How to blow the feel good factor

Critical Bill gives his view on the January transfer window

In the penultimate scene of David Cronenburg’s History of Violence, William Hurt orders his heavies to immediately murder Viggo Mortenson who is sitting across from his desk. Despite being in a seemingly inescapable position, Mortenson overpowers and fatally wounds the men trying to kill him. An astonished Hurt then screams at his dying henchmen, “How did you f*** that up !!!”.?

At the start of the January transfer window I was unusually optimistic. I was told deals were lined up and we would emerge stronger than we were in December. Europe, the League Cup, the League, in fact everything appeared to be going as we want it. Even a bad defeat at Ibrox wasn’t the end of the world. Everything was in place to improve the team. We have £80M plus in the bank, we couldn’t fail this time, could we ? So my question to Michael Nicholson and the Celtic board today is simple – “How did you f*** that up !!!”?

Look at the position we were in at the beginning of the year. The League Cup secured. A double digit lead in the league. European football almost a certainty in February, (which has proved to be the case) three home cup ties since the start of the season which saw crowds of 50,000 plus. Money has poured into the club.

And the end result? At the very best we have stood still in this window. If Jota comes close to his old form then we have improved the wide areas. I’m pleased Tierney is coming back for next season but Schlupp is a fairly uninspiring stop gap (somebody who hasn’t actually played left back in a long while) and when Taylor leaves in the summer another left back will have to be found. It couldn’t have come as a surprise with regards to Valle leaving and Arsenal not playing ball over releasing Tierney early, so why were we scrabbling about in the bargain bin come the last hours of the window ?

However being unable to replace Kyogo is as bad a failure of any previous transfer period and I’m including Peter Lawwell’s Willo Flood spectacular. It is inexcusable. It has let both the manager and the support (who have backed this team considerably with their own cash) down terribly and makes us look absolutely amateurish when it comes to transfer dealing.

I have no issue with us selling the Japanese striker. It’s been pretty obvious with the speculation surrounding him since the summer and a change of agents that he had itchy feet. Cashing in on him makes perfect sense especially given his age but with one rather major proviso. You have somebody lined up to step into his shoes. At the end of the summer 2018 window, we took the cash for Dembele without a replacement. We are now an Adam Idah injury away from repeating the “Mikey Johnston at Ibrox” situation. And if Idah does get injured, then our transfer dealings this past will have left us with a worse position than we were in at the end of last year. Think about that.

How we handled the Dembele transfer 6 and a half years ago was ridiculous. But the Kyogo transfer is even worse – we had so much to time to line up and sign another striker. Therefore to have ended the window with nobody is even shocking for somebody like me who has little faith in those currently in the Celtic boardroom.

We had bids for Kvistgaarden and Sondre Ørjasæter. Yet we decided not meet the respective club’s valuation. I am merely stating the bleedin’ obvious that this should have been discovered long before the start of February. Does anybody think those valuations are going to get lower? Ørjasæter will be in mid-season come the next transfer window, whilst if Kvistgaarden’s scoring record continues his price isn’t going to drop and he will end up in a bigger league (We could have signed the Dane 18 months ago for far lower than what we were bidding for this past month but decided against it)

This shows why there has to be doubts have to be raised about Michael Nicholson and his suitability for the job. Because we are not in a big league, we need to move nimbly and quickly when it come to getting players in. Nicholson’s inability to make decisions whilst constantly appearing to be looking over his shoulder means that this appears to be beyond him. He dithers, prevaricates and takes too long to make his next move. In the summer he hesitated over a loan to buy deal with Mahamadou Diawara and Lyon. By the time he finally agreed to Lyon’s terms, the French team had already reached their limit of players out on loan.

He strikes me as a boardroom equivalent of Yang Hyun-Jun. The Korean is likeable enough, has some skills but completely lacks the character to carry out the role he has been given. He gets nervous, becomes unsure of what to do, looks over his shoulder and then passes the ball backwards. For our Chief `Exec just substitute the phrase "and then the deals fall through" for the last part. Neither appears to have the mentality for their respective roles at Celtic. An opinion which I would love for them to go out and prove me wrong.

