Daniel Podence Is A Fine Player, But Is He Really A Celtic Transfer Target?

When I wrote about experience earlier, I didn’t expect a player with some to arise as a potential target quite so soon. Daniel Podence of Wolves is a fine footballer, with the right pedigree, and the sort of guy I would like to see us sign.

But I have my doubts that we’d even entertain the idea.

We will go for experience in this window, I have little doubt. But we won’t pay a premium fee for a player over 25, because that’s not just going outside the lines of the strategy, that’s quite possibly bursting the ball. Podence is valued at £12 million. If we’re going to spend £12 million, I would be shocked if we weren’t looking to recoup it somewhere down the line.

What would get for Daniel Podence in a year or two or three?

Not anywhere near that kind of money, that’s for sure.

If Brendan sees him as a marquee player, a good Jota replacement and wants to move for him I have no doubt the board will back that … but they’ll ask him if he’s sure, because that’s the kind of signing that changes the game board some and removes any future alibi for failure. For a club our size it’s a massive gamble you have to get right.

That fee is just way too high. At £6 million he’s a goer.

At £8 million you might think it’s worth a crack if he’s definitely going to be around for three or four years, and if those years include blasting you to a couple of Champions League Group Stages then you’ll make that money back and then some, whereas the downside is that if he doesn’t make it you can sell him in a year or two and get some of it back.

At £10 million you’re at the tipping point though, especially for a 27-year-old. At £12 million, the current Scottish transfer record, you can’t afford to get it wrong, and any manager who did spend that would be taking his chances with the axeman.

I like that we’re now regularly being linked with players from the EPL, although I think it’s too pricey a market in some ways and we can probably get our experience at a better value somewhere else. We’re surrounded by rumours and stories at the moment and whilst there’s quite possibly some truth out there somewhere, most of them will be rubbish.

Take the story this morning involving Quentin Merlin; The Daily Record got a whole days’ worth of articles out of that story, but I never touched it. Why not? Because Celtic sources denied any interest in him to the paper at the very first time of asking … so they basically generated a full day of news on something they knew had no news value at all.

Separating the fact from the fiction gets increasingly more difficult as the transfer window period goes on. That’s when a little common sense is a better barometer than what the so-called “in the knows” or experts are saying about a story.

Daniel Podence could definitely do a job for us, but at that fee I think we can do better, and younger, and still have something left over for a decent keeper. The Saudis moving for Jota might have caught us by surprise, but that there would be interest in him and that he might want to follow it up was certainly not surprising in the slightest, and I have to think, therefore, that we do have a list of targets somewhere that Brendan can work his way through.

He will also have some ideas of his own. Podence might well be one of them, in the same way Ryan Fraser might. But we can get Fraser much more cheaply, and spend the money we save on another part of the team. And that’s the thing here; if we spend that on one player that’s probably it, that’s the budget, and other parts of the team may have to go without.

Those are the sorts of decisions our manager is paid to make, and this is a big one. This window has a ways to go yet and a few surprises still in store … a signing like this would certainly qualify as amongst the most stunning.