Celtic’s board should be pilloried if we sell Kuhn for a lousy £15 million fee.

There’s a moment in the movie Margin Call—about the collapse of a fictional Wall Street investment bank—where a character says, “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

Now, in football terms, we’re obviously not in the business of cheating. But you do have to wonder where Celtic think they are right now in this transfer market.

Because I’ve been watching this Kuhn saga unfold, and with every passing day, it becomes more baffling.

First came Packie Bonner’s intervention, which seemed odd at the time and now looks even more ill-judged. Then came my own piece warning that the story about the fee was being picked up elsewhere. And now here we are, with Newcastle World and The Record confidently reporting that Nicolas Kuhn will be sold for that knockdown fee of £15 million. It’s gone viral. It’s hardened into fact, just as I feared.

That figure, if accurate, is absurd. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s nonsensical. It’s not reflective of market reality. It’s not reflective of the player’s value. It doesn’t even make sense on Celtic’s own terms. And yet it has now been repeated so many times that it’s taken on the aura of truth.

And that’s dangerous.

Because this is how bad decisions get locked in. This is how the narrative becomes “Well, that was the offer, and we took it.”

This is how Celtic find themselves boxed into a corner of their own making. We should have crushed that story at birth. The only reason we wouldn’t is if we were really contemplating a sale at that price, and if so, it is going to raise real questions about what our priorities are this summer and it should.

Let’s go back to where this began: Bonner, of all people, dropping Kuhn’s name into a conversation on the radio and suggesting he’d be on the way out for that daft fee. I said at the time that this was unhelpful. Bonner, even when he’s speculating, is listened to, not least by a lot of our fans and by people in the media. And once a story like that gets out there, the sharks start circling. I knew they would bite.

From there, this site and others picked it up—not to inflate it, but to push back. To warn against it. To say this made no financial sense. Kuhn, after all, has shown his quality in the biggest competition of all. His stats from last season are phenomenal.

Now let’s look at the number: £15 million. That’s being floated as the sale price for a player we bought for £2.8 million just eighteen months ago. On paper it looks like a huge profit, but this is a classic mistake, from people who place dumb assumed valuations above actual value. He’s a German youth international. A player with a resale trajectory. A player who actually has improved from the player we bought.

There is every reason to think he has a lot of improvement in front of him, and if he can continue on his current path then nothing under £20 million even gets you in the room in 12 months time. This club has to stop rolling over. Keeping unhappy players is never a good idea, but seriously, what’s Kuhn going to do if we keep him here another year? Down tools? What kind of interest will there be in him then? Is it too much to expect a footballer to act like a damned professional?

I don’t want him here if he’s determined to leave. I have no issue with selling the guy, not at all. But it is pathetic to simply roll over like this.

RB Leipzig has plenty of money. So does Newcastle and some of the other teams he’s linked with. We’re not sending anybody to the poor house here. These clubs do pay big fees for squad players or “projects.” Even fringe talent down south goes for more than this. What in God’s name are people at Celtic thinking about?

We don’t cheat. But this doesn’t look like playing smarter either. Which, if you subscribe to the Margin Call theory leaves “be first.” Which translated into terms here is simply that as soon as offer comes in where you can sell a guy for a big return you jump on it at once in case it’s not available later.

I would prefer we played it smart. This comes off as weak. It makes us look desperate for the money. We have him on a long-term deal. There is no cause to sell for this price. Why are we in such an apparent hurry to push a Champions League success out the door for such an abysmal sum? Convince me this makes sense.

Do we want to do this fast so that it becomes a data point in the annual report? We have a week before 1 July. Is that what this is about? Does it help us create the illusion of a well-oiled, well-run operation?

Jota went for £25 million. O’Riley went for similar. That’s the benchmark now. Kyogo left for £10 million but he was 30 years old and wanted to go for over a year. He saw the chance to go and get one last big contract elsewhere and although the timing of it stunk to high heaven I understood it to an extent.

Kuhn is 25. He’s signed a long-term deal. This is a low-ball offer and we should have punted it into touch and made sure the media knew that full well. That we didn’t starts to make the whole thing feel like asset shuffling instead of team building. The abilities of the squad in football terms seems like a secondary consideration for this board. They are more interested in the balance sheet than the team sheet.

This should have been stamped out early. We should have gone public rejecting that fee out of hand the moment Bonner said the words. Now we seem boxed in. And if the deal goes through at that fee, it will be a minor scandal.

And I tell you, if this summer is another exercise in balancing the books, about showing profit at the expense of progress then a lot of fans are going to come out of this window angrier than they went into it.

God even knows how pissed off the manager is going to be.