Celtic should have dealt with this Kuhn fee nonsense. Now it’s spreading.

There’s a line in Glengarry Glen Ross that I quoted on the blog last week when Pat Bonner decided to hold forth on Nicolas Kühn’s price tag:

“You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.” Bonner ignored that rule. So has just about every ex-pro and pundit who’s piled in since, and the result is exactly the mess I worried about—an infectious, self-replicating narrative that Kühn “isn’t worth more than fifteen million quid.”

The Daily Record has latched on to it like a starving dog on a butcher’s leftovers, Chris Sutton has obligingly added a sound-bite, and now the notion is spreading quicker than a rumour in a pub queue.

This is how football folklore starts: someone floats a figure, the echo chamber repeats it, and before you know it that number becomes the default talking point on radio phone-ins and Sky Sports News.

The reality—no bids, no negotiations, not a single shred of evidence for any of it—gets buried under the weight of repetition. It’s the old propaganda trick: repeat a lie often enough and folk will take it for the truth. In this case it isn’t even a lie so much as a half-formed opinion, yet it can still do damage, because it sets the anchor point around which every future discussion will revolve.

Let me tell you about anchoring.

It is one of the simplest principles in negotiation psychology.

Mention a price first and you plant a flag in the ground; everything afterwards is measured against it. I said something similar in the piece about Miller, and it doesn’t just stop at the dreadful possibility that we might actually only get offers in the £15 million range; it’s worse than that because all of these guys have suggested we’d bite hands off for that money.

Once the notion hardens into fact that you’d be delighted with fifteen million you just watch rival clubs start their bidding at ten. They’ll reason that they can haggle you down because you’ve practically begged them to. But if you keep schtum, quietly decide your own valuation and let genuine offers reveal themselves, you hold the initiative.

You dictate the terms, not the tabloids.

That’s why the Bonner comments irritated me. He might think he’s just passing on harmless opinion, but ex-players carry weight—especially ones who now sit in studios being billed as “Celtic legends.”

When he says fifteen million, supporters start repeating it on social media, rival scouts clip the quotes for their dossiers and sports desks turn it into splash headlines. We all know how that cycle works; we’ve watched it for years. By the time Celtic’s board sits down with a buying club, the first sentence across the table is likely to be, “Your own people are saying fifteen, so let’s not get crazy, eah?”

Now add Chris Sutton.

Big Sutton is nobody’s fool and rarely shy of an opinion, but he at least dressed his scepticism in caveats—Kühn needs to prove himself in Europe, one consistent season isn’t enough, timing is everything. Fair enough. I don’t disagree, indeed I’ve said much the same. Nicolas has a lot more to do before he should even think about the next level. He’s given us a year and a half. The half has been the launchpad for all these stories. The year was mostly underwhelming.

Now the half shows that he’s a huge talent and will be a massive player for any team once he has a good grounding under him, a few years of consistency. Otherwise he risks becoming one of those players I talked about the other day, a guy who will move to a new club riding a wave of PR and will quickly run headlong into reality of the most painful sort. Bench-warming. Being touted around at a cut price.

That’s what Sutton is saying. Not that he’s not worth that money but that at this point there’s enough growth potential in the player that we can get more, and he can get a bigger move for himself, if he stays and shows more of what he can do.

The trouble is that nuance gets stripped away once the Record’s headline machine gets involved. They take the gist and suddenly it’s splashed across their site in bold. No nuance, no context. “Kühn ‘isn’t worth more than £15m’ claims Hoops hero.” Bang. Another brick in the wall.

Why does any of this matter? Because Celtic’s reputation in the transfer market is an asset, of course, as I’ve said many times. Clubs believe in our system. They know we are good at developing talent. Even the players I talked about in that piece the other day aren’t bad players. They definitely chose the wrong clubs at the wrong time. You watch O’Riley excell if he goes to Napoli. Watch what Kyogo does at a club where he plays every week. These guys didn’t stop being good players.

So we’ve sold players for proper money—Tierney, Jota, Van Dijk—by sticking to valuations, not by shouting numbers into microphones.

Clubs know we negotiate tough; that’s why Southampton didn’t dare come in low for Van Dijk and Arsenal had to bring Champions League cash to prise Tierney away. The moment we allow ex-players to set unofficial price tags in public, we chip away at that hard-earned image. If Celtic legends are telling the world we’d bite your hand off for fifteen million, what message does that send about the board’s backbone?

We should make it clear that this valuation is miles off the mark.

Because what’s worse is it fosters uncertainty among our own fans. People start asking, “Is he actually that good? Maybe we should sell if someone flashes fifteen million.” It becomes a self-doubt loop. Others will talk about how taking an offer that low suggests that the board just wants the money in so they can hoard cash, and they don’t care particularly whether we get maximum value or not.

That narrative can seep into the dressing room too. Players read newspapers; they scroll through Twitter. If his people believe that’s a bid we’d accept what if a bid comes in for that and we flatly turn it down? Will they accept that? Or will we see some signs of agitation in the media? Will it have a knock-on effect at the club?

