As Celtic struggles at the back, did we make a multi-million pound mistake?

Sometimes football decisions come back to haunt you, and Gustaf Lagerbielke is beginning to look like a very good example of exactly that.

Celtic allowed him to leave for just £2.2 million, and looking at the defensive problems we have now, that decision is becoming harder to defend.

I am not suggesting Lagerbielke was the answer to every problem at Celtic. I am not pretending he would suddenly have transformed this defence into the best in Scotland. But we should look at what actually happened.

He arrived from Elfsborg in 2023 and never really received the extended run of games that a centre-back often needs. Under Brendan Rodgers, he made only seven Scottish Premiership appearances.

Yet in his first 404 minutes of league football for Celtic, the team conceded just one goal and kept five clean sheets in his first six appearances.

That is not an insignificant start.

Of course football is not mathematics. Opposition matters. Partnerships matter. Tactical systems matter. Individual performances matter.

But if a defender is playing in a team which is consistently keeping clean sheets, surely he deserves more than a handful of opportunities before a final judgement is made.

Instead, Lagerbielke slipped down the pecking order and Celtic eventually sold him to Braga for £2.2 million.

That is where the story becomes much more interesting.

Lagerbielke has established himself as a regular in Portugal and has started 31 of his 33 Liga Portugal appearances for Braga.

That is not somebody surviving on the fringes.

That is a player his manager trusts.

This season he has continued to play regularly, and Braga have kept five clean sheets in his eight appearances in all competitions. In their recent 1-0 victory over Estoril, he won 11 of his 12 duels and completed 91 per cent of his passes.

That contrast with Celtic is difficult to ignore.

We are currently talking about defensive instability, centre-back partnerships and the lack of control at the back. Braga, meanwhile, are getting regular performances from a defender Celtic decided was surplus to requirements.

That does not automatically prove Celtic were wrong to sell him. But it certainly makes the decision worth examining again.

And this is also why some fairness is required towards Martin O’Neill.

He did not create this problem. O’Neill inherited Cameron Carter-Vickers, Auston Trusty and Liam Scales as the senior centre-back options. He did not get the opportunity to rebuild that part of the squad properly.

Seven goals conceded in the last three matches is not good enough for Celtic, regardless of the opposition or formation.

If we keep defending like that, every game becomes harder than it should be.

And that is exactly why the Lagerbielke story is frustrating. A player who might have given Celtic another option was gone before O’Neill returned, and the question now is whether we ever really discovered what kind of player he could have become here.

I do not think we did. Centre-backs need rhythm. They need partnerships. They need confidence. They need to know that one mistake will not automatically send them back to the bench.

If you play a defender for a few matches, drop him, bring him back, change his partner and then decide he is not good enough, you may never actually find out what you have.

Lagerbielke’s career since leaving Celtic makes that question impossible to ignore.

He has gone from being somebody Celtic were prepared to sell for £2.2 million to a defender who starts almost every week for Braga.

Maybe that is development. Maybe the move suited him better. Maybe Braga found a system which gets more from him.

Or perhaps he was always capable of more than Celtic saw because another club was willing to trust him for long enough to find out.

That is the part Celtic should learn from. From an English-teacher perspective, the important word here is patience.

Celtic cannot keep treating players as disposable assets before they have genuinely been given the opportunity to develop. A footballer can look ordinary in one environment and become extremely valuable in another.

Lagerbielke may be one of those players.

This is not about rewriting history and pretending he was world class. He had weaknesses, and Rodgers obviously saw things in training and matches which influenced his judgement.

But football decisions have consequences.

And when Celtic are searching for defensive stability while Lagerbielke is becoming an established player at Braga, that £2.2 million sale looks increasingly questionable.

The biggest lesson may not even be about Lagerbielke specifically.

It may be about how quickly Celtic make decisions on players who have barely been given time to settle.

Sometimes the mistake is not buying the wrong player.

Sometimes the mistake is giving up on the right one too early.

And right now, watching Lagerbielke become almost undroppable in Portugal while Celtic struggle at the back, it is difficult not to wonder whether that is exactly what happened here.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.