Recruitment is one of the hardest things to get right in football, especially when you consider that one bad transfer window can undo years of good work while it can even take the club a couple of seasons to recover.
Celtic have done a great job in recent years of picking up talented players who have a major role in the team before selling them on at a profit.
Obviously you can’t get every single transfer right so there will be some misses, but Celtic haven’t seen a lot of success from their last couple of transfer windows.
Football Insider spoke to Celtic great Frank McAvennie about the state of the club just now, and it’s obvious that he’s utterly furious with Nick Hammond for some of his recent transfer decisions:
“You have to look at the recruitment at Celtic. We are blaming the players and blaming the manager but you have to look at the recruitment. It has been terrible. It has been just awful.
“There is a combination of things at Celtic and it is not just the manager. The boy Hammond, I mean what the hell has he brought in that has bettered the team? I look at Ajeti and Klimala and I go, ‘They are not better than what we have got.’ They cost £9million between them and it was £4.5million for the goalkeeper.
“It is not right. Money has been spent, it just has not been spent right. It is not Lawwell, I think it is Hammond putting it to him. I do not get it. There is a cluster of problems.”
It might be too early to write some of the signings off but they haven’t looked good enough so far, and that will only lead to a knock-on effect in future windows.
If they don’t improve then they will eventually be sold for a loss, so the club will have less money to spend and the board will be unlikely to sanction big money moves if they don’t trust the judgement of their recruitment department any more.
It leaves Celtic with a huge choice to make in January because egos in football dictate that you’ll stick with your decisions in an effort to show you were right all along, but Celtic could have a disastrous season if they go for that defiant approach instead of trying to fix things.
