The Juranovic Story Continues To Generate Beneficial Heat For Celtic.

And so it continues; another day and another rash of stories about Josip Juranovic.

Not only is the player himself the beneficiary of these stories, but I think that Celtic is too. Our club is at the centre of all of them. We didn’t make this guy, but we spotted him and now he’s turned out in a World Cup semi final.

We are respected and trusted.

Celtic has a growing reputation for being able to talent spot.

That comes with difficulties as well as advantages. Difficulties because teams will squeeze us a little harder if it’s recognised that we can develop players and sell them on in this fashion.

It might not add much to transfer fees, but it will see sell-on clauses inserted everywhere and our interest in a player will alert others as to how good he is. But we’ve coped with that up until now.

The press today has Chelsea in the hunt. This is more good news for us in terms of drumming up interest, although that interest is being generated perfectly well without us needing to push it along. Celtic is in a good place with this … we control the situation and the player is not banging down the door trying to get away. We will do well out of this.

But we’ve already done well in terms of the publicity it has generated.

The next thing is to get the kind of fee we want, which I’m now certain that we will. Celtic bought Juranovic for under £3 million and we will make five times that back, at least.

What we really want is the bidding war.

We have to be pretty close to that now, with interest from England, Spain and Italy confirmed and German clubs also said to be keen. It’s going to come down to who moves first, I think, as long as their offer is acceptable to us.

But I don’t see us getting less than £15 million at this point, which represents extraordinary business. The manager must see the bulk of that cash. He has a plan to use the proceeds of sales to bring in even better players and move us to the next level.

Celtic must allow him to see that plan through.

It will take us where we want to be.