Frosinone can’t blame Celtic for their own transfer screw-up.

It is a rare thing indeed that you will find me on here praising Celtic’s transfer policy. But in light of what has happened elsewhere, that is exactly what I am about to do. Not the policy when it comes to signing players. God knows I have said enough about that.

I am talking about the policy when it comes to selling them, and more generally knowing when a negotiation has reached the point where there is no value in continuing. In that regard, Celtic have outshone the Ibrox club quite comfortably this summer.

They have also outshone Frosinone, which is interesting because we spent months negotiating with the Italian club over Farès Ghedjemis and, in the end, the whole thing played out almost exactly as I expected it would.

Celtic had been interested in the Algerian winger since at least January. He was one of the major attacking targets going into the summer, and there was clearly serious interest in getting a deal done.

In the end, we moved for Haissem Hassan instead. Nobody should have any regrets about that in the long term if Hassan develops the way we hope he will. That does not mean Ghedjemis is not a good player.

He is. The problem was that Frosinone were simply bad at selling him.

Their position always seemed to be that Celtic, or somebody else, would eventually meet the valuation if they simply held firm for long enough. That is not negotiation. That is waiting for somebody to surrender.

And Celtic did not.

According to reports at the time, Frosinone valued Ghedjemis at around £8 million, while Celtic’s interest dated back to January and was revived again during the summer. The Ibrox club were also linked with him, while Monaco were among the other clubs reported to have shown interest.

The crucial thing is what Celtic did when it became obvious that there was no sensible middle ground. We walked. Then we signed somebody else.

That is how this is supposed to work.

You negotiate while there is a realistic prospect of agreement. When it becomes clear that agreement is not coming, you stop wasting time and move to the next target. Had Celtic shown that same decisiveness across the whole range of our summer business, it would have been a much better window.

But in this particular case, we did exactly the right thing.

Frosinone, on the other hand, seemed determined to make every mistake available to them. They started from a valuation high enough to limit the number of serious buyers. Then came the oldest trick in the book. “Other clubs are interested.”

There is competition. You had better move quickly. And, conveniently enough, one of the clubs supposedly interested was the Ibrox club.

Did I believe they were seriously preparing to spend the kind of money Frosinone wanted for Ghedjemis? No. I did not believe it then and I still do not. But invoking them was a useful lever. Or at least Frosinone clearly thought it might be.

The mistake was that they completely misjudged the club they were dealing with.

Whatever else you want to say about Celtic’s negotiating style, and I have complained about it often and loudly, this board does not scare easily when somebody tries to manufacture an auction. They do not suddenly throw another million pounds on the table because somebody whispers “Ibrox”.

They did not move. They did not panic. They did not believe they were about to lose the player to our rivals. And they were not going to be spooked into paying one penny more than they had decided he was worth.

Normally, that stubbornness drives me insane.

In this case, it was exactly right. If we had ended the window without a right-sided attacking player, I would have been furious. But we did not. We moved on and signed Hassan. That changes the whole complexion of the decision.

You can walk away from a negotiation only if you have somewhere else to go.

Celtic did. Frosinone apparently did not.

I remain convinced that the attempt to introduce the Ibrox club into the equation helped push Celtic towards the exit. Whether that was actually the decisive moment, only the people in the room know. But the broader lesson stands.

If you try to create pressure in a negotiation, you had better be certain you actually have leverage. Otherwise, you are simply giving your best customer a reason to leave.

The comparison I used at the time was the Hitler Diaries affair.

Stern, the German publishing group, believed it could use competing media interest to create an auction around the supposed diaries. Rupert Murdoch was not interested in being manipulated like that. He walked.

Newsweek, believing it had also been played, walked too. Suddenly Stern found itself with considerably less leverage than it thought it had.

When Murdoch returned, he was negotiating from a completely different position. The point was not the Hitler Diaries themselves. The point was what happens when a seller mistakes imagined competition for real competition.

