Scottish football, as ever, is full of rumour and counter-rumour. There is no real way of knowing which stories are true and which are false, and the only way we are ultimately going to find out is when the window closes and we see the state of this Celtic team.
Obviously, there has been a lot flying around tonight about Gvidas Gineitis, the Lithuanian midfielder at Torino.
Depending on which report you believe, Celtic either made a bid and did not reach the valuation, are preparing another bid, agreed terms with the player, did not agree terms with the player, or are still somewhere in the middle of the whole damned thing. Italian reports say negotiations remain active and that Celtic is preparing a final offer, while other reports have suggested a deal in the region of £9 million could yet be done.
It is a mess. Whatever the truth of that particular story is, one thing is clear: Celtic supporters now expect a blue-chip signing before this window closes.
I mean a major player brought to the club on a permanent deal, someone who answers at least some of the unanswered questions about how we have conducted our business this summer.
Tomorrow I am going to write about the difference between the transfer window we have actually had and the transfer window we should have had, because the consequences of that go far beyond simply losing Champions League revenue. But tonight, the immediate issue is much simpler.
Before the latest outgoing deals, Celtic was already sitting on a transfer-trading surplus in the region of £8 million. Since then, Johnny Kenny has gone to Preston for a reported £3 million and Reo Hatate has joined Burnley for around £6.5 million plus add-ons. That is another £9.5 million or thereabouts coming into the club.
So, we are now looking at something approaching an £18 million transfer surplus before any further business is completed.
This board cannot sit on that kind of surplus, fill gaps with loan deals and cheaper options and then tell us the job is done.
Fans will not accept that. The manager should not accept that. Nobody should accept that.
The money Celtic has brought in over the course of this window vastly exceeds what has gone back out in permanent transfer fees, and not to spend a meaningful amount of that surplus on another serious player would be a betrayal of everyone who has put money into this club over the summer.
I cannot put it more bluntly than that.
Because what it would effectively do is ask supporters and the manager to pay the price for the board’s own failure to do enough to secure Champions League football.
Even if that Champions League money had arrived, I am not convinced the people running the club would suddenly have pushed the boat out. We will never know. What we can judge is the window we actually got, and the unseemly scramble of the last 24 hours cannot end without something that resembles a statement of intent.
Everyone knows I was prepared to come out of this window broadly satisfied with the business if the remaining deals were completed. My biggest complaint has always been the speed at which Celtic moved and the failure to bring in enough significant players before the Champions League games which mattered most.
We had a 4-0 aggregate lead against LASK. Does anyone seriously believe that having another defensive midfielder, another full-back or simply a deeper squad would have made no difference whatsoever to our chances of seeing that tie out?
The blame for that failure lies with the current executive structure. But after bringing in another £9 million to £10 million in transfer income over the last 24 hours, the expectation among supporters that some of that money will now be reinvested is entirely reasonable.
If it is not, then the fans have been screwed again and the manager has been screwed again. This window will then be remembered less for what Celtic did than for what Celtic refused to do. It will not matter whether the people in the boardroom think that judgement is fair. The perception of a club which once again puts the balance sheet ahead of the team sheet will be impossible to shake off.
And let us be blunt about something else.
We all know that charge has substance.
We all know that the characterisation of Celtic as a club more interested in protecting money than in giving the manager every tool he needs has not been invented out of thin air. There is nothing outrageous about saying it. The club’s own behaviour has created that perception over years.
This club owes the supporters and the manager something after the way this summer has unfolded.
It owes us a finish to this window which allows us to look at the squad and say, right, this is what all the waiting was about. This is what the chaos was supposed to produce. We have emerged stronger and better equipped because of it.
There are still holes all over this team.
Even if you do not think Celtic needs another midfielder, there are still questions at left wing, central defence and left-back. Depending on what happens with the final full-back business, there may still be issues on the right as well.
You cannot leave that many obvious weaknesses unresolved while sitting on a mountain of transfer profit.
Celtic has Europa League tickets to sell. It has season-ticket holders who have already put their money in. It has supporters buying merchandise, hospitality and everything else the club sells. It has to look as though it gives a shit.
Even the perception that the club has not tried everything possible to build the strongest squad it reasonably can would wreck further devastation on its relationship with the supporters after everything that has already happened this summer.
I do not know how many times I have warned on this site about the damage caused by negative perception.
The remarkable thing is that Celtic does not have to perform some great act of public relations to avoid it. It merely has to do the right thing.
