The Celtic Board Cannot Continue Denying That We’re Stuck In The Mud Through Choice.

Over the last couple of years, the Celtic board has excelled at getting away with things that they should not be allowed to.

One of the things they consistently do, and which this website has slated them for time and time again, is that they brazenly lie that high calibre players simply won’t come to Scotland. You only need to look at the Middle East right now to see how many of them are over there. The Saudi League is not even at SPFL standard; players are going there for the money. Money remains the motivating factor for a lot of the players across football.

I’m not suggesting that we pay Saudi type fees. I’m not suggesting that we pay what teams pay in the upper half of the EPL. But these people get away with this because they present it as an irrefutable fact of football, when actually it’s a choice. It’s a choice our club makes, and not only does it stop us from bringing a higher quality player to Parkhead but it makes it virtually impossible for us to keep people here once they reach the salary ceiling we’ve set.

If you want me to prove that this is something we lock ourselves into rather than something that circumstances impose on us, I would ask that you look no further than the club across the city.

We may laugh at their being linked with high profile players, and when they pull off a Barton deal or go out and sign an Aaron Ramsey it might strike the funny bone, but how much do you reckon they are paying someone like Butland? And they don’t mind doing that in his case because he justifies that salary, and he won’t soon leave them for more money elsewhere.

They don’t just talk a good game about leaving it all on the field; they do it. They would never have a £70 million surplus whilst critical areas of their team were crying out for signings. We might think certain elements of the way they do things are mad, but they behave like a club that means business, and in a year like this that just may be enough.

I’m not here to praise them. They don’t deserve it. They overspend every single year, and that’s not something I want to bang the drum in support of. What I’m saying is not that their strategy is better than ours, or that throwing caution to the wind is not a little bit mad. I’m talking about one specific issue, and I’m saying that they have proved that if you’re willing to put the right financial package on the table that you can attract high profile footballers.

And our board gets away with talking about this issue as if it’s ridiculous to suggest that if we paid more that we’d get some of these guys. But it isn’t ridiculous at all. Established players in European leagues wouldn’t come to Scotland? Says who?

Offer these guys guaranteed Champions League football next season, and the chance to win things and play in front of 60,000 and for a lot of them it will come down to what financial package is on offer. And it’s there where this club has made a conscious choice not to push out the boat.

The problem isn’t even the players we won’t try to sign.

The problem, of course, comes when we’re trying to keep the guys who are here right now. It’s difficult not to see the wage cap as a deliberate strategy to ensure that players don’t want to stay here when there are offers from elsewhere. If you take Matt O’Riley for example; if we made him the most well-paid player at Celtic Park and asked him to stay for two or three seasons more because we want to crack on and attempt at least to climb out of the Pot 4 basement and into Pot 3 and maybe even 2, would he hang around? He’d be tempted to, I think, but this is why no such offer will ever be made.

Because the people above the manager only see O’Riley as a bankable asset. If we get a £25 million offer for him, the bean-counters are going to conclude that we need to accept that and move him on and replace him on the cheap. That’s the strategy after all. And that strategy only works if O’Riley doesn’t know he can treble his wages somewhere else and if the buying club knows that even such a salary demand isn’t out-with their budget.

We will never be able to pay O’Riley or others what even a modestly sized English club would, but if he was earning twice what he is right now it makes it that much harder to entice him away and the club doing the buying would have to pay much more, and this is the kind grey area – the “will he or won’t he want to go?” – that Celtic doesn’t want him in.

This is what hamstrings us, and this will be the board’s excuse if we get through this window with no significant business done. That attracting quality to Scotland is too difficult, and especially in January. You could write the script for these guys, it never changes.

Until we ditch the wage structure and bring in something more realistic, we’re chancing our arm every single season. Ibrox now spends more than us on wages … they don’t get value for that money but what if one day they do?

We’ll move half a dozen players on in this window, and all of them will be on decent but not brilliant money … think of what bang we could get for our bucks if we married the scouting policy to a decent go of it in the marketplace.

Our system isn’t completely wrong. It is certainly not broken; it has certainly given us a squad full of saleable assets … but it doesn’t work as well as it might either. We are held back not by any restriction set on us from elsewhere but by the ones we put on ourselves. We are, as has been pointed out, our own worst enemy.