It is a truism in football that a former player, no matter how immaterial to a club he was, only has to go to the press with a story about his time there and he will get headlines. Many of them do it just for the sake of those headlines; they miss the limelight.
Today’s there’s a report in a downmarket tabloid that Jorge Cadete has told a newspaper in his home country of Portugal that his eighteen months at Celtic was the high point in his career; I daresay it was, as he was one of those guys who actually squandered a major talent globe-trotting and looking for the money.
Even if he hadn’t been, though, there are really top class footballers who squeezed every memory they could out of the game and won the top honours in it who’ve said the same; the King of Kings is a case in point, and not the only one.
I rarely enjoy hearing from our former players of that era; Cadete was one of the “three Amigos” who Fergus fell out with and eventually sold, to the enormous anger of a lot of our fans. Yet in all three cases – even, arguably, in the case of Di Canio – he was proved right by their subsequent behaviour at other clubs.
Cadete’s attitude was pretty abysmal. He scored a Hell of a lot of goals in a Celtic shirt, but like Pierre I think his head was turned by the promise of getting more elsewhere, and that’s why his other claim of today is so hilarious. He says that whilst he was at Celtic Park Leeds United offered £9 million for his services, and we turned it down.
What’s that word I’m looking for … ?
Oh yeah, that’s the one.
Nonsense. Utter laugh out loud nonsense.
How do you say “stay off the glue” in Portuguese?
Someone needs to have a word with this guy.
Either someone is pulling his chain with a claim like that or he heard it somewhere and believes it in spite of it being undisputed swill.
He claims this happened in 1996.
Well Stan Collymore’s £8.5 million move from Notts Forest to Liverpool was the British transfer record back in 1995. In 1996 Alan Shearer’s move to Blackburn shattered it; it was worth £15 million. So Cadete appears to believe that Celtic – run by Fergus McCann haha – turned down a fee that was either the British transfer record itself or would have been second behind that of the England international.
Who believes this stuff?
Cadete signed for us in February that year … but that would not have stopped us from cashing in on him at a time when the business plan was just taking shape.
Had we received an offer like that, at that time, McCann would not have waited to put the phone down before he had ordered Cadete seized, taped up and stuffed in cotton wool for the journey south. He would have bitten the hands off the Leeds chairman to get that kind of cash. There would have been no debate about it.
Cadete was a phenomenal goal-scorer at Celtic. His record speaks for itself. And I daresay he still gets a lot of good wishes from our fans around the world; indeed, whatever he’s doing right now I hope he’s succeeding at. The SFA knew how good this guy was; that’s why they delayed his registration as long as they could, and why Jim Farry eventually paid for that with his job. But this is silly season stuff, it really is, and The Record knows that but printed it anyway.
Some people just love to be in the papers … and some papers just love putting in any old nonsense they think will get them readers or hits.