One signing made, several key players heading for the door, and Rangers and Hearts spending freely. The nervousness among the Celtic support this summer is entirely justified.
Let’s be honest – one summer signing going into the final week before the title defence begins is not a transfer window. It’s a holding pattern. And Celtic’s support, having lived through last season’s identical slow start, knows exactly where holding patterns lead.
As reported by BBC Sport Scotland, the Parkhead club have made just one addition to the squad all summer – Camilo Duran, a forward with Champions League goalscoring experience from his time at Qarabag, and a man who has apparently noticed the unusual quietness around Celtic Park himself. His surprise at the thin attendance for the 1-1 pre-season draw with Middlesbrough says something about the mood around the club right now.
The Exits Are Mounting
The departures are the real problem. Kasper Schmeichel, still a goalkeeper of genuine international standing before injury ended his season and then his career, has not been replaced. Daizen Maeda is heading to Ipswich Town for a reported £10 million – a fee Chris Sutton, via the BBC, described as a bad deal for Celtic, particularly given Maeda’s strong showing for Japan at the World Cup.
Beyond Maeda, Martin O’Neill is braced for the departures of both Reo Hatate and Arne Engels from midfield. Then there is the Kelechi Iheanacho situation – Celtic held an option to automatically extend his stay, chose not to exercise it, offered a new deal, and watched him sign for Bursaspor, a club freshly promoted to Turkey’s second tier. That sequence of events is very difficult to defend.
And hanging over everything is the question of whether Callum McGregor, the captain and midfield cornerstone, might be tempted by a big-money move to the Middle East before the window closes.
Rivals Are Not Standing Still
The comparison with our two closest competitors makes uncomfortable reading. theRangers, stung by their late-season collapse to third last year, moved decisively – bringing in Derek McInnes as head coach and adding seven players to the squad, including Lawrence Shankland, who was last season’s Premiership top scorer, and goalkeeper Ivor Pandur, fresh from helping Hull City return to the Premier League.
Hearts, under new head coach Wouter Vrancken, have brought in eleven new players, paying fees for five of them. Their Champions League qualifier opener against Sturm Graz ended in a 4-0 humiliation, which shows recruitment volume alone is no guarantee of quality – but the intent and the structure are plainly there. Celtic, meanwhile, are still waiting.
Former Celtic striker Cillian Sheridan, speaking on the BBC Scottish Football Podcast, did not pull his punches. He noted that the club appears to be circling back to transfer targets that were already in place before the current regime, and pointed to the absence of a permanent head of recruitment as the structural rot at the heart of the problem. Celtic’s own chief executive Michael Nicholson has admitted that competing with Premier League and Championship clubs for players has proven genuinely difficult – but difficulty is not an excuse when the balance sheet is as healthy as ours.
Sheridan compared Celtic unfavourably to Motherwell, who built a coherent footballing identity under Jens Berthel Askou that allowed the club to recruit purposefully regardless of managerial change. That is the modern model. Celtic, he said, are putting themselves under enormous pressure before a ball is kicked.
The Board Cannot Keep Hiding Behind ‘Difficult’
What makes this summer especially damaging is the context. The pressure to rebuild the squad in time for Champions League qualifying is acute, and the window for error is narrowing by the week. Last season’s slow start led to fan protests and the departures of Brendan Rodgers and Wilfried Nancy. We ended the season with a league and cup double – heroic, and genuinely earned – but the board appears to have concluded that the rescue act absolved them of the need to change anything.
It has not. O’Neill himself has raised concerns about Champions League qualifier readiness, and a 73-year-old man who came back to this club out of genuine love should not be left fielding press conference questions about why a forward who joined Bursaspor’s second division chose not to stay.
The support’s nervousness is not hysteria. It is institutional memory doing its job. We have been here before, we know how it tends to go, and the people responsible for fixing it are running out of time and excuses in equal measure. Mon The Hoops – but the board need to do their part.