But if the club was deliberately trying to arm its critics with every weapon available, I am not sure it could do much better than rake in another £10 million in transfer income and then fail to spend any meaningful portion of it.
If you wanted to create an image of dysfunction, chaos and desperate late scrambling while the bank balance continues to swell, this is exactly the picture you would paint.
As I write this, there are around five hours until the UEFA registration deadline. Scotland’s domestic window remains open until 5pm tomorrow, so Celtic has longer to make signings for domestic competition, but anything intended for the Europa League league phase needs to be done tonight.
Something big can still happen. It has to happen. Preferably before the first deadline, but absolutely before the second.
Because otherwise it will not simply be serious questions being asked about this window. After everything that has happened this summer, that would be the biggest disgrace in a long, long list of them.
Supporters will pass a devastating verdict on it, one which will once again be characterised by profits swelling in the bank while the sands of what might have been dribble through our hands.
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James what will decide how the supporters feel about this transfer window is how successful the new signings will be. If they lose out in the pursuit of Gineitas, then it will be a disappointment and another failure of our super duper negotiators, but there will be enough new faces to distract the support from that failure, and any large scale criticism will only come if there is failure on the park.
We have signed some exciting players, now the question is, can MON and his coaches weld them into a well functioning unit, lets hope they can.
I still can’t believe we failed to sign Saracchi to cover for Tierney.
The elephant in the room is the Ian Bankier process.
A player signed for x millions is an asset.
That said, it is written off after 3 years, much like a company car.
Whatever the club gets for the player after that is clear profit.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Your point??
Good piece james , this fkin board let us down at every turn ,hate the bastards, always want profit , hope when they eventually go ,they never darken the doors of our stadium ever again , lifetime bans all round , never celtic fans anyway , just thieves
James very good read…..but no way is our stinking board going to spend anything resembling serious money in the next couple of hours, they got nearly 10 million for Kenny and Hatate and Desmond, Nicholson and Co. are probably rubbing their hands together patting each other on the back and congratulating each other on a job well done. Scumbags the lot of them
James, you appear to misunderstand the nature of a player trading model, which is what we have attempted to follow over a good many years now. Where such a model is successful it logically leads to a trading surplus on transfers. Not all of that surplus can be reinvested in the squad otherwise we would end up with a very bloated or an unjustifiably expensive (in the context of Scottish football) squad. The surplus cash should be invested in improving Celtic to be the best the club can be (investing in the infrastructure around the ground, the academy, etc) and not sat in a bank account.
The board don’t appear to have the vision to invest productively for the future of the club and for that reason alone they should be held to account and replaced.
As an aside, Scotland uncoupling itself from the transfer deadline of the big 5 leagues is a positive development and I think will allow for deals to happen that in the past might have been to difficult in the frenzy of the big leagues doing their big deals – a sad but true reflection of our position in the food chain.
The money isn’t the problem, the problem is/was having the money while the squad is weak or while the stadium needs fixed. Now we’ve signed a lot of players, it’s a rebuild of midfield and attack and I’m glad it was O’Niell who done it. It remains to be seen how good they all turn out but he’s got a squad to work with. The short term deals give the new manager next season a chance to put his stamp on the team and while I don’t like developing Chelsea’s players with no option to buy, they will probably both be very talented and useful to us this season. Mheuka looked sharp and MON praised his attitude , he’s exciting. I’m not disappointed about Gineitis and I don’t suddenly believe in the board’s wisdom but we can make a big signing in January too if required. Let’s make some plans for the stadium.
“.. I don’t like developing Chelsea’s players with no option to buy,”
Me neither but as we witnessed with Saracchi the “option to buy” is irrelevant when we have a Board like the one we have. Also, someone on another thread stated that the fella Gineitis was just being dangled in front of us while we pursued loan deals. I think he is 100% correct. The parasites on our Board had absolutely no intention of closing that deal.
T
There are three things in this World that you can depend on….Death, Taxes and the Celtic board fucking things up. However at the end of the day, there is no point crying over spilled milk, we have got what we have got and we need to get on with it. Yes, we should still be in the Champions League and that is a big disappointment, but we still have a season to look forward to that may bring the rewards that Season Ticket holders invested in. We have some exciting new players and the signs are encouraging for the coming season no matter how we ended up in this position. Onwards and upwards!
Keep the faith, and we will be true to thee till death!