Yesterday Celtic demolished the Kuhn transfer fee rubbish. Bravo.

One of the most ridiculous, yet pernicious, transfer stories of this window was finally shot full of holes by an unofficial statement to the media the other day.

It was done the way these things usually are—a sly word to a few sources in the mainstream press. And, amazingly, those sources are the very people who were pushing the lie in the first place.

Celtic have finally done what I and others have been begging them to do for weeks: they’ve shut down the Nicolas Kühn transfer story.

Not the story that Kühn is available—because we know he probably is, especially if he’s requested a move or badly wants to go—but the idea that we were ever going to accept a £15 million fee for him.

That was beyond ridiculous. Many of us have been saying the club needed to make a definitive statement making it clear that it wasn’t true.

Yesterday, it seems as if they did exactly that. The media is now reporting that £15 million is, in fact, the minimum price we’d be looking for.

It’s where the bidding would start. And that’s more or less in line with what all of us have been saying. For Celtic to have placed a £15 million price tag on Kühn would have been crazy. Celtic know he’s a top player. Celtic know that if he stays beyond this season, his value is only going to go up.

There was never any good reason why Celtic would accept a £15 million fee for him, because Celtic know—and we all know—that we can get more.

The media strategy when dealing with Celtic has always been well known to us. And it’s pretty plain that there is a strategy being followed here. The moment a former Celtic player put that valuation in the public domain, and the moment other former Celtic players started talking as if it were realistic, it was only a matter of time before the media jumped on it and started to amplify the claim.

The claim has no basis in fact. The claim has no validity. Everyone who has watched the player knows that he is worth more than that.

Potentially, yes—but he certainly isn’t going to be worth less than that, and that’s the critical factor that underpins our stance.

It doesn’t matter whether he stays and has another good season or whether he stays and has a bad one—his valuation is not going to drop below £15 million. That is where the bidding will have to begin, and Celtic know that.

There are clubs out there who will pay more. If we can get £20 million, that’s a realistic figure for which this guy could be sold.

We are not the Ibrox club, scrambling around desperately in the free transfer, loans and League One signings market. We have tens of millions in the bank. We are not pleading poverty. We are not an impoverished club, and as such we have to act with strength and conviction at all times in order to maintain that position.

I felt that the Celtic board should have moved sooner to stamp all over this story, but I knew they would eventually do it.

Because the idea that Nicolas Kühn is worth a mere £15 million is ludicrous. And the fact is, we were always going to have a good chance of getting a bid that was higher than that—as long as we knocked the lowball nonsense on the head. As long as we didn’t allow it to remain in the public domain as the club’s official position.

So yesterday’s development is no surprise.

The only people who seem genuinely surprised are those who’ve been pushing the £15 million line. Some of them are obviously also disappointed, because they’d hoped that was Celtic’s negotiating position.

They’d hoped we were going to sell ourselves short. They hoped we were going to sell the player short. That was never going to happen. The people who run our club are far too good at this business to allow that.

I mean, we may not give these people much credit when it comes to going out and bringing in the players we want. But when it comes to moving players out, they seem to know what they’re doing. And it would have been baffling had we accepted the first actual bid on the table for this guy instead of operating from a position of strength.

Because the truth is, we hold all the cards here.

The player is on a long-term deal. If he wants a move out of Celtic, he’s going to have to play for it. He’s going to have to look like a guy who can go and perform at a higher level. There’ll be no spitting out the dummy. There’ll be no going in the huff. He’s going to have to knuckle down and work hard if he wants that bigger move. And since we’re not an impoverished club—since we do have all that money in the bank—we are under absolutely no obligation to sell him.

Unlike what, you know, the likes of Hugh Keevins seem to believe.

I read his comments the other day with incredulity. That Celtic has a financial obligation to sell Nicolas Kühn for £15 million. Where in God’s name did he get that from? I mean, I know this guy isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but that is a ludicrous proposition. An obligation? No such obligation exists, nor ever will.

Celtic can afford to act in its own sweet time and in its own best interest here. And that is exactly what the club has signalled that it will do.

I applaud it, at last. I’ve been waiting on this for weeks, and I’m glad that finally the club has made its position clear.