How Did Celtic Get £5 Million Out Of Spurs? By Playing The Biggest Cards In The Deck.

Spurs could have had Ange Postecoglou for a lot less than £5 million.

They probably expected that they would. Our statement today wishing Ange well and making this all sound as if it was done without rancour was a masterpiece of PR.

In truth, we’ve probably spent the last 24-36 hours twisting their arms until you could hear the scream, and we had the tools at our disposal to do it.

We were never going to get Rodgers style money, but Spurs could have done this for the price of Ange’s current contract had they wanted to play hardball.

If anyone thinks Ange was on £5 million a year they’re quite mad; he’s probably not on that now.

So why would they – why would Daniel Levy – pay more than he had to? Well, I reckon Celtic reminded him of one or two things here.

Think of this as a Texas Hold Em hand where both parties have gone all in before the flop; in that case both sides turn their two cards over and show the other what they’ve got. I think our hand was pretty strong here.

Our first ace is that there’s a compelling case to make here that their club was guilty of an illegal approach. There’s enough in the public domain, and in the timeline, to make that a very tricky prospect for Spurs if we’d taken it to a tribunal.

That would have been expensive and time consuming, and would have cast a cloud over both clubs, and the man himself. But we could have gotten a lot more than £5 million, based only on what Spurs have paid for managers before and were willing to pay to the likes of Feynoord.

But it was in nobody’s interests that we went down that road … but we could have, and if we presented ourselves as being sufficiently pissed off about this that the bluff couldn’t be called (if it was a bluff; Fergus would have initiated those proceedings in two seconds flat) then that would have given us a huge advantage. Which we played well.

The other ace we had was Ange himself; we could very well have dug our heels in here and told him that as far as we were concerned he had a one-year deal which we expected him to honour, and I am very sure that possibility haunted him, and them.

In those circumstances they should have the advantage because he only had to pay Celtic the one-year salary and he could go … and Spurs would have covered that on his behalf and quite easily. But then Ange would have had to actually do it … he’d have actually had to resign and to make it public that he was just a mercenary after all.

And again, that’s not in anybody’s interests, not Spurs, not his and not ours.

So yeah I reckon that instead of banging the drum in public we banged it in private. We reminded certain people of their obligations and others of how the regulations work.

Even if we didn’t explicitly threaten one of those thermonuclear scenarios the possibility of them and the damage they would have wrought would have been not so subtly made clear.

Celtic’s board deserves credit for chiselling that fee out of them.

In what was a tough start to the week they played this one well. £5 million isn’t everything but it isn’t nothing either; it’s more than Ibrox will get for any of the players they’re trying to flog.

We should give all of it to our number one target, tell him “there’s your salary for the next couple of years … now get to work.”