There should be lessons for Celtic from what happened to three forwards who started last month playing in Belgium. Anderlecht’s Kasper Dolberg seemed to be on the hook for a move to Celtic, but he was a player in demand. That has consequences.
Kasper and his agent knew that players in demand often receive bids late in the window. Why would they move before everyone has shown their hand? While Celtic tried to get the deal over the line, Ajax moved in with an offer. The player had a choice and chose to go back to the Netherlands. This is not an exception, players will often make choices like this rather than come to Scotland.
Michel-Ange Balikwisha had a good season at Royal Antwerp. With a deal to Celtic in the offing, Balikwisha’s agent had a duty to offer him everywhere north of Scottish football in the food chain. We can assume that Michel-Ange had little prospect of a bite, so signed with Celtic.
The lesson: try to recruit top players with years’ experience in highly scouted leagues and you will often fail. If they have offers from better leagues, they will go there rather than come to Scotland.
A year after Genk paid Celtic £2.4m for Hyeon-gyu Oh, he was subject to a €28m bid from Stuttgart. Reports on why the deal fell through are vague: a medical issue was reported, promoting Stuttgart to reduce their offer to €20m, which Genk declined.
There are so many lessons from Hyeon-gyu Oh’s year in Belgium it is painful to go over them. We had a player in the building who did not get the development support at Celtic which was available to him at Genk. Adam Idah was the recipient of that help, which resulted his sale on Monday for a £2m loss. You can get recruitment perfect, but if you don’t get development right, you are wasting your time.
If we want a striker who Stuttgart are prepared to pay around €20m for, we will not find them in Belgium. Recruitment is difficult, requires proper resourcing and absolutely cannot be done well working the agent circuit.
Scottish football is about to get a lesson on how it’s done by Tony Bloom’s Hearts. If we persist in trying to sign top strikers from Anderlecht, they will soon overtake us.
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well, well.
ave ave
Atleast something’s going my way?
Ave Ave
Aiple, Aiple, wherefore art thou Aiple?
Ave Ave
Have the happy clappers and bed wetters come to a truce and agreed npt to post?
Ave Ave
Paul, IF Celtic had paid the asking price for Kasper at first opportunity, what were the chances of that bid being accepted and the deal done BEFORE new dogs on the street arrived?
Ave Ave
This is key for me “While Celtic tried to get the deal over the line”
Hopefully we review the what, when and how much.
Lessons must be learned.
Why were we unsuccessful?
Other scottish teams had fairly productive transfer windows, so let’s not trot out that one
Burnley78 – I will try to ask you again, who would you like to see manage Celtic? If the board sacked BR this month who do you think would do a far better job and, of course, would be prepared to take on the job? Do you have someone in mind? Perhaps someone young and up and coming? Or old and experienced? British or foreign?
We all know you dislike the current manager with a vengeance. That’s fine, you are as entitled to the rest of us to have an opinion. But tell us who your ideal candidate to replace him would be (and who you would be confident would be happy to work with how Mike Nicholson, PL and DD work).
Cheers
I don’t think we can begin to understand the transfer market because no football channels of any sort ever try and explain it. No podcaster (I have found) has ever got an agent in and asked detailed questions on how it works.
Our club will do what they have always done and tell us nothing. They will sit back and watch us continue to spend money on something that we don’t understand. What we do understand is watching good footballers. We understand that John Mcginn was a good young player and we didn’t sign this Celtic man.
We also understand that you can overcomplicate a job.
If Scotland is such a hard place to come to (as Neil Lennon, Paul and one or two others suggests) then what you have to do sometimes is offer a little more money that you ordinarily would. Even more than the player may be worth. It is either that or we will continue to repeat the cycle of failure in Europe that we have been watching for a decade plus.
Players like Dolberg were unfortunate but if we had tried to sign him in July he may have come. He may not.
There are others though that will come.
What I do know (we all do) is that signing free transfers after the window closes is not the behaviour of a well run football club.
In fact it is negligent.
Agent and their clients hold most of the aces in any transfer. Anderlecht could have accepted a higher offer from Celtic, but his agent would still have held out to see who else would bite, por cierto.
Once again, more “Blame Rodgers” cobblers.
To say that Oh didn’t get development opportunities at Celtic is nothing more than a barefaced lie. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s a barefaced lie. He was here long enough for us to have seen what we needed to see. That he’s had a good season in Belgium and almost got a madly OTT move to Germany on the basis of it does not mean that we missed out on something.
We saw what he had to offer in a Celtic shirt and it wasn’t enough. This narrative is just tiresome. The difference between Idah and Oh isn’t that one was beloved by the manager and the other wasn’t, it’s that one of them performed consistently enough – and in big games – to get into and stay in the team.
