CELTIC have made a £500,000 bid for Inverness Caley Thistle midfielder Ryan Christie.
And the Hoops are willing to loan the 20-year-old back to their Premiership rivals until the end of the season.
Boss John Hughes said: “We have to do what’s right for Inverness.
“We are a selling club, no doubt about that, and we would never step in anybody’s way. It would be the same with Ryan Christie.
“But, at the moment, he’s under contract to Inverness and long may that continue.
“The ideal scenario would be, if he ever did move, we would try to keep him here just to buy ourselves some time and keep that quality at the club.”
Hughes admitted he expects clubs around the country, including England, to be “sniffing about him”.Christie, whose contract runs until May 2016 with a year’s option, has already played for Scotland Under-21s and his manager has tipped him to win senior caps in the future.
The Inverness-born player is the son of former Caley Thistle manager and player Charlie Christie, who appeared in a handful of first team games for Celtic in the eighties.
Christie scored for Thistle in their 4-2 defeat at Parkhead earlier in the month.
News first broke on this transfer earlier this morning, when it was posted by a contributor on Celtic Quick News.
