Fabio Silva Does Not Come Close To Being What Celtic Requires In January.

Fabio Silva on loan. That’s what the media is touting today, a competition between us and Ibrox to prise him away from his EPL disaster for six months.

Much is made of the “16 goals” he scored last season on loan; yeah, at two different clubs, neither of which was seriously interested in retaining him. He got that total in a mind-bending 51 appearances. In short, a goal every four games or so.

Silva is 21, and proof positive of the utter lunacy of the EPL. He cost Wolves £35 million when he moved there three years ago, whilst still a teenager who had proven absolutely nothing. He was their version of the “project signing” and the project has failed spectacularly to deliver value for money, as anyone who looked at his “record” could have guessed easily.

In the season before he went there, he’d played 12 games in Portugal’s top flight and scored once.

Apart from an impressive display in the UEFA Youth League the year before that, when he was still very much in his early development phase, nothing at all merited the size of the transfer fee from Porto, who must have been rubbing their hands together.

Some of these deals are so very obviously suspect that UEFA would do itself a big favour if it got deep into how agents tout their footballers and what size the fees they are on are.

No player his age, and with his lack of experience, should ever have commanded a transfer fee that size, but it’s symptomatic of a much bigger issue in the global game.

Where would be the merit in us going for someone like this?

We require a signing who at least stands a chance of carrying Celtic’s forward line through the month-long period, encompassing both the league and the Scottish Cup, when he’ll be the only option we have short of giving Mikey Johnston more games.

This can’t be a signing which is more about easy headlines, public relations and bling than getting the job done; getting the job done is all that matters.

if you asked me right now, would I take Miovski, or Shankland or even Van Der Veen the ex Motherwell player in his 30’s who is currently out of favour in Holland, ahead of an option like this I would agree to that without hesitation because we know – we know – those guys can score goals up here. They’ve got proven records.

They are not projects. They are not punts.

We would not be doing “development” for some other club or offering some down-on-his-luck former youth prodigy a chance to rebuild his own reputation. We would certainly not be signing someone just to look like we’ve found our ambition again.

This is the signing on which this title might very well hinge. We cannot afford to get it wrong. We cannot afford to take some hopeful swing at a wild pitch from some agent.

Someone with a record of scoring goals. That’s it.

Someone who can deliver.

Sure, those players will cost us a few quid, but what’s the money for if not for this?

Yes, it will cost us more than such a player would have cost us in the summer … but we should damn well have done this in the summer, as many of us expected us to. That’s how we got here, and if the board is smarting at the obvious lesson in that, well that’s just too bad.

If we had done this when it was crying out to be done, we would not currently be scrambling about for options. These decisions are where “heads of recruitment” should either earn their money … or lose their jobs.