Anything else is just arrant rubbish.
Tangbhoy
If it was as easy as offering a bit more in July we would do it. No doubts. As paul suggested no player who is in demand at a top league would be moving then unless for really big money.
Obviously we could get half an Oh for £12m if we really wanted. Thats an indication re market in Belgium as paul stated.
Kieran Tierney and Anthony Ralston have withdrawn from the Scotland squad for the opening World Cup qualifiers in Denmark and Belarus, with Josh Doig called up as cover.
Both Celtic defenders played for Brendan Rodgers’ side in Sunday’s 0-0 draw at Rangers, although Ralston appeared to suffer a knock in the Champions League play-off defeat by Kairat Almaty four days before that.
The 26-year-old started both legs of Scotland’s Nations League play-off defeat by Greece in March and won his 21st cap in the 4-0 friendly win against Liechtenstein in June.
Forrest
Not sure why you come in here spouting your rubbish.
No evidence or substance re Oh ? Idah or whatever. Just angry nonsense from someone who has missed out in life.
I think it’s clear you have no clue about football and recruitment, Peter. Sorry, Paul.
Those Excuses are pretty thin gruel for the worst executed transfer window since Willo Flood played.
No more excuses please.
“Scottish football is about to get a lesson on how it’s done by Tony Bloom’s Hearts. If we persist in trying to sign top strikers from Anderlecht, they will soon overtake us.”
Now, this is totally confusing.
Is this a suggestion that we abandon the much vaunted recruitment “model” and use Jamestown Analytics for our recruitment advisors.
As long as we have Brendan Rodgers at the helm, and it looks like out manager is here for the duration – Hearts have no chance of beating Celtic.
Hail Hail
File this under predictable pish. Continuing to look in all the wrong places with this dead cat 💩. As if this window was somehow different to any of the previous Board-led calamities when Rodgers wasn’t in the building.
For all those criticising fellow fans for encouraging others to boycott the EL games I remind you that it’s the clown show in the boardroom that has turned the relationship with the fans into a transactional one. Hardly fair to judge when this is reciprocated.
Deniabhoy
Thought I had replied. Apologies
For me it’s about a proper football structure.
A board place for a properly qualified football / business person to oversea football ops and a head coach similar to Brugge Brighton Copenhagen USG or The like.
It’s a pity that Dolberg had already been quoted though as……..’ I don’t think they’re serious”
I knew the fairytales would start …its a complete and utter fiasco scrambling about in the last few hours begging for players and paying over the odds for a winger…..
What larks Paul67 – what larks
So many sad folks determined to vent their bitterness with zero experience of actually doing much in life. Really hilarious.
Given we have so little control over events I’m not sure why we’re paying the mute the thick end of a million a year to achieve the same results the tea boy could give us.
Cheap ad hominem attacks from a superior self-image I always associate with a hun mindset.
When I saw “Lessons from Belgium” i thought the article would be about Club Brugge (Bruges).
Someone posted a lot of interesting info about them recently.
Brugge (Bruges) has a population of about 120,000 and the club has a local rival in Cercle Bruges. The club does not have a global fan base like Celtic. Their budget is about 40 million Euros less than Celtic’s. They have a squad of 29 players, which is roughly the same as Celtic’s. Of course they have the advantage of playing in a good league in a country that produces great players.
They prepared for the CL qualifiers in good time after selling some top performers. They did not scramble to buy players at the end of the transfer window.
A big difference with Celtic is that their main shareholder/virtual owner is a member of the board. He does not live in another country and is not seen regularly on golf courses.
Oh! Oh!
The bitter wee man is very nippy today…
Anger stage!?
Hail Hail
I’m not really interesting in discussing scenarios which didn’t happen, all you get is a lot of biased conjecture. Any point built on such unfulfilled scenarios will naturally be flawed. And if you believe such stories without question then I have a Morelos to sell you.
For all that the fact remain Stuttgart did _not_ pay 20m for Hyeon-gyu Oh, and he remains a player whose highest “real” transfer valuation (what someone actually paid) is £2.8m, paid by Celtic.
I see you up top EMERALDBEE \O/ A DOUBLE NINER!!
Slept in. Friday eve is here!
Stankovic and Forbs…..who ripped rangers apart aged 19 and 21 …were a combined total of 16 million euros….young quality players who cost a bit of money but should be well within our price range. This is the difference between a progressive forward thinking club and a timid weak scared to spend farce we’ve become.
I could understand it just a little if we had not took in millions ( again) in transfer fees and had an obscene amount lying in bank vaults !!!