Trying to play buyers against each other can work beautifully when you actually have several buyers prepared to pay. It becomes much more dangerous when one of them is doing most of the serious bidding.

That always seemed to me to be the problem with Ghedjemis.

Celtic looked like the club most likely to get somewhere close to Frosinone’s valuation. We were never going to pay whatever they demanded. But we appeared to be one of the few serious buyers sitting at the table.

Once we walked away, the market suddenly looked much thinner. Monaco were linked and other interest was reported, but no deal materialised, and Ghedjemis remained at Frosinone into the new season. Their club, bizarrely, is blaming the conduct of the interested parties rather than themselves, for what was their own fault.

I do not know how they can blame Celtic. Nor Monaco. If you set the price, refuse to move and the market does not meet it, that is your decision. You cannot later complain that buyers failed to behave the way you wanted them to.

And this is where the comparison with the Ibrox club becomes irresistible.

Because they have spent much of the summer making exactly the same mistake with their own players. They kept attaching enormous values to footballers and then behaved as though merely repeating those valuations would eventually make somebody pay them. Nicolas Raskin is the most obvious example.

Thelo Aasgaard is another. Connor Barron was talked up relentlessly. Youssef Chermiti became the most dramatic case of all, because a reported £22 million offer from Galatasaray was rejected before he suffered a serious ACL injury. It demonstrates the risk in believing that today’s valuation will still be sitting there tomorrow.

But you have to get lucky for that to happen. Players lose form. Players get injured. Buyers move on. Markets close. Circumstances change. A valuation only becomes real when somebody is prepared to pay it. Everything else is chat.

And let me say what is surely obvious; the minute your club goes out of Europe altogether, there’s no leverage to use. Everyone knows there’s a major dent in the balance sheet at that point and nobody is paying you major money anymore.

Thelo Aasgaard was eventually sent to Anderlecht on a £1 million loan with an option to buy reportedly worth £5 million. That is a long way from the kind of grand transfer narrative which had surrounded some of these players. Raskin nearly went out on loan too.

But this is a club which badly needs income. This is a club which has spent heavily. It is not negotiating from the position of strength it seems to imagine it is.

How many times have we said they are simply not very good at this stuff? Part of the problem is their obsession with headline transfer values, and in particular the sort of fees that we get. They look at what Celtic gets for players and seem to assume their own assets should automatically command something similar.

The Raskin discussion has often carried that flavour. Celtic got serious money for Arne Engels, therefore Raskin should bring serious money too. Why? They are not the same player. They are not being sold by the same club. They do not carry the same development story. They do not come with the same market confidence behind them.

Celtic has built a reputation over many years for buying players, improving them and selling them successfully. The Ibrox club does not have that same track record.

You cannot simply announce that your player is worth what Celtic’s player was worth and expect the market to salute.

The market decides. That is why what Celtic did in the final hours of this window must have hurt them. We were able to bring in millions more from Johnny Kenny and Reo Hatate.

God knows it pissed enough of us off that the club did not then spend anything like enough of that incoming money. That criticism still stands. But selling players well and reinvesting badly are two different issues.

Celtic knows how to sell footballers. That is simply true. The Ibrox club, far too often, seems to confuse valuation with value.

It puts a huge number next to a player’s name and waits for somebody to validate it. It is as if they don’t understand the market in front of them.

But you need to know when you have leverage and when you do not. You need to know when to hold on to a player and when to sell.

And, crucially, you also have to know when to walk away.

Celtic got that right with Ghedjemis. Frosinone did not. Celtic has also got it right more often than not when selling its own players. The Ibrox club still seems to believe that following Celtic’s headline numbers is the same thing as following Celtic’s strategy.

It is not. The strategy is not “ask for £20 million”. The strategy is creating a player somebody actually wants to pay £20 million for.

That is the part they keep missing.

It’s the part the Italians at Frosinone missed as well.

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