Following his excellent first half performance for Scotland tonight, Kieron Bowie will once again be in the news and people will be talking about him.
That is right. They should be.
Celtic supporters should look at Bowie and think about the road not taken, because it is increasingly obvious that he was exactly what so many of us thought he was when Celtic were first linked with him: a player of real potential who was always going to get better in a stronger environment.
Bowie is an excellent footballer. You can see it immediately.
He is strong, aggressive, quick and direct. He has good instincts and a physical edge which makes him difficult to handle. He plays with the kind of determination supporters respond to.
But when Celtic were trying to sign him, he was still playing for Hibs.
And at that moment Celtic did not really need a development striker.
We needed a proven front man who could come in and help save a season.
That distinction matters.
At the time, I wondered whether Bowie really had the experience required to carry a title-challenging Celtic side. I still think that was a fair question.
I still do not believe he would have arrived at Celtic and immediately cemented that position under the weight of expectation which comes with leading the line here.
He was not the finished article.
What Celtic needed then was somebody who was.
Of course, in the end, we did not sign anyone to replace Kyogo Furuhashi properly anyway, so even Bowie would have represented an improvement on doing nothing.
But that does not mean he was necessarily the right answer to the immediate problem.
The move to Italy was probably excellent for his development for precisely that reason.
He got time.
He got regular football.
He got a different tactical education.
He got the chance to play against good players without simultaneously being asked to carry the expectations of a Celtic support demanding a title.
That is exactly the environment a player like Bowie needed.
I always respected him because he had already done things the hard way.
He started lower down the game.
He scored goals consistently.
Every time he moved up a level, he showed that he could adjust.
And that is one of the things I always look for in a player.
Can his game scale?
Can he move into a better team, a tougher league or a higher level of competition and still find a way to produce?
I thought the same thing about Leigh Griffiths when he was coming through Scottish football.
Griffiths had a very obvious pattern.
He scored goals at one level.
Then he moved up.
There was a short adjustment period.
Then he started scoring again.
He moved up again.
The same thing happened.
That told you something important.
His goalscoring was not simply the product of one environment.
It travelled with him.
And I always thought Bowie had something similar in his game.
Not that he was identical to Griffiths.
He is a very different kind of striker.
But the pattern was there.
He kept moving upward.
He kept adjusting.
And he kept showing that he belonged at the next level.
The problem was always the same.
How long would that adjustment period take?
And could Celtic afford to give him that time while trying to win a league title?
At that moment, I thought the answer was probably no.
I still think that.
But that is also where the regret comes in.
Because if Celtic were ever going to sign Kieron Bowie, we had to do it before he moved into one of Europe’s top leagues.
Once that happened, the chance was effectively gone.
That is the economics of football.
You either buy the potential before everyone agrees on what the player is going to become, or you pay the premium once the uncertainty disappears.
And Celtic too often want both things.
We want the low price of the prospect and the certainty of the finished article.
Football does not work like that.
At around £6 million, I thought Bowie was expensive for Celtic at the time.
I thought we would be paying finished-player money for someone who still needed significant development.
But £6 million would not look expensive for him now.
And the problem is that you would not get him for £6 million now anyway.
That is what waiting costs you.
The moment a player establishes himself in a top-five league, his value changes.
His wages change.
His profile changes.
The clubs competing for him change.
Everything changes.
And that is why Bowie is going to become one of those players Celtic supporters look back on and think: if only.
If only we had moved sooner.
If only we had taken the risk.
If only we had trusted the trajectory.
The frustrating thing is that his trajectory was not hidden.
It was there in front of us.
He had already shown the ability to move up through levels.
He had already shown the physical tools.
He had already shown the mentality.
You could see the outline of the player he might become.
What Celtic could not see, or perhaps were unwilling to pay for, was the time required to get him there.
And now look at him.
He is increasingly involved with Scotland.
He is developing abroad.
He has become physically stronger and tactically better.
And he now looks like the kind of striker Celtic would love to have.
He would give us physicality up front.
He would give us pace.
He would give us aggression.
He would give us someone capable of unsettling defenders and getting supporters out of their seats.
In a Celtic side which creates chances, I think he would score goals.
Would he have done that immediately when we first looked at him?
Probably not.
Eventually?
I think so.
That is why this should not become another lazy story about Celtic being stupid for failing to sign him.
The decision was more complicated than that.
Celtic needed an immediate striker.
Bowie was a development signing.
Those are not always the same thing.
But the lesson should still be learned.
Because the next time a Kieron Bowie appears in Scotland, Celtic need to understand what kind of player they are looking at.
If the talent is obvious, if the trajectory is obvious and if the ability to adapt to higher levels is obvious, sometimes you have to accept the risk.
Yes, there will be a Celtic tax.
Of course there will.
Selling clubs know Celtic have money.
They know what European football can do to a player’s value.
They know what happens when a young player succeeds here.
That premium is part of the deal.
But if the talent is right, sometimes it is worth paying it.
Bowie almost certainly would have made Celtic their money back and then some.
And more importantly, we might now have the player rather than sitting here admiring what he has become somewhere else.
That is the real frustration.
Celtic do not always lose these players because we fail to identify them.
Sometimes we identify them perfectly well.
We lose them because we wait until the risk disappears.
And by the time the risk is gone, so is the opportunity.
The next time a Kieron Bowie appears in our league, Celtic need to go and get him before everyone else realises what he is becoming.
Because once everyone knows, he is already too expensive.
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A nonsense article and a rewrite of history. Of course we should have signed Bowie for our greater benefit but you damn yourself with your own words on the immediacy requirements – “we can’t afford to develop we need goals today”.
And of course there is a premium on home grown players- it’s not a Celtic Tax – every country has this (it’s largely why English players transfer for so much within the EPL – no club outside of England would pay £115m for Elliot Anderson).
Bowie could have gone into our first team and scored the goals required to win us the league last season – he was already scoring against the same teams at a lower level club. Some on here would have screamed “lack of ambition”.
The question to be asked is how do we develop our own Bowies? where is the pathway? And why can Hibs give them the chance but we are always fixated on the extreme short term?
What’s your response to the Celtic board statement? The are directly blaming the CFC saying they signed off and provided funds to facilitate the protest targeting DD today. It’s acheived nothing. I want him and the board gone, however the only way to achive this and i’ve been saying it consistantly is for supporters to stop attending games. They have to be starved out. Throwing tennis balls at a 76 year man, jeezo if the mob across the city did it we’d be laughing our heads off at them.
Beep Beep