Of course Celtic will pay a premium for a striker. Not every club is as stupid as we are.

Tonight, there are all sorts of internet rumours about the Brøndby striker, Mathias Kvistgaarden, and whether Celtic may or may not be pursuing him right now. All the speculation agrees that it will be tough to move him from Brøndby in this transfer window because it will take a record fee—and because their club isn’t stupid.

No sane club sells its elite-level striker, its first-choice forward, at this stage in a transfer window. Why would they? There’s talk that the player has told the club he wants to go, right here and now. But they’re holding him to his contract and telling him they’ll decide the day and hour he leaves. And why wouldn’t they?

This is a club that holds all the power when it comes to this guy. Kvistgaarden signed a deal that suited both parties at the time, and that deal will only be terminated when it suits both parties again. It doesn’t matter how much he wants to go, and it doesn’t matter how badly Celtic want his signature—Brøndby will be the ones who decide if and when he leaves.

I have no problem with that at all. I understand it. I’m not accusing them of blocking a man’s dream. I’m not accusing them of being single-minded or pigheaded or anything of the sort. They’re putting the club first. Kvistgaarden belongs to the club, and he’ll just have to sit tight and stay patient while they try to sort out a fee with another club that they find acceptable—at a time they find acceptable.

Anthony Joseph says there’s been no contact between Celtic and Brøndby in January for this guy who is supposedly our number one target. Now, I don’t think the media really knows who our number one target is, but we’ve been tracking Kvistgaarden longer than Game of Thrones fans have been waiting for The Winds of Winter. And I feel that if Celtic fans are crossing their fingers for this deal to happen, those fans of George R.R. Martin might get their wish first.

The problem with selling your number one striker before securing a replacement is that everyone knows you’re desperate to find one. How many times do I have to say on this site that our club lacks a strategic brain at the top of the house? This is 360-degree chess we’re playing here. But you don’t need 360-degree imagination, understanding, or comprehension to recognise the absurd, dangerous, and probably expensive position we’ve put ourselves in here. Even a Ludo player could figure this **** out.

So yeah, any player we’re targeting now is going to cost us more. Any signing we try to make will see the selling club bleed us that little bit more. They’ll take an extra pound of flesh because our board of directors, and our so-called strategy, is essentially stupid. This is what happens when you have third-rate intellects running the show.

And when you look at the Kvistgaarden rumours and how Brøndby is reportedly hiking the price, you see shades of what happened in the summer with Adam Idah. An injury to Kyogo advertised just how desperate we were, and we paid more than we should have.

The only person at the club’s upper echelon I feel sorry for right now is the manager. He has to know exactly how this is going to go from here. Unlike the fantasy football league-style accountants we have running things, he understands how the football world works. He knows that, with just over a week left in the window, everyone out there is looking after their own interests and knows how exposed we are.

So what would you do if Celtic came calling and inquired about one of your players? Not that we should necessarily be inquiring about anyone at this stage because, frankly, it beggars belief that a club which sold its star striker didn’t already know who it wanted to replace him with—and whether that player was available.

They’re going to sell us a pig in a poke here. Some English Premier League loanee, maybe Evan Ferguson. We’ll pay a premium on the loan fee and develop someone else’s player, lose him in the summer, and then we’ll have to start this whole desperate search all over again. All because we didn’t act decisively at the start of this window, when we weren’t reeking of desperation.

Let me repeat what the manager said at the press conference on Friday. We’ve known that Kyogo wanted to leave for months. Everyone at the club knew this might be the window it happened. But unlike other clubs—i.e., almost all of them—it never occurred to us to tell the player, “You’re under contract, and you’ll go when we decide.”

The plans should already have been in motion. The deals should be virtually done.

All that should remain is the rubber stamp and the signing of a very big cheque.

If that’s not the case and we’re scrambling in the dirt, the size of that cheque is only going to grow, and having already gone through this nonsense in the summer, there is absolutely no excuse for being in the same position in January.

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