The O’Riley Offers Insult Celtic And The Player. No Wonder They’ve Been Dismissed.

I wrote last week about how crazy it would be for this club to sell Matt O’Riley before we had brought in some high-profile signings. But that’s only part of the story. It would be just wrong to sell O’Riley when the offers so far have been so utterly unsatisfactory.

In fact, I’ll go one better; those offers have been a flat-out insult, not only to Celtic but to Matt O’Riley himself. He’s a better player than the sort of low-ball bid which would not buy you a mediocre footballer from the so-called Big Five.

Celtic has made it clear what it thinks he’s worth. That would make him the most expensive player ever sold by a Scottish club. But he might also be the best player ever sold by a Scottish club, at least in the modern era after transfer values went haywire.

The calibre of clubs who are interested is telling all on its own. O’Riley is a top-class talent.

So, Celtic’s valuation is right on the money. It’s actually less than what he would command if he was playing in England, and everyone knows that. To offer a sum in the low £20 million range treats us like mugs, and worse it is an open insult to the player himself.

The game is dominated by money. Everyone knows this.

Yet with so much of it sloshing around the game and the really good players having the opportunity to make more of it with every day that passes, we overlook the point that many of the top players are more motivated by the winning of prizes than with self-enrichment.

That, they can get anywhere. A guy like Mbappe might seem greedy; in point of fact, he could have earned vastly more heading over to Saudi Arabia than staying in Europe. He’d have been the blue-chip signing to end them all for that league and they would have rewarded him accordingly.

When anyone reaches a certain threshold of wealth, whatever field they are in, they cease to be able to buy “more” things with the money.

When you have the house you always wanted and the car you always wanted and the apartment in another part of the world and your kids are secure and there’s enough for their kids and theirs, what’s the point in chasing the money any further? The guys at the very, very top can earn as much from endorsements and sponsorship than they can from the game, and they will never be short of offers when their careers end.

What motivates them in that period when they are still playing and are reaching their peak? What is it that gets the really top players out of bed and into training? The will to win. The desire to be the best and to play and beat the best.

At that point, the money is nothing more than a representation of how much they are respected and wanted and valued, and a big transfer fee is more than just a reflection of a team having too much money to spend; it’s a reflection of how much you are wanted, how much a team manager feels that he needs to have you, how much a club wants to push out the boat.

Flattery, to some. An appeal to ego. Actually, it’s much more than that. Feeling appreciated and wanted and respected and regarded … those are rewards people have gone to greater extremes for than they ever would for the money. Don’t underestimate that.

O’Riley deserves the respect of an offer which doesn’t just dismiss his own talents.

Remember, for a deal like this to go through he has to agree to it, and I think even if Celtic were so inclined to accept a valuation way below what they’ve set out I think he might not want to go to a club which views him so cheaply, and he’d be entitled to feel that way.

It looks as if he might go during this window, although I pointedly refuse to use terms like “inevitable” because in my view I still don’t think that it is. But the teams who are interested really have to do a lot better than this.