Multiple targets in multiple positions. Have Celtic learned the lessons of January?

Yesterday, a couple of the Celtic sites led with a story about how we had submitted what they called a lowball bid for Janssen at Rapid Vienna.

I covered that story too, but I came at it from a slightly different angle—namely that Rapid have to be very careful here. We made an offer that was ten times what they paid for him. And while they are fully entitled to ask for whatever they want, the fact that they were talking about an eight-figure fee was absolutely off the scale.

Today, The Record is reporting that he has been excluded from his club’s training because they don’t want to risk losing what they regard as a deal that’s too good to turn down. In short, they don’t want to see him get injured.

They don’t want anything to happen that might put the deal in jeopardy.

That deal almost certainly does not involve Celtic; maybe we’re wrong, but the drumbeat from Austria does make it sound as though there are better offers on the table than ours, and I can’t understand why the media is trying to spin it as though it does—unless they’re already preparing to write a story about how we got “snubbed.”

The basic dishonesty of some of the reporting that surrounds our club is ridiculous. It’s like what I said about the Kvistgaarden deal. That deal had been touted for so long. We were linked, although there was never any obvious truth in it.

I’m sure we retained an interest in Janssen. I’m sure we made an offer. And I’m sure that offer was in the sort of range we deemed acceptable—roughly what we paid for Kuhn in the first place. A bid in that range would have given them a return of ten times what their club initially bought him for. If they get a higher offer than that, they’re fully entitled to accept it and tell us what the new bid has to start with.

And of course, we’re also entitled to walk away from any deal that we don’t think hits the mark for us, which brings us to the way we are handling things.

We’re linked at the moment with no fewer than three centre-backs, which tells me that we’re seriously interested in at least one of them. We’re also in for at least two strikers, and there’s talk that we may even bring both to Celtic for the start of the new campaign.

That would be an interesting choice, because as we’ve all discussed at length, football is no longer just played over a handful of domestic games and a limited number of European ties. Football is a two-front war now, and you have to be thinking in terms of squad rotation, balance, and everything else.

I don’t think we’ll sign two strikers, any more than I think we’ll sign two more centre-backs. One player in each position is probably what’s needed to pad out what we already have in the team.

But, as with the scenario involving right-sided attackers, this is a sign that we are taking seriously the strategy of targeting multiple players for each position—because if one deal isn’t progressing the way you want it to, such as the Jansen deal, you simply move on to the next one. And I don’t even think we’ve moved that far, because the Antwerp situation has been pretty well known since January when we tried to sign that guy. It’s just a matter of switching from one option to the next.

This club gets stick from us when it deserves it. But when the club is doing the right thing, when it is clearly progressing along the route we want it to, when it is taking the right steps, then it deserves praise. And right now, it looks a lot like we’re doing the right thing. It looks a lot like we are following a plan.

I’ll talk about individual players a bit later on—I’ve got one particular thing I want to say—but the whole idea that a plan is finally being followed is welcome. And it does look as if that’s the case.

It’s not a coincidence that we’re linked with so many players from so many different parts of the world, and that we’re bidding for several in each position. This isn’t just paper talk either; we know we’ve made concrete offers.

So work is being done. Things are happening behind the scenes. And this time, finally, there does seem to be a sense of urgency about it.

Some people complain about the lack of a blue-chip signing—but what even is a blue-chip signing? At the end of the day, did Daizen Maeda look like one when we signed him? Did Matt O’Riley, at the low cost we got him for, seem as if he was going to be a blue-chip signing?

A blue-chip signing is judged on what he does once he’s in the team—not on how much he cost the team. We can all already tell that Nygren is a really good player, for example, and he didn’t cost us the earth.

What’s important is that we’ve got some forward progress. And, as we’ve all talked about before, it’s expected that we’ll ramp things up significantly the moment Kuhn departs the building. He was in Italy yesterday for his medical, and that deal will be done in the next few days. It is to be hoped that, once it is, we can make some signings to take with us on the pre-season games in Portugal.

But perhaps the most significant thing here is that we seem to have learned the lesson of January, namely that we seem to have a few irons in the fire. We have done work in advance. We have obviously scouted out the areas where we need to improve and have identified multiple targets in each of them.

It’s hardly revolutionary stuff but it’s a big breakthrough for us.