Celtic, Motherwell and Miller are heading for a summer of high-stakes poker.

Last night I put up a piece on Lennon Miller and the situation facing Motherwell if they really are serious about getting £7.5 million for him in this transfer window. What I didn’t realise until someone drew my attention to it earlier today is that Lennon Miller is in the final year of his contract this summer—and that makes that valuation not just absurd, but absolutely preposterous.

If Motherwell are attempting to spark some kind of auction, they’d better know they’ve got one chance at it—and they need to get it absolutely right. Because if no club is prepared to pay that—and let’s be honest, why would any club be prepared to pay it when the guy is going into the last 12 months of his deal?—then they’re taking a very real risk that at the end of next season, he walks away for nothing.

You know what? For a kid his age, I can actually see the attraction in doing just that. When you think about it, you’re making the ultimate bet on yourself. It’s a dangerous game, just as dangerous as the one Motherwell themselves are playing. But the potential upside is enormous.

If you’re 19, you’ve won the Scottish Young Player of the Year award, you’ve further enhanced your reputation with another good season in our top flight, and you’re available on a freedom of contract—you’re set.

At that point, you can pretty much negotiate with everybody and anybody. And if there’s serious interest from a top five league, you can sign for a club there and pocket a pretty ridiculous signing-on fee, since nobody has to pay Motherwell anything. Financially, you’re made—whether the move itself works out or not. And at that age, you’ve got plenty of time to correct any mistake you make in that regard.

Of course, the downside is just as enormous.

If you take a chance like that, you’re 19 years old, and you sustain a serious injury with no contract at Motherwell or anywhere else, you’re facing a long road to recovery to get your career back on track—if your career is even viable at all. You could find yourself completely out in the cold—without a club, without anyone having any responsibility for you. The possibility of a long time on the sidelines without a club’s medical department guaranteeing your recovery. And at that age, you could be looking for a different line of work. Everything you’ve worked for could be over.

That’s the extreme case scenario, but it’s one that everyone who thinks about leaving a club on freedom of contract has to consider. It’s the balance of risk versus reward. At 19, it probably doesn’t seem like much of a risk, but with a downside that big, you really need to think about it. That’s why he might well be willing to go this summer—even if he doesn’t quite like the destination, even if he’s not entirely sure it’s the right move—just the one the club finds most acceptable.

But what’s clear from the revelation that he’s in the final year of his deal is this: Motherwell don’t really hold any of the cards they think they do here. That valuation just looks completely unrealistic in light of this. I said in the earlier piece that I thought it was unrealistic anyway—but now it’s a non-starter. And they haven’t done themselves any favours by putting that number out in the public domain.

I think he’ll go in the summer. From the point of view of Motherwell, he pretty much has to. Because if he goes into his final year and the summer passes them by, they get nothing anyway. If they sit on the player or the player decides to stay there over the summer, then come January he can talk to whomever he likes and sign a pre-contract agreement—and they get nothing. So the balancing act is such that a deal has to happen in the next few months or, from their point of view, it’s not going to happen at all. They have to cash in now while they can.

What does it mean for us, if we’re determined to get him?

Then we have the standard set of options.

We can come to some kind of agreement with them about what he’s worth and include sell-on clauses, additional fees based on percentage of games played, international caps, European appearances and so on. Or we can take the same chance that Motherwell would be taking—we can wait to see what happens over the summer and then make a move in January on a pre-contract deal.

But here’s the thing—I’m not convinced that Lennon Miller really sees signing for Celtic as one of his major goals. With other Scottish players, there’s been obvious interest from our club, and there’s been obvious interest from the player in signing for our club. I don’t think waiting to sign him on a pre-contract would bear any fruit whatsoever—except to frustrate Brendan Rodgers.

So as with Motherwell, I think the moment—the correct moment—to do this deal is the summer. Or not at all. Because if he has other options—and from the way he’s spoken about it, and the way his father has spoken about it, it’s pretty clear they would prefer to be abroad—then once he’s in the last six months of his deal, he can pretty much write his own ticket. If he stays fit. That’s the gamble.

I don’t know what other clubs around Europe will be willing to offer for Lennon Miller right now. I don’t know what Celtic think he’s worth right now. Motherwell won’t get £7.5 million, but if Celtic are going to negotiate with them, it can’t be an insult. We can’t try to lowball this, and we can’t play the same games we did with John McGinn—because that didn’t work in his case, and it certainly isn’t going to work here.

It’s going to be an interesting summer in the Lennon Miller transfer saga. And what’s most interesting is that by the end of the summer, I don’t expect we’ll be hearing any more “Lennon Miller to Celtic” stories. Either it’ll be done—and he’ll be at our club—or it won’t get done at all.

Right now, I wouldn’t put money on which of those two outcomes it’ll be. There’s an awful lot of poker to be played around this table, and a lot of it’s going to come down to how much we want him—and how much we think he’s worth paying for at this moment in time. I hope we handle this better than with John McGinn.