The stupidity of our ex-football people in the media continues to astound you.
This time the person making a bizarre and untenable suggestion is Murdo McLeod who thinks that we should push the boat out and break our transfer record to replace Odsonne Edouard.
It’s quite the idea, but impossible to take seriously for the obvious reason that we’ve got limited resources to play with and a lot to do with it. We can’t afford to spend a sum like that on a single player, it would be insanity.
Instead of spending more money, Celtic has to learn to learn how to spend its money better.
One of the reasons why I presume Howe is the target is that he’s got knowledge of the English markets and who’s worth looking at and not. He will be a huge asset to us in this regard even without his managerial knowledge, which of course is what he’s being hired for.
There are a lot of well-meaning fools out there, of whom McLeod is just one.
A lot of people telling us the best way to do things, the best way to rebuild the team, the best way to spend our money.
Our money. They’d never be so reckless with their own.
We’re going to get a lot of this crap in the next few months, people urging us to do this and that and the next thing and almost all of it will be uniformed financial illiterate nonsense.
The rebuild will be substantial and serious money will have to be spent on it, and more money in some areas than others. But what we paid for Edouard could buy two decent front men if they are well scouted and we know what we’re doing.
Why the necessity to replace like-for-like?
Edouard is a good footballer and on his day the best striker this club has had since Larsson.
But Larsson was more consistent and even when he knew he was going he still gave us everything.
On present form, Edouard will not be terribly hard, or expensive, to replace, and whilst we do have to try we can’t just throw money at the problem and hope that it fixes it.
What we have to do is get every signing right.
To make sure that we don’t repeat past mistakes.
People tend to forget, this was a player we brought to the club initially on loan, for a small sum of money. Gary Hooper cost us £2.4 million. Scott McDonald cost us £700,000. Dembele, we got on a free. Leigh Griffiths cost us a cool £1 million.
Larsson, we got him for just £600,000.
Breaking the transfer record isn’t just un-necessary here; it’s plain daft.