Yesterday the press published their latest “Celtic transfer blow” story, about a player who there’s not the least evidence we were ever interested in to begin with. The player in question is the World Cup midfielder, from Tunisia, Aissa Laidouni.
The “transfer blow” is that his club has slapped a “hefty” price tag on his head.
He plays for Ferencvaros at the moment, and they have said that he will cost interested clubs somewhere in the region of nearly £10 million. That is probably too rich for our blood, particularly as he’s already 26 and that reduces, somewhat, his possible re-sale value.
Every player who had a good World Cup is going to be subject to interest, and we know as well as anyone how high it can push up their valuations. It’s one of the reasons we moved for Johnston as swiftly as we did; we didn’t wait for other clubs to express their interest or for the kid’s value to start to skyrocket. If we wanted Laidouni we’d have moved quickly.
It never seemed like a plausible story to me.
There was reputed interest from clubs in Germany and France right from the start, and that probably counted us out of the running.
It’s not that we don’t have that kind of cash to spend, if the player is right, but we’d need to be dealing off better information than just a World Cup campaign.
Some of the clubs who are interested in Juranovic were clearly watching him for some time. I don’t believe we were unaware of Johnston before the competition kicked off. Clubs do this kind of work well in advance these days, and our club especially.
We are certainly looking at players in a number of areas – Ange has confirmed that in his recent interviews. But as usual, I doubt that the media is aware of what these areas are or what players we are interested in. Most of our signings catch them off guard.
The media writes so many speculative stories though that they are bound to get one or two of them right, but this one didn’t seem like there was much in it … but still, they’ve got their wee story.
Still they can write that we’ve “suffered a blow.”
We do occasionally lose out on targets.
We lost out on Riley McGree last season.
But the plan is working better than ever, and our Plan B is usually up to snuff. Juranovic himself was a Plan B after we were priced out of other options … if that’s the case here then so be it.
I think we’ve probably got some pretty decent alternatives on the list.