The Record’s Dembele Article Makes It Sounds Like Celtic Got Nothing For Him.
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The Daily Record this morning is running an article about Moussa Dembele possibly going to Aston Villa, for a £4 million fee which leaves us with “a meagre £400,000” as our sell-on fee.
That’s nearly half a million for doing nothing, by the way, a very nice chunk of change and not to be sneezed at.
So it’s not £5 million or something north of that, but that’s the kind of money that could buy Ibrox a new first team player. Still, even that only tells a fraction of the story.
Because when you add it to what we got in the transfer fee in the first place you see an exceptional piece of football business, and the sort that the Ibrox club flails desperately for.
Moussa Demeble cost us virtually nothing. We paid a cross border contract fee which I believe came to little more than £1 million. He gave us two seasons of goals, including a hat-trick against Ibrox’s pitiful NewCo.
He played his role in an Invincible campaign.
When Dembele left, he netted us an astronomical £19.8million.
That’s twenty times what we paid for him, so The Record can write all the snide articles that it wants about we’re banking a pittance here at the end, but our deal for him remains one of the best transfer turnarounds in the history of Scottish football and nobody at Parkhead is crying the blues.
Dembele should have done better in Lyon.
A lot of us thought it was the wrong move at the time, he was built for EPL football and could have gone there and been a hit.
It’s been evident for a while that we were going to get close to nothing for the big guy when he finally left France, as his contract is running down and he might even go for free.
But Celtic has had its money’s worth out of that deal, and a long time ago.
We got our big pay day and anything else would have been a bonus.
Over the years we’ve also made plenty from sell on clauses, including the whopper we got when Van Dijk went to Liverpool … so as much as The Record might want to paint this as a bad news day, it isn’t.