As rumours swirl over Kris Ajer – all nonsense, as I don’t think there’s any way he’ll be sold this summer no matter the offer – a more realistic transfer story continues to gather pace; the subject of it is Moussa Dembele, who is due to face us in pre-season.
Whether or not that will ever happen is now very much up in the air. Dembele is one of the hottest football properties in Europe, and with the EPL having salvaged its TV contract with Sky there remains a lot of money to spend in that particular league.
Dembele is linked with several clubs down south. He’s also linked with several mammoth sides in Europe. They all know he will be expensive. The likely fee is set to be staggering. If the clubs get into an auction it will be higher still.
What can Celtic expect to get? Our alleged cut is 10%. If he goes for £40 million we get £4 million.
He is probably going to sell for much more than that.
The higher it gets – and some speculative estimates suggest that it could be as high as an eye-watering £70 million – the more we earn as a result.
I don’t think it will go as high as that … but there will still be a pot of money at the end of the rainbow.
It must gall them to know this over in Sevconia.
Not only did we get two exceptional seasons out of Moussa – in which he terrorised them like few players have – but we netted a pile of money already and used some of it to buy Edouard. The idea that more benefits might be on the way must be a real choker, and especially now as they wait for the Morelos offers which never quite come.
This is the model they are desperate to replicate, this is the example they would dearly love to follow, but wanting to do it and having the means are two separate things. They operate under the erroneous belief that a player is worth what they say he is … actually, a player is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay and so far nobody thinks their dreck is all that valuable.
Sevco has a serious problem in this window. Having promised their fans that Morelos would go for a fee at least comparable to what we got for Dembele, they are faced with having to accept a fraction of that in order to simply keep on the lights.
They aren’t going to spend Edouard style money replacing him either. About the best they can hope for is a little bit of it on Lyndon Dykes and trying to make that sound like a revolutionary deal which will get the job done for them.
Without being able to sell Morelos for some big money it is entirely possible – probable even – that we will net more for Moussa in the sell-on clause than they are able to spend. That is just one glaring piece of evidence as to how big the finance gap remains, and the global health crisis has not bridged it but will actually make it wider, as I’ll explain tomorrow.
It sickens them, this stuff. We’re so far ahead of them it’s incredible.
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