A record fee for Matt. If the Celtic Board have any ambitions as a football club then they need to quickly reinvest it by backing Brendan Rodgers. They have less than a week to do just that…
Matt O’Riley will unfortunately soon be a Brighton player and that leaves us a big void to fill no matter how huge the financial compensation is.
The EPL side have agreed to pay the Scottish champions a record transfer fee which will be worth upwards of £30 million to the club for the Danish international, who Celtic signed for just £1.5m from MK Dons, who I believe have a sell-on clause. And as Brighton are like Celtic a development club, Celtic’s sell-on clause could make another multi-million pound return on investment a few years down the line.
However all that means nowt if we don’t act fast and reinvest all that money received for Matt, or at least a sizeable chunk of it, on a replacement. Or at least bring in two or three quality players to cushion the blow.
Our board of directors aren’t renowned for reinvesting previous big incoming fees on quality players, and it’s highly doubtful that they will break the habit of a lifetime. They got lucky somehow arriving at the decision to appoint Ange Postecoglou after blowing the ten through a ludicrous summer spending ahead of the attempt at the ten.
Even in that season, when the supporters were not allowed into the grounds due to the pandemic, Celtic supporters sold out our season tickets. Brighton fans didn’t do that, nor did Atalanta supporters. Then they stumbled their way to appointing a new manager after the Neil Lennon appointment in shower ran out of steam.
It’s wasn’t Eddie Howe who they courted for many months but now desperate, they took a massive gamble on appointing an Australian coach working in Japan who had just been knocked back by AEK Athens despite being of Greek heritage.
Ange Postecolgou arrived and funds were quickly made available – funds that were provided not by our billionaire largest shareholder but by the Celtic support in exchange for a dodgy stream service on Celtic TV. He brought in players like Jota, Matt O’Riley, Liel Abada, Gorgios Giakoumakis, Carl Starfelt, Josef Juranovic and others who all delivered on the park before being sold for serious money. With Reo Hatate next, or perhaps Kyogo the return on allowing an elite manager to spend will be approaching £100m.
It’s imperative we at least bring in three or four new faces before the window slams shut next week. It’s what is needed if we want to push on from our success last season, not just domestically, but in Europe also. It’s also what is needed to keep the elite manager we have at the moment.
Ange Postecoglou was chasing success. He wanted that at Celtic and one of his reasons was that he always wanted to manage in the Premier League. Fair play to him.
Brendan Rodgers wants to manage Celtic. He is a better development coach than Ange Postecoglou and as a genuine Celtic supporter he wants to be the Celtic manager. Yesterday he sent a coded message to the Board and to the Celtic support. This time I know how to handle it better.
As a Celtic supporter he is as frustrated as you and I. But last time he took the quick fix that was far from the easy way out and did the moonlight shuffle down to Leicester. This time Brendan will stand his ground and wants to get his way in taking Celtic forward as a team that can compete in the Champions League.
Last summer with Ange’s head turned for many months and with Brendan coming back to ‘buy in’ to the board’s brilliant strategy of turning project signings into superstars after a few months at Lennoxtown, he was given new players from all around the world. He gave them all a chance and no we have one on Australia refusing to come back basically because the boy himself knows that he’s out of his depth.
Brendan is clearing up that mess and now with players like Abada, O’Riley and maybe more leaving he wants ‘quality’ rather than punts which were selected from the boardroom or their subordinates and NOT by an elite football coach.
The club is rolling in money yet are this morning, with less than a week to go until the window closes, weaker than we were at the end of last season. They have sold out on season tickets and have a huge waiting list, supporters being denied access to their team because of the lack of ambition in re-developing the main stand at Celtic Park. Fergus who was nowhere near as wealthy as Dermot Desmond built the three stands our current status in Scottish football is built on in one year. Desmond has been around for two decades and has failed to put hot water in the toilets, never mind put 20,000 new seats into Paradise.
It’s no use staying static just because theRangers are skint and below par at the moment. Those in charge must show serious ambition to push our football club to a new level. We have the means, it’s time to utilise those means so we can all reap the rewards, by backing Brendan. He might not have signed Matt O’Riley, who was a second choice remember after that Aussie guy opted for Middlesbrough (how did that work out for you bro?), but he DEVELOPED him into a player that Celtic were able to sell for £30m.
It’s make your mind up time Michael. You failed in January and promised us you’d put that right in the summer. You have until Friday evening then we can all take stock on where we are.
The very best of luck to Matt O’Riley, once a Celt…
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