As Idah Closes In On His Celtic Return, A Lot Of People Should Have A Long Hard Look In The Mirror.

Tonight, the media is reporting that we are on the brink of completing the signing of Adam Idah.

The BBC is reporting a fee of £6.5 million, with potential add-ons taking it beyond £8 million. Meanwhile, Anthony Joseph suggests Celtic might be paying £8.5 million, with further potential add-ons and a 15% sell-on clause.

Now, we don’t know which of these reports is true.

All we know is that this deal looks like it’s about to be done, finally bringing an end to a summer of nonsensical foot-dragging and whatever else the club has been involved in.

I’ve written about this several times over the past few months, arguing that there was a financial point beyond which this deal didn’t make sense.

If we’re paying £8.5 million for Idah, that’s the extreme end of what I ever thought we’d be prepared to spend. And I’ll tell you this: if we end up paying that much, it’s twice what we initially offered and likely represents a sizable increase on what we offered just last week.

Now, I’m not going to knock this signing because I like Adam Idah, and I think we’ve got ourselves a really good player here. But, I’m also 100% certain that we could have secured a better player if we had gone shopping in that upper-level cost bracket.

Here’s what I think this tells us about Celtic and our transfer policy: it doesn’t work. Something is seriously wrong at Celtic Park. We’re potentially spending more on this player than we ever intended, and quite possibly more than is entirely smart.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Idah.

This is a guy I would have signed because we know his qualities and talents as a player. We know he can play under pressure and deliver when it matters most. He will be a great addition, providing strength and depth in an important area of the team.

But Adam Idah’s signing highlights a very serious problem, one I’ll be writing about tomorrow in the context of another transfer story.

It seems clear to me that our scouting system is a shambles. Whoever is responsible for identifying targets and getting them signed is hopelessly overmatched by the size of the job at a club like Celtic. That person cannot possibly still be in that role come the January window.

We’ve watched this drama unfold for more than two months.

Throughout, we were assured that this deal would be done, that Celtic would get what they wanted, and that Norwich would get less than they wanted.

This was supposedly some genius work by the negotiators at Celtic Park. But in the end, all it took was Brendan Rodgers giving a press conference at the end of a game and mentioning Kyogo’s injury, and stating that he expected the deal to be done this week. What was once unthinkable is now being considered, and what was once undoable is now being done. The price we weren’t willing to pay is the price we’re about to pay.

And I ask you, in all honesty, why, if we were going to do this, didn’t we just do it two months ago? Who at Celtic really thinks it was a good idea to drag this out, taking grief from fans like me, instead of just getting together with Norwich and sorting it out in good faith, possibly at a lower cost, and much, much sooner than this?

After two months of token efforts and one insulting offer, it’s finally deemed acceptable to pay Norwich their fee and close this matter out.

If people at Celtic are feeling slightly stung tonight, wondering if we overpaid or thinking that maybe we’ve been unlucky because Kyogo picked up a knock, I can only laugh.

They have only themselves to blame. Their big bluff backfired the moment Kyogo fell clutching that shoulder yesterday. Their poker skills are as big a joke as everything else they’ve tried to do this window. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.

It was inevitable that they would leave this too late for any possible wiggle room, until we were forced to the table with serious money, panicking about the potential consequences of leaving it any longer.

This is the scenario some of us have been warning about for weeks. I was absolutely certain that we would either end up overpaying because time had run out or that we wouldn’t get Adam Idah at all.

If the deal is done, I’m happy.

I’m happy, first, that we’ve brought the player in because I like him, I rate him, and I think he’ll do a really good job.

But I’m even happier that it didn’t go down to the final day when we finally had to admit to ourselves and to the manager that there was no Plan B.

In that extreme scenario, with the minutes ticking down, we could have ended up paying an eight-figure sum in a blind panic and out of sheer desperation. This transfer window has been an absolute shambles, and the dangers inherent in leaving business until the last minute should now be obvious, even to the most blinkered pro-board fans.

Heads ought to roll for this calamity. But they won’t.

The people at the top of our house will, even now, find a way to convince themselves that they are geniuses after all, in spite of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

I look forward to writing a more upbeat piece tomorrow, after we’ve finally got this deal done.