GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - JANUARY 29: A General Stadium View during a UEFA Europa League 2025/26 League Phase MD8 match between Celtic and FC Utrecht at Celtic Park, on January 29, 2026, in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images)
Last night, a Celtic fan site, which I will spare naming, produced one of the most unintentionally funny pieces I have read in this entire transfer window. It suggested that, as we head into the final days, Celtic are discovering that player valuations set by selling clubs do not match what we believe those players are worth, and that this represents some kind of high-stakes game of chicken.
An eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. A test of nerve. Who blinks first.
I laughed. Not because it was clever, but because it was staggeringly divorced from reality.
You do not intimidate someone who has a gun pointed at you by pulling out a knife. And if you insist on behaving stupidly, people are entitled to mock you for it. Anyone who believes that the way Celtic conduct transfer business represents strategy, rather than ritualised self-harm, has a very loose grasp of what the word strategy means.
The most astonishing thing about this framing is that it ignores the most basic fact of the transfer market. The closer you get to the end of a window, the more power shifts to the selling club. This is not controversial. It is not clever insight. It is Transfer Market 101. And yet here we are, with people still pretending that Celtic are somehow dictating terms.
Four weeks ago, myself and others in fan media accurately predicted exactly what would happen. Prices would rise as the window closed. Clubs would become less flexible. Sellers would squeeze buyers who were advertising need. You would have to be wilfully dense not to understand that dynamic by now.
Add to that the reality that Celtic sit on more than £70 million in the bank, a fact we have boasted about, and the picture becomes even clearer. No club is going to entertain a “value” argument from a buyer swimming in cash.
Every negotiation starts a million higher simply because that money exists. Every selling club, every agent and sporting director knows it.
On top of that, successive Celtic managers have publicly identified the positions they need strengthened. Loudly. Repeatedly.
That is not a criticism of the managers; it is an indictment of the people who forced them to do it. But it does mean that sellers know exactly where the pressure points are. They know our need to buy exceeds their need to sell. And in any market, that means you pay over the odds or you walk away.
The idea that Celtic are “waiting to see who blinks” in these circumstances is nonsense. There is no staring contest. If you wait for the other guy to back down, you will be waiting forever … and of course, the ticking clock in the background means we don’t have time to mess about, which is another thing the selling club knows full well.
What Celtic do at the end of transfer windows increasingly resembles an apocalypse drama trope. The survivors arrive at a compound looking for medicine. They try to barter. But unless they have something the compound needs, there is no negotiation. One side has leverage. The other has desperation. Try playing eyeball to eyeball in that situation; your travelling party will be dropping like flies before the other side gives an inch.
Take the lad at Frosinone. If a player is valued at £4 million, Celtic are not getting him for £4 million in the final week of the window.
They are getting quoted £6 million because the seller can.
They know that as long as someone meets their £4 million valuation eventually Celtic walking away doesn’t harm them one bit and if we do decide to pay what they want, in the very last hours of the window, they win anyway.
There is no victory here for us. There is no bluff to call and no stare-down to win. We cannot barter from a position of weakness, and everyone in the market knows it.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable part.
For years, many of us rejected the idea that people inside Celtic were deliberately sabotaging us. I did. Repeatedly. I dismissed it as paranoia, as emotional reasoning, as fans inventing villains when incompetence would explain enough. This season has forced a rethink, not because conspiracy suddenly feels appealing, but because incompetence on this scale no longer explains what we are watching.
This behaviour, repeated window after window, points to only two possibilities. Either the people running this club lack even a basic level of professional competence, or they have consciously chosen not to do what the situation demands. No other explanation fits the evidence.
At some point, coincidence collapses under its own weight. At some point, you have to ask whether these people actually want to win this title, or whether they have decided the cost of doing so exceeds their appetite. That is where I have ended up, reluctantly, after months of watching the same mistakes made again and again.
And let’s be clear about what does not exist.
There is no hidden genius at work here. No grand strategy revealing itself. No four-dimensional chess unfolding while the rest of us fail to keep up. To believe that, you would have to ignore everything you have seen. Every piece of evidence points the other way.
Either we are dealing with some of the most amateurish, gutless, and incompetent executives ever to run this club, or we are watching a form of wilful sabotage. Increasingly, the latter is easier to believe, because the former would require a level of unprofessionalism that is jut too implausible to be real.
Anyone at Celtic who believes this is a high-stakes poker game needs a reality check. You are holding a terrible hand. And it is madness to stake the remainder of this season, the stability of the summer, and our prospects of European football next year on a lousy pair of fives.
To be absolutely clear: the other guy is not bluffing. He is not going to blink. And the only people being hurt by this fantasy of control are the ones who actually care about the outcome. The manager. The players. And us.
30 yrs ago celtic paid 4m quid for a player.
