Ibrox Is Trying To Copy Celtic’s Transfer Policy On The Cheap. How Amusing.

One of the things that I do on this site is keep a constant eye on what is going on across the city. I keep telling people who complain about this that The CelticBlog is just the name of this site.

Since I started editing it, it has fulfilled a dual role. It is a site for Celtic fans, but it is not just for Celtic fans. This is, as I’ve said, a Scottish football site written from the perspective of Celtic fans. It is why I would have been writing about the SPFL board yesterday regardless of who took the place of the departed Ibrox CEO James Bisgrove.

Scottish football always has something going on in it. That’s the beauty of covering the whole game. Ibrox fans think that some of us do nothing but think about them all the time; in fact, they sometimes generate the best stories because whatever else you can say about that shower over there, that club is never boring.

And people do love a freak show.

There isn’t a lot of Celtic transfer business to analyse. I take comfort in that to a degree. Because it seems to me that we’re getting on with things quietly behind the scenes, without leaks, without the media having a sniff of what it is we’re up to. Ibrox, on the other hand, is leaking like a sieve, and what do we learn when we look at their “transfer policy” in action?

Well, it looks oddly familiar. It looks … like ours. Except for one thing, and it’s the one thing that makes me laugh. Theirs is the budget supermarket version of the strategy. Which fundamentally misunderstands what it is that we do.

There is a sense of expectation around this club at the minute that we’re going to sell Matt O’Riley in this window, and for a huge sum of money. He cost us £1 million. Ibrox looks at that and sees us on the brink of a fee twenty-five times what we paid for him and they are salivating like Pavlov’s dogs. This isn’t the first time they’ve looked across at Celtic and what it is that we are doing and assumed that they understand it. They don’t and never have.

Celtic’s transfer policy leaves theirs in the dust, but it’s had its ups and downs, and it’s had its exceptional years and its disastrous ones.

Let’s tackle the obvious point first; it helps if you have money to spend. There it is right there; this is the place where their strategy already dooms itself. For every Matt O’Riley you are going to sift through a lot of sand, and in some cases, you are going to have to speculate to accumulate, and you’re going to have to do that more often than you’d like.

Odsonne Edouard netted us £20 million. He cost us £9 million. Jota netted us our record fee so far. He cost us £6 million. Of the saleable assets in the team right now, Kyogo cost us £4.5 million, Carter Vickers cost us £6 million and Alastair Johnston cost us £3 million. Yes, Maeda cost us £1 million, Hatate not much more than that and then there’s Matt O’Riley … but the Japanese were signed due to exceptional local knowledge.

Most of the signings we’ve sold for big bucks cost us a right few quid in the first place, that is the reality of it. To do this job right means spending money. And the difference between their club and ours is that we can afford it and they cannot. This is of critical importance because something else to remember here is that you are going to have bad years.

You need to be able to stand up to the disastrous ones, which means that you never over commit or spend more than you can afford to lose. Even in the windows where we’ve made huge errors – last summer, and the Lennon window where we splurged £12 million on two players who barely kicked their own backsides – we offset the harm by not going over budget and by making corresponding sales to balance the books.

Of course, one of the ways of staying in the budget is by matching incoming players with those going out the door for huge profits.

But you need to have those players in the first place in order to do it, and it’s not enough to hype your own players in the hope that people will believe that you do. Other clubs who send scouts and watch them will suss that in two seconds flat which is why none of the Ibrox players who they expected to sell for big money have gone for big money.

Another thing to remember is that it’s crazy to over-hype your players or overdo it with the price you put on their heads. It is the market that decides what a player is worth, not whoever briefs The Daily Record, or Keith Jackson taking a wild punt.

When clubs are interested in your players, they will make that known, and you can set your price as you see fit as long as clubs are prepared to pay it … when you start talking nonsense about players being worth massive sums when they obviously aren’t you don’t “start a bidding war”, you get clubs dropping their interest and going for more realistic targets.

The idea of going looking for players in “unexplored markets” is funny as well. There is quite literally no such thing left in football. The “unexplored market” concept is a complete fiction. Everybody, everywhere, gets scrutinised now, and if you look just at Jefre, their left back, he proves the theory; he was taken from Brazilian football to Europe … but it was the Cypriot league he went to, not one of the major ones. Central and South American players don’t exactly settle well in Scotland … there is a longer history of failure than there is of success.

You cannot do this job on the cheap, and if we’ve proved anything in the last 12 months, you certainly can’t go to Australia and Asia and sign players in the hope of hitting the jackpot, not unless you can afford the failure rate.

£1.5 million for Tilio. We paid £1 million for Kwon. We paid £2.5 for Yang, and he’s only a modest success at best. We’re now looking for a buyer for Oh, another £2.5 million player, so our “success rate” in Korea is, you could argue, 0 for 3 … and it’s cost us £6 million to find that out. Do they have that kind of money? Of course they don’t.

All they do is look at Celtic and at the players we’ve bought for modest sums and made a profit on and they tell themselves that it must be easy or we wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s arrogance and stupidity in equal measure, because they don’t understand how we’ve done it, or what the costs are.

They don’t know how much we spent on scouting and affiliate networks, they don’t get that some of it has required specialised local knowledge and they refuse to consider how much money we’ve had to throw at it. The “success rate” is not promising either.

It is going to be fun watching them try to cobble together a squad out of cheap foreign punts. Perhaps the smartest move they’re making right now is attempting to sign Connor Barron, but he’s an average SPFL player who isn’t going to make a huge difference, and this presupposes he gets into their starting eleven in the first place … their “strategy” appears not to make a lot of sense, and in fact might be pretty damaging to their club.

The last thing to understand is that it can take time for “project players” to pop. We’ve had to send several of them out on loan for spells before they came back ready for first team football … and that’s something they can’t afford to do if this is about building a squad whose first priority is to stop Celtic before we’re heading towards another big “in a row”.

But it’s cheap … so no real harm done, right? Yeah, tell that to their fans in a year’s time when all this falls apart.