than their spiteful need to write it in the first place.