Celtic’s Possible Transfer Bonuses Will Do Us No Good If The Board Just Banks The Cash.

I took no pleasure this morning from reading that Juranovic and Giakoumakis might be heading out of their respective clubs, possibly netting us a nice chunk of change.

All that does is leaves me cold this week. For a start, it suggests that we sold those guys on the cheap last season, which was the impression a lot of us had at the time, and I just think “so what?”

Say what you like about the Ibrox club; they go for it. They take risks. They aren’t the kind of risks we would ever take or that I would ever advocate us taking, but building a war-chest is only valuable if you are willing to use it to win the war. It pisses a lot of us off that in spite of opportunities aplenty to do so we have yet to kill the Ibrox club off.

Getting additional transfer money in now will be nothing to celebrate if there aren’t players in over the next few days.

Besides, I can’t shake the feeling watching what’s going on in Saudi that there are things there which are going to see us shafted. We’ve lost any possibility of a future sell on fee for Jota if he is allowed to leave for nothing and that might have been substantial later.

But it matters not. We want to see signings, not more money tucked away for a rainy day. If, at the AGM this season, our directors expect applause when they tell us how much cash we have in the bank they better hope we’re well clear in the title race and have made a good go of it in Europe, or they will find an atmosphere as cold as Hell frozen over.

Looking back on the sales of these two players, I cannot help but think that we got them out as quickly as we could so we could make a fist of “balancing the books” in that filing year rather on the good of the team.

Those could have been costly departures and I really did not see the need to sell them in the way we did or for the fees we did. Certainly, there’s little argument that we are yet to replace big Giakoumakis in the proper sense.

We let a proven finisher with a great scoring record go to bring in a prospect.

A good one, but that’s all Oh was and is at the moment, a guy who has shown us something but doesn’t have the Greek’s killer instinct. A killer instinct he’s continued to hone in America.

We sold these guys for shirt buttons. I will not be surprised if both of them do leave their current clubs for more realistic fees, and only those inside Celtic can tell us why they did that, why they allowed that to happen, when we could have gotten more.

It will be some consolation if we do, in fact, get greater returns on those deals in sell-on clauses. But I won’t celebrate it until we see some footballers actually walk through the Parkhead gates.