BSR @ 11:56 am,
“The board aren’t answering the phone never mind calling an EGM LOL 😜”
LESSONS FROM BIRMINGHAM
Get Micheal Nicholson a P.A.
Hail Hail
Just going back to your point from the other day about letting Kuhn go without a replacement. Surely we had the world-class Yang already in place to step in?
As for Oh, his stats in Belgium don’t look much different from what they were with Celtic. Maybe whoever negotiated the sale price completely messed up?
Burnley 78 12.27
Disgraceful post.
burnley78
Pretty sure you mentioned Chris Davies last week as a possible Celtic manager.
As I have previously. Lets see how Birmingham do in the Championship this season.
If they were to make it to the EPL, or even make the play-offs, Tom Brady would want him to stay.
Think they will do well to make the top half, cant see them doing an Ipswich.
One omission from yer ‘our basic problem is player development’ insistence Paul, is your regular mantra that the right/only time to buy players is at the squeaky end of the transfer window.
But your article reveals that ‘…players in demand often receive bids late in the window. Why would they move before everyone has shown their hand?’
Surely this suggests that waiting til the end most commonly puts any club into, effectively, a house auction situation where some mug will pay over the odds just for the privilege of not missing out.
Like we did with Hammarby Seb. And Idah before that.
BR has been asking the suits to get the work done – and players in – early. Which the club appears not have done; clearly feeling it knows how, who and when to get a deal over the line.
Nothing in your article suggests you can see it any other way, instead framing the bungles as: ‘The problem is asset development’. FFS, the suits have been publicly recently called out as transfer amateurs (re Breum deal).
For most sensibilities, everyone at Celtic need to pull their efen socks up.
BR needs to get more out of the current pool. Some players need to grow some balls and get the heids on right.
But, by God, these suits can’t be exonerated from their role in blocking or blundering the acquisition – not just the hasty sale – of valuable assets.
Your credibility Paul, aint enhanced by failing to address the executive elephants in the boardroom.
Then again, maybe not.
On Tuesday you wrote: “The Norway-born Tunisia international spent only six months at Hammarby, in which time his transfer fee quadrupled. Our fee feels high.”
What would that say about a 10x increase?
Celtic Quisling News
Paul67,
Nobody cares one jot about Oh, he’s an ex-Celtic player.
They do however care about the below. Yet zero mention of it.
The boards tactic of using the international break to hope things will all blow over will fail as spectacularly as their ability to take our club forward.
Will CQN be adding their name to the list? 😂😂😂😂
After a disastrous transfer window and failure to qualify for the Champions League, Celtic supporters are once again calling for urgent action to address the clear structural problems within the club.
We demand full transparency from the board regarding its repeated failure to back the manager and reinvest our money into the playing squad. We also demand accountability: what course of action will be taken to ensure such a collective failure does not happen again? In addition, we highlight once more the club’s lack of a coherent fan engagement strategy, and call for a progressive, innovative approach to working with supporters.
Our questions for Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay, Peter Lawwell and Dermot Desmond are:
• What is the club’s long-term footballing strategy, and when and how will this be communicated to supporters?
• Why has there been no investment in critical positions despite repeated pleas from the manager, obvious weaknesses in the squad, and calls from supporters?
• What accountability measures are in place for repeated failures in transfer dealings?
• How do you intend to modernise the club’s structure to compete in Europe, and why are we consistently unprepared for qualification stages?
• When will supporters receive the results of the ‘fan survey’ conducted over a year ago, and why have these not yet been released despite being in the club’s possession for several months?
• Why have the results of the Fairhurst Inquiry not been made public, and what action will the club take to protect supporters from unlawful and disproportionate policing in the future?
• Why does the club continue to resist working with supporters to improve matchday atmosphere, supporter experience, and consultation on key issues such as ticket pricing and distribution?
It has now been years since any form of meaningful communication between the Celtic board and supporters. For clarity, this means clear, open and transparent dialogue across the support, and not confined to carefully selected representatives behind closed doors.
Fans have repeatedly demanded positive engagement and repeatedly been ignored – the time for silence is over.
We all want what’s best for the club (not the boards pockets) yeah?
CELTIC MAC on 4TH SEPTEMBER 2025 12:49 PM
That’s the thing. If he does well, he’ll stay there. If he doesn’t, he probably isn’t good enough.
keep yir high bids low
So who’s accountable then, Paul? How do teams with smaller budgets who have beaten us in Europe over the years manage it?
Burnley 78….the only person I see bitter on this blog regularly is you about Rodgers …there are some who go over the top regarding Lawwell and Desmond ( who think he doesn’t care about celtic) but nowhere near the animosity you have about our manager….its quite sad actually.
Maybe you should seek professional help ?