I will let that sink in
I resigned myself to the fact that there would be no signings this window before it opened. I think DD is in a huff because he’s been made to look stupid with his filleting of Rogers, and the fans were proved right in the summer. Rather than build bridges, we have a section of fans still excluded without any valid reason, we have a board that seem intent on burying their heads in the sand rather than admit they were wrong. The whole thing is an absolute classic cutting of the nose to spite the face. No one can be as incompetent as Nicholson appears to be and still remain employed. So this has to be by design.
I resigned myself to the fact that there would be no signings this window before it opened. I think DD is in a huff because he’s been made to look stupid with his filleting of Rogers, and the fans were proved right in the summer. Rather than build bridges, we have a section of fans still excluded without any valid reason, we have a board that seem intent on burying their heads in the sand rather than admit they were wrong. The whole thing is an absolute classic cutting off the nose to spite the face. No one can be as incompetent as Nicholson appears to be and still remain employed. So this has to be by design.
Are the figures even relevant either way when the board’s lack of ambition and lack of desire to progress or modernise eclipse everything else? £650k for our best player in my lifetime and then they shell out £4.5 Mil for Barkas! I know there’s 20 years between the two, but it’s not necessarily the fee that matters. These f***ers sit and count the money, but while they refuse to back a manager who knows the players he wants and is capable of getting them to play, we are wading through a quagmire from the opening to closing of every window. We have the money; we have the manager; we have the history; we, the fans, have the desire. Make it f***ing happen!
Yes, our board are sabotaging us, something that’s been becoming increasingly obvious since watching how we “struggled” to sign kolo toure.
A man without a club, who just needed to agree his wages, at a time when our defence was like corporal Jones from dad’s army, & what was it, 4 euro qualifying matches he missed before a deal was agreed to sign him.
It’s only when you look at it through this lens, that it’s sabotage, that everything they are doing makes perfect sense.
HH
The board hate us. They clearly dont care about celtic FC so if they can annoy us and get back at us by damaging the club then that’s exactly what they will do. They still get paid at the end of the week and their bonuses at the end of the season so why would they improve the team? If the club goes all to hell they can just move on and get law jobs or otherwise elsewhere and count the millions they’ve taken out of celtic. People keep expecting things to change and unless Nicholson and Desmond suddenly think to themselves “Actually maybe our customers have a point” nothing will. They’ll continue to resent us and regress the club because they know that’ll hurt us the most.
I dismiss completely the notion of self-sabotage as it is totally illogical. The board are no different from us and they want a successful Celtic for a couple of reasons, First and foremost right now is that success would take the spotlight away from their glaring errors and give them a bit more of a comfort zone to operate in. Secondly the team’ success I’m sure that would mean bonuses for them in their pay packets which I am assuming will be success related. Success also means we are a better prospect for sponsorship and advertising and that we will attract more investment in the Club. So, unless I am being remarkably naïve then the self-sabotage accusations are strictly for the birds.
They are simply useless, incompetent fkn barnacles, no more no less.
You have obviously not listened to Desmond ever. He is an individual who does not like yo be challenged and, whilst I’m not a psychologist, he displays narcissistic traits. He paid circa 30million for his shares, he has taken close to 8 million in dividends over the years and his shares are worth around £100 million currently. Either way he is a billionaire who at worst would not lose anything on by running the club into to ground to prove a point to disgruntled fans. Nicholson et al, will still be paid their very generous salaries so long as they kow tow and do his bidding.
This piece after the one about Bowie doesn’t make sense, you must make your mind up
A fervent ideological adherence to their financial model is the reason for their penny pinching and scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The boy sent to read out DDs dictate stated as much at the AGM.
DD sets the budget limits and it’s up to his board to work within them. That will be in their job description irrespective of our bank balance or league position.
Failure to win trophies in one year will be their failure and not the failure of the financial model,which has endured for over a dozen years with much success.Periodically it will receive surplus financial injections to boost a new manager or European push though quickly brought back within the models restraints.This is what we seen in glorious technicolor since the Jan 2025 window.
The trouble is the models success is now it’s downfall as we sit with a massive £ 77 million in the bank for the first time in our history yet in the worst league position for over 30 years.The former has created the latter as we wont spend past a set budget restraint to rectify this historically scandalous league position.
The model has given us great domestic success and the greatest financial position in our history. At the same time it has put us in the worst league position for over 30 years and put up barriers to us winning the league as we wont use its financial muscle to dig us out of this hole
To lose this league with £77 million in the bank would be worse than any in our history.It would be a deliberate decision not to spend well when there is no excuse not to. We can easily buy this title and keep £50 mil but that’s the problem with billionaires.
They keep wanting more and more money.
Why do they hate Celtic so much ?
Is there not enough hatred out there for us without our own doing it !