I know a few people wondered why the Hell I was so bothered about Bonner’s remarks the other day; I trust I don’t have to explain it any further. I feared this precise scenario. I feared that one daft comment would go viral and suddenly everyone would be talking in the same terms, about the same crap fee.

Let’s step back and look at the reality of Kühn.

He’s 25, tied down on a reasonable contract, versatile enough to play across the frontline and technically gifted. Brendan Rodgers rates him; the stats back up an upward trajectory. He’s Germany-tested and he’s not yet at his peak. Why on earth would we cap the conversation at fifteen million before a single offer has come our way? Why would we? Another year and if he hits the same sort of form as had people drooling in the first place and he’s worth twice that.

We shouldn’t even consider opening serious talks unless someone is waving at least twenty, preferably twenty-five, and even that would come with add-ons. Inflation exists in football as surely as it does at the supermarket. If Brighton can quote fifty million for a promising Championship full-back, Celtic shouldn’t feel bashful slapping a premium on a proven winger who has shone on the European stage.

Now, I can practically hear someone bleating in the background: “But what if fifteen million is the realistic price?”

To which I say, maybe it is. “But the first rule, and you’d know it if ever you spent a day in your life … you never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.”

The market decides. Clubs looking for wide players with pace, end product and room for development will do their own scouting. They will weigh Kühn’s data against alternatives and place bids accordingly. Sometimes you bite their hand off; sometimes you tell them to take a hike. Until those conversations happen, chattering about ceilings is pointless at best and self-defeating at worst.

Look at Matt O’Riley. We had pundits insisting before he left that we’d be lucky to get fifteen for him. The club nodded politely shut the door and waited. Six months later the numbers whispered were into the twenties. We’re even looking at a wee added bonus if he goes to Italy thanks to our sell-on clause.

If we’d accepted the early patter, we’d have left money on the table. “Oh it’s fifteen times what they paid.” Why take that when you can get twenty five times what you paid? This isn’t fantasy—this is how negotiation works.

The Record pieces also try to paint a picture that Kühn himself must be itching for a move; their logic is that the gravitational pull of the Premier League turns every Celtic star’s head eventually.

Maybe—but players also crave Champions League football, stability and a crowd of sixty thousand belting out their name. As long as Celtic remain competitive in Europe and continue to develop talent, plenty of our squad will see Glasgow as the right place to shine and to shop themselves on that biggest of stages.

The idea that every Celtic player is desperate to jump ship the minute Sky Sports News rolls its yellow bar is as lazy as it is inaccurate. There would barely be a highly-value player still at the club right now if it were otherwise.

Let’s not fall for it.

Kühn’s camp has been silent. There’s no talk of him agitating for a move. Rodgers is planning pre-season with him in mind. If anything, the lad is in a sweet spot: mainstay starter, thriving under a manager who trusts him, with the chance to raise his value further in Europe.

That’s how you secure mega-money transfers—by starring in high-profile matches.
Here’s the kicker; I don’t think Kühn has played his best football yet. If he has another season of growth under Rodgers in this revamped Champions League format where Celtic could feasibly reach the next stage his value might skyrocket. Imagine flogging him now for fifteen and watching him sparkle for a mid-table English side, who then ship him on for thirty plus two years later.

We’d know – not think; we’d know – that could and should have been our money. And to those who say that buyers will not spend that money in Scotland I say that you should listen to the manager more when he says clubs are buying the player, not the standard of the league. Good performances in Europe will be a benchmark anyway and if can do it on that stage – and we know he can – the sky is the limit.

Pundits shooting from the hip don’t have the slightest clue what figures are on scouting dossiers and newspapers love a “he’s not worth it” angle because negativity sells. Anchoring a fee in public only helps buying clubs. Our own transfer history proves holding firm pays. Therefore, the sensible course is to ignore the hysteria, keep our valuations in-house, and let actual negotiations set the terms.

Will that stop the Record from churning clickbait? Of course not.

But Celtic’s job is to win trophies and sell players for proper money. We do that by sticking to Brendan Rodgers’ plan, trusting our scouting department and keeping negotiations behind closed doors.

In the meantime, fans can play their part by not parroting every headline as gospel. If you see a figure repeated without a source, question it. If an article references “insiders” without naming a club or a director, treat it for what it is: filler.

Our transfer strategy works best when supporters resist the urge to turn rumour into accepted fact. Remember, it’s not that long ago that there was chatter about Daizen Maeda going for nine million. Nine million! Almost every fan site leaped on that and beat it back to earth. The story has not been heard since.

And Bonner? Great servant, top bloke—I grew up watching him myself—but he should know the first rule of the negotiation game. Once words are out, you can’t take them back, and you certainly can’t control how the press will weaponise them, and that’s the thing that annoys me most because we all know they’ll do it and Bonner has been in the media game long enough to have seen it a hundred times.

So the next time an ex-pro points at Kühn and mutters “fifteen million” like it’s a biblical commandment, remember that someone who gets jittery and over-excited at the poker table usually walks away lighter in the wallet.