Celtic’s Two “Contract Rebels” Are Being Touted By The Media For Absurdly Low Fees.

It’s bad enough that the media has been running constant speculation about two of our players now for weeks on end. What is worse is that they are now running stories about both being for sale at ludicrously poor prices.

Where is this stuff coming from?

Last night, the story was about Juranovic and how we might be ready to accept as little as £6.5 million for him. What nonsense. A week ago Celtic was holding firm for a £15 million fee.

One bad game hasn’t more than halved the guy’s valuation so where in God’s name is some of this stuff coming from?

Those reports are surely not credible.

Equally bizarre is the idea that we might be willing to take a similar sum for Giorgios Giakoumakis, a Greek international and a guy who has proved that he can score goals. We should be looking for close to eight figures for him and anything else is a waste of our time. Different if this guy is banging down the door for a move, but all indications are that he’s not.

The Giakoumakis scenario might be less straightforward than the Juranovic one, and that may account for a slightly lesser fee.

As I noted in a previous piece, his time at Celtic and his one season of goals in Holland are really the only blazingly success ones of his career and it might just be that teams aren’t as inspired to offer big money for him as they would be if he had been a regular scorer until he topped the charts in Holland.

But I still think that now that he’s got that honour, and shown that he can score for us, that he ought to be commanding a bigger fee than what we’re allegedly asking for or willing to accept.

The one explanation that might make sense is that Ange genuinely thinks we can do better than this guy (and Juranovic as well) and is willing to let them go to get his new men in.

If we got £7 million for Giakoumakis and replaced him with the boy from Korea, who wouldn’t cost us anywhere near that, we could bank the leftovers and still come out with what’s arguably a better player as well as making a tidy profit from a footballer who helped us win a title. You get the feeling that the Korean boy just has more to offer long term.

These might be the thoughts going through the manager’s head.

This might be the logic of his position and if it is then we’ll soon find out, but at the moment the fees being quoted for Giakoumakis and Juranovic look an awful lot like selling ourselves short.

These guys are title winners now, and we shouldn’t be encouraging the idea that because we play in Scotland that we can’t get premium prices for our footballers.

I very much doubt that any of the figures touted so far are accurate.