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.
276 Comments- Pages:
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Taurangabhoy on 5th September 2025 10:50 am
Celebrate our successes, Enjoy it while we can.
👏👏👏👏👏👏
TAURANGABHOY on 5TH SEPTEMBER 2025 11:01 AM
A Dun how are we circumventing FSR and why would we want to.
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We’re not. And we wouldn’t want to because we’d be fined, heavily fined and then thrown out of Europe.
I’m challenging the premise from our Chairman that cash reserves help us mitigate for a rainy day.
Our reserves don’t allow us to break FSR. Stock piling cash makes little sense.
Eagerly awaiting Paul’s next attack on BR,and ,not so cunningly,refusing to mention the words,those never to be uttered,Michael Nicholson.Only 15 minutes to go.
If we were competent at bringing in replacements then Maeda should have been sold this window.
He’ll likely never have a season like last and at 27, it would make sense for all involved.
Once more, our incompetence in getting players in has seen us retain players that should be moved on.
Talk of player development and trading is utterly pointless when we refuse to acknowledge and rectify an incompetent executive.
in
Maybe that is the plan run on 70% of 60m, certainly fits in with the ambition of the board. Think we’re going to find out quite soon that it doesn’t pay for much, now who made Maeda available that he agreed to a transfer ,buyer seller or player it didn’t materialise in this window but no doubt he’ll be gone in January
taurangabhoy
I’ve said it before on here that I think Brendan Rodgers managed the team well and the squad through those match packed months of January/February, and all but achieved yet another treble. Somebody said on here, Saint Stivs probably, that you get as many co-efficient points in the EL as the CL so might be useful if, if, we could rack up a few. Dont see too many easy games mind.
!!Bada Bing!! on 5th September 2025 10:55 am
Maeda said to Japanese media,told the club he wanted to go during the Window
Bada
https://x.com/weeklysd/status/1963806609622143175?t=_DelkGqf4KXOuFmTRPgycQ&s=19
HH
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new article posted.
Celtic Football Club pleased to announce that we were able to keep most of our good players