We should NOT have a CEO that appears to be asking a non-Exec director (Desmond) if its OK to spend money – what else was the Dublin trip ? Having a former CEO of two decades as Chairman does not help either - particularly if it comes to bringing anyone in who wants to change the dysfunctional set up that he has been the chief architect of. This state of affairs in the boardroom is even further undermined when – as a recent Graham Spiers podcast publicly revealed – a director is briefing against the manager to journalists.

I don’t believe that the Chairman is the unseen hand making decisions – if it was, Brendan Rodgers would NOT be Celtic manager. But the culture he created still pervades through the club. Those mocking what we paid for Engels and Idah should be aware that if we had conducted our business properly we could have both players for a combined total of £7M less than what we actually paid. However our inability to pull the trigger on transfers quickly enough resulted in paying far more than we should have. None the less, what we spend on individual players has to increase. The price of good players is going up. If we are selling players for £25M then we should be looking to replace them with players at £8M to £12M. that’s the market we should be in. And we have to accept it. Shaking our heads and shouting like Calimero that it’s an injustice achieves the square root of zero

Over the years we have mastered the art of selling a player. But it’s also true to say that when it comes to signing players we are stuck in an archaic management set up that results in massively sub-standard transfer windows. We should have a football department with scouts who know how to identify players, taking their reports to a director of football who works with the manager to decide on which players to sign and then to go out and secure the deals. Scouting is clearly an issue. Look how many players we are signing that have a previous relationship to Rodgers or who he is identifying. The scouting network and Rodgers are clearly not on the same page. But that by itself doesn’t explain why nearly every window we are scrabbling about to sign players (plural) at the very end of the month in a way that other clubs (think Brugges, Feyenoord etc..) do not.

And history tell us two things. That scrabbling about the in the final hours of a window rarely works – think Toljan, Bauer, Kenny, Scepovic, Bangura, Abildgaard, Mulumbu etc.. And walking away from deals over chump change regularly sees the cheaper alternative costing us more as we then ship them out at a loss. This year, we coveted Danish centre half Tobias Slotsager but wouldn’t pay his club a fee as we wanted to sign him out of contract in the summer. He joined Verona this week. Getting a right sided centre half in the summer will doubtless cost us more. This is a microcosm of how we are run. Save a penny, waste a pound.

This summer we will have qualifiers (assuming we win the league) to get into the league stage of the CL. As well as striker, we will need in all likelihood need to find replacements for Hatate, Kuhn, Schlupp (assuming he doesn’t stay and Tierney is Taylor’s replacement) and a right sided centre half if we can finally get Nawrocki off the books or at least to another club. That’s a heck of a lot of business to get done before August and I have zero faith in the ability of those who run Celtic to carry it out. Now the opinion of ordinary punters like me doesn’t of course mean a damn but do you think that Rodgers is going to hang about after his contract expires. Would any aspiring manager – looking at how we handled this window – fancy the Celtic job ?

We cannot keep having transfer windows where we either standstill or go backwards. In 2023 we signed 12 players. Only Bernardo and Idah have any real long term future at Celtic. Iwata, Kobiyashi, Tillio, Oh, Kwon, Lagerbielke, Palma, Holm have either left or are out on loan with no real future at the club. We tried to sell Nawrocki this past month and would have been receptive for a loan deal on Yang. Mark Lawwell correctly paid for that with his job. Surely questions have to be asked at those responsible for the past month and a window that saw us yet again fail to move from a position of strength and left us with a lot of work to do to get ready for qualifiers next season.

For years, some of us have been saying that how the club functions needs looked at. We sit on an ever increasing pile of cash gathering dust in the bank. HMRC will be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of tax on the profits we make. Supporters on the other hand can only dream of what we could be if we only knew how to spend it properly.