Dembele should have stayed at Celtic, and Celtic should have insisted on it.

The other day Moussa Dembélé made some rather interesting comments about Celtic when he talked about how the club never leaves you and how there is an emotional component to playing here which you only really appreciate once you have gone.

I liked everything he had to say. I also liked the fact that, for the first time, he brought some clarity to what actually went wrong between him, Brendan Rodgers and the club towards the end of his time at Celtic.

And I liked that because Dembélé was honest about what his intentions had been.

He had been told he could leave Celtic after two years. He had been told that, after that period, he would be allowed to move to a bigger league. As he saw it, that promise was not kept. I can understand why he was unhappy about that.

But perhaps, and this is just a thought, people inside Celtic assumed that his emotional connection to the club might eventually produce a change of heart.

That would have been a mistake. We all know football is a mercenary business. We all know that affection cannot be assumed to translate into loyalty. It simply does not work that way.

That is why, when Ange Postecoglou left Celtic, I did not allow it to bother me too much. I tried to take a lesson from it instead.

If the game is mercenary, then we have to be just as mercenary as the game. If these people do not believe in loyalty, there is no point obsessing over old frustrations and resentments. You make the best decision available to you and move on.

For me, that translated into one very simple choice.

If all that mattered was finding the best possible person to replace Ange, there was one candidate above every other one: Brendan Rodgers.

To my amazement, for once, the club and I were on exactly the same page.

But I have always wondered whether a genuinely cold-blooded assessment of Celtic’s transfer policy would lead us to make some of the decisions we presently make.

The point from Dembélé’s comments is that he signed for Celtic on the understanding that he would stay for only two years.

I wonder whether there was really much point in agreeing to that in the first place.

If a player is genuinely going to hold the club to a demand like that, then I am not sure I want Celtic agreeing to it, no matter how good the player is.

Because there is a difference between being mercenary and allowing everybody else to see you as mercenary. There is an even bigger difference between being a club which buys and sells players intelligently and one which openly allows itself to be used as a stepping stone.

That is the only thing that bothered me about Dembélé’s comments. I understood them. I respected him for being honest. But Celtic should never have signed him on that condition.

For far too long, this club has behaved like this towards players. We have given them the rights and the leverage instead of keeping enough of it for ourselves. Yes, we have to be mercenary. But being mercenary means looking after our interests first.

I know some people will argue that we are never going to attract players like Dembélé unless we do things their way. I do not believe that is necessarily true.

There was surely a middle ground. We gave him a stage. We gave him European football. We gave him the opportunity to develop, win trophies, score huge goals and put himself in front of clubs from the major leagues.

Telling him that we would eventually allow him to leave for a bigger league was one thing.

Allowing him to dictate the timetable was something else entirely. I loved the big guy. We should never have let him away with that.

Too much of modern Celtic’s transfer business seems to be built around the idea that when a player decides his time at the club is finished, the club acts accordingly.

I always thought it was supposed to be Celtic who decided when a player’s time was up.

If a serious bid comes in, and it arrives at a time which suits us, after we have made our preparations and got our own ducks in a row, then fine. There is no reason to stand in the player’s way, especially when substantial money is involved.

That is what eventually happened with Dembélé. And I do not want this to sound like criticism of the service he gave us, because it was exemplary. He scored huge goals in huge games. He was central to some magnificent moments. When he left, Celtic made a vast profit on what we had paid for him.

That is good business in anybody’s language.

Whatever regrets exist about the way it ended, the transfer itself was good business.

But the principle at the heart of it still bothers me.

That little period between the start of the season and his acrimonious departure on the final day of the window should never have happened.

Celtic should never have agreed to a hard two-year window in the first place, and Dembélé, for his part, should have been professional enough to stay if the move was not right for Celtic at that moment, work hard, keep scoring goals and continue delivering on the pitch.

In the end, I think he left Celtic too early for his own benefit. He left when he was still an unpolished gem, not when he was the finished article. The club he went to expected something closer to the finished article, and they did not get it.

A player with that much talent should have had a career at the very top of the European game. He should have been playing in one of the major leagues for a Champions League-level side and doing it every week.

Instead, his career eventually took him to Saudi Arabia while he was still in what should have been some of his best footballing years.

Mistakes were made? Oh, you better believe it.

On Celtic’s side, the mistake was giving him that two-year window. On Dembélé’s side, the mistake was believing those two years had made him ready.

They had not. He needed another year, perhaps another two, playing regular football, playing European football, testing himself against good sides and continuing to refine his game. That is where the fantasy you sometimes hear around Scottish football falls apart.

You do not go from the Scottish Premiership straight into the Real Madrid first team because you have had a handful of excellent games and somebody in the press has decided you are a world-beater. That is not merely a step up in class. It is an entirely different playing field.

Dembélé should perhaps have been more conscious of that.

The big man will always have my thanks and my deepest appreciation for what he did in a Celtic shirt. But he should have given us more, and Celtic should have been prepared to dig in our heels and get more out of him.

The money was nice. Rodgers did not get to spend much of it, but it certainly looked good sitting in the bank.

And that brings us to the part of this which has always bothered me most about Celtic’s transfer policy. It is about downsizing.

Over and over again, that is what we do.

We sell the £20 million player and replace him with the £2 million player. Then we congratulate ourselves on the profit.

And more pathetic still is the framework Celtic has constructed around itself over the years, where we increasingly present ourselves as a small provincial club which talented players can use as a stepping stone towards something bigger.

Why? Why should Celtic sell itself that way?

Why should we begin negotiations by telling talented young footballers that the most attractive thing about playing here is how quickly they might be able to leave?

Of course, players will move on. Of course, some of them will eventually outgrow Scottish football. Of course, Celtic should make huge profits when the right offer comes along.

But the decision over when that happens has to serve Celtic too.

We should be telling players that this club will develop them, give them European football, give them trophies, give them huge matches and give them a stage few clubs anywhere can match. And when the time is right for both sides, we will talk.

That is what went wrong with Dembélé. Not some falling-out between a manager and a player. The policy itself created the conditions for the problem.

And until Celtic stops thinking of itself as a stepping stone and starts behaving like a serious football club which protects its own interests first, we will keep having versions of the same problem over and over again.

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