The most tedious Celtic transfer story of the last two years ends with a soft bombshell.

The least surprising story of the whole day just broke—and it’s that Mathias Kvistgaarden has gone to Norwich for a fee that’s reportedly under £7 million.

That figure is well within Celtic’s affordability range.

In fact, it’s far less than what Brøndby were trying to get for him last year. It echoes almost exactly what I wrote earlier about the Jannsen situation at Rapid Vienna, and some of what I’ve previously said about Brøndby’s stance here.

This deal is the ultimate proof of the stupidity of a club trying to get more for a player than he’s worth. That’s a subject I’ll be returning to tomorrow in a different context, but for now let’s just acknowledge that £7 million is a lot less than what Celtic were allegedly willing to pay at one point.

In fact, it’s actually more in line with the kind of fees that we expected when we first moved for him—and that poses an interesting question.

That question was sort of answered this afternoon with a report about the fee, and a line in that report claiming that Celtic had long since withdrawn any interest in the player and would not have moved for him at any price.

That’s quite a reversal from a lot of what we’ve been told—but it echoes what this site has long suspected. We were never seriously in the running for this guy. It was always speculation. Media hype. We never made a concrete bid in January. There were just a lot of rumours about a bid.

So, were we ever really interested in ths first place? The answer to that is almost certainly yes. So, when did we actually stop wanting to sign him?

And on that one, I think we can speculate with a decent degree of confidence. I said this on the podcast the other night—there’s an obvious answer that just doesn’t suit the narrative the media has spun, and so it’s never been seriously debated in the public square. I think the interest ended the moment Mark Lawwell left the building.

Kvistgaarden was on his list of targets, and we’d probably have moved for him if the fee had stayed relatively low. But I don’t believe Brendan Rodgers was ever particularly interested in the player. I certainly don’t believe he would have sanctioned any move that went above a certain price.

I’ve never thought there was all that much to Kvistgaarden. His record in Denmark isn’t brilliant. And if he were truly a top-tier player, you’d expect him to be comfortably outscoring his peers in that league. But he hasn’t. That’s always been a red flag. The fact that he was first touted back when Mark Lawwell was steering the transfer policy? Another red flag. And that, I suspect, is where Rodgers drew the line.

I said as much at the start of last season, back when the summer window was still open and rumours resurfaced that we were back in for him. I thought that because he was on the Lawwell shortlist that Rodgers probably dismissed the idea out of hand.

Everything we’ve read about Kvistgaarden over the last two years has turned out to be false. All the interest from Germany, Italy and elsewhere? Pure fiction. If he’d had the chance to move to a top Bundesliga side like Leverkusen—as was claimed—that’s where he’d have gone. If Italy’s big clubs were sniffing around, he’d be there now.

Instead, he’s ended up in the English Championship. For less than Brøndby allegedly quoted us. It’s been a colossal misjudgement on their part. They tried to spark an auction and they failed.

And it also seems obvious now that one of the reasons they couldn’t spark that auction is because we were never seriously in the running, or had pulled out long before the final act. And to be honest, this saga has long since passed the point of tedium. I’m glad it’s done. And I trust that this is the last we’ll ever hear about him.

Some people have pointed out that the transfer fee Norwich paid is basically less than the fee they recouped for Adam Idah. I’ll say it plainly—I think Adam Idah is the better footballer. And I think that, as much as anything, is part of the reason why Rodgers wasn’t interested in Kvistgaarden. It’s just not clear that he would’ve been any kind of improvement on what we already have in the building.

It’s also conveniently forgotten that we’ve seen this kind of story before. We signed Adam Idah in a window where the widespread rumour was that our number one target was Sydney van Hooijdonk. He went to Norwich. We got Idah instead. We were accused of going for a cheap option and blowing a big opportunity.

Then Idah scored goals that helped win us the league. He scored the goal that won us the Scottish Cup. Van Hooijdonk didn’t score once in twelve appearances for Norwich.

So no—I’m not remotely impressed with the claim that Norwich have now bought “the player we should’ve gone for” with the money we supposedly “wasted” on Idah.

Adam Idah has 29 goals in his first 18 months at Celtic. When Kvistgaarden’s been in a Norwich shirt for 18 months, we’ll see where his tally is. I expect Idah to be well past the 50 goal mark for Celtic by then.

So ends the saga, and while it’s still unclear whether it was ever anything more than a fantasy spun up by agents and journos, the suspicion remains that Brøndby were trying to play games—using us as a stalking horse to drive up the price—and that our genuine interest didn’t last longer than Mark Lawwell’s contract at Celtic Park.

Certainly, Rodgers never had any reason to believe Kvistgaarden would’ve been an upgrade on what we already had. And nothing the player’s done in Denmark since has changed that.

Norwich is about the level I always suspected he’d end up at. And £6.9 million is a far more realistic fee than what Brøndby were quoting in January—if we even bothered to ask. And I strongly suspect we didn’t.