Tonight, we’re on the brink of confirming the signing of Odsonne Edouard with most outlets reporting that it will break the transfer record the club set when it signed Chris Sutton. The fee they are reporting is £9 million.
Based on the comments of the manager, and people close to the club, I’m called bullshit on that number.
When Brendan Rodgers was asked if the fee was £7 million he said that was ludicrous. Did he mean that the fee’s actually higher?
That, my friends, is what’s ludicrous.
But Sky Sports Scotland, brazen, notorious liars, had a partial explanation for how a fee that was less than £7 million earlier in the season can have soured to almost £10 million; Celtic missed a chance to close this deal for half price back in October.
And there’s a temptation to ask exactly where Sky Sports gets this garbage from, and there’s an obvious answer as well; they make it up.
They make it up so they can put an anti-Celtic spin on everything. If we were about to break our club transfer record on a fantastic young striker from France who has already destroyed Sevco several times this would be a good way to do it. To say that we overpaid. To say that we slipped up.
I don’t know how many months I’ve been writing this, but Brendan Rodgers made up his mind on Odsonne Edouard very early in the day. Had we had the option to secure his signature for a little over £4 million, in the knowledge that the offer would have to double if we wasted time, we would have secured it long before now, and long before the deadline.
Sky Sports Scotland has a history of these kinds of stories. They told us that Moussa Dembele had been sold on Christmas Day, to Brighton, for a paltry sum of money and have never even had the decency to apologise for that arrant nonsense.
But trying to spoil what is a superb transfer deal for an exceptional footballer by making out that we were somehow incompetent or slow … well this is the most scandalous yet.