Sutton Is Right. Celtic Should Be Expecting Top Whack For Josip Juranovic Now.

Chris Sutton has said that Celtic should be demanding £25 million for Josip Juranovic. The number might sound insane to some people, and I don’t believe that “demanding” any fee guarantees that you will get it.

Indeed, sometimes it is better to let the bidding start and then sit back and wait to see how high and crazy it gets.

Still, he’s thinking about it properly. A guy with Juranovic’s profile, who is now at the centre of a feeding frenzy, can fetch a far higher price than any of the media outlets have mentioned thus far, and the more clubs are interested the better.

If Celtic get a high opening offer, there is no telling how nuts it all might get. Anything above £15 million would represent good business, but that should be the starting point for negotiations and if there are a series of clubs in the battle it won’t stop there.

Sutton has voiced what we are all thinking.

If Juranovic was at Ibrox the media would be pushing bigger fees than that. They certainly wouldn’t be talking about £10 million and other such paltry sums, the kind that Celtic will certainly swat aside.

In the context of some of the crazy numbers they have quoted for Ibrox footballers these past few years, £25 million doesn’t even sound like that much. When you consider that one of Juranovic’s defensive team-mates is being linked with a move worth over £70 million then it actually sounds like a deal out of the bargain bin.

I don’t think we’ll get that high for him, although it would not shock me if we did. Somewhere above that £15 million figure would be more than acceptable and give us a major return on a footballer who we brought to the club just a year ago, for £2.5 million.

A six-fold return on that would be an extraordinary bit of business, made even more so by the fact we’ve already sourced his replacement and brought the guy in. This would be a Celtic doing business like we’ve never seen before.

Yesterday I published a lengthy article on Peter Lawwell’s record; in it I mentioned, briefly, the final summer window with Rodgers in which we lost Dembele right at the last knockings, in spite of his making waves beforehand.

Ange would never have allowed that situation to get out of control like that. More than anything else, he would have had the replacement lined up well in advance and he would have made sure that Dembele was only sold when the deal was done. That’s the danger in the crazy way we used to do things, that last minute rush stuff … this works far better.

This is why we have such tremendous faith in this manager.

He thinks more than one step ahead. Like a great chess master, he is always planning, even as he’s moving the pieces around the board. The Juranovic deal might be his smartest stratagem yet.