Celtic’s First Ever Profit Making Transfer Window – A New High for the Financial Tims

LAST Saturday I was at my boy’s rugby match, a game that I was able to attend thanks to Peter Lawwell, so credit where it is due. Peter arranged for Celtic to move the game against Hamilton to the Sunday, rather than Saturday, so I was able to attend both games.

He did that by failing to bring in the players that the manager wanted – a right back and a midfielder or the players the supporters wanted – two central defenders. This allowed a poor AEK Athens to score 3 goals from 4 attempts at goal in the Champions League Third Round of Qualifying games so it was them and not Celtic playing Vidi over the last few Wednesday nights.

We were of course playing in the rather more humble Europa League Play-off against the little Lithuanian side FK Suduva, and even they were able to show that we needed a dominant centre half or two in the Celtic side. Those games were on the Thursdays and that’s why I was able to go along to the rugby match last Saturday.

I was talking to one of the other dads. He works for one of the big Insurance companies and although he is English, Celtic is his team. He used to go to games regularly but is now more an armchair supporter due to kids etc.

Anyway he was talking about two things, neither Celtic related, but worth mentioning here.

Firstly he was chatting about graduate trainee courses and from his experience the big companies look at this in one of two ways. Some invest in these schemes, recruit the brightest and the best and spend a considerable amount of time and resource training their graduates up over two year programmes.

The example he gave was the global bank HSBC – the graduates would work in London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, New York then at the end of the programme they would be offered a job as manager of the branch in somewhere like Bradford (apologies to anyone reading in Bradford!)

Hardly appealing after the jet setting. Other companies know this, so their strategy is different. They spend nothing on these Graduate trainee programmes but instead pounce on the ones who have been ‘trained up’ elsewhere and they therefore have the resources available to offer better wages etc.

I thought about this conversation yesterday as Aston Villa targeted the centre halves from Le Havre and Aberdeen that Celtic had been interested in and this coming after their John McGinn steal.

Suppose it’s nothing personal, just business.

The other thing my mate at the rugby was talking about was his own company. He says that his CEO’s biggest bugbear is the cost of Actuaries.

Actuaries are highly regarded professionals; actuaries are problem solvers and strategic thinkers with a deep understanding of financial systems – pretty crucial to an Insurance business you would think.

But his CEO knows he employs about 80 of these Actuaries and their starting salary is around £90k pa. He reckons that within a few years he’ll have developed a computer software programme that will do a better job than these expensive professionals and he will no longer have any need for them.

The financial savings to his insurance company will be enormous, do the sums.

Anyway that made me think of our CEO, Peter Lawwell and his Financial Tims. How wonderful it would be for them if they could strip Celtic of our own footballing
Actuaries – the players – and just concentrate on making money, PLC style…There’s a guy in the classic novel Catch 22 who bombs the American runway for the Germans because he was able to undercut the Luftwaffe to get the job. Again it was nothing personal, just business.

Here’s an article from Brian Fegan, a Celtic supporter not a Financial Tim, on the transfer window and thanks to Jerry Woods for sending over the share price graph that will delight the FT Bhoys this morning when they see it…

The First Ever Profit Making Transfer Window – A New Low

Based on the various reports of the transfer fee agreed between Lyon and Celtic for Moussa Dembele, it would appear that Celtic are the ONLY British club in the recent history of the transfer window to announce a PROFIT of almost £20 million and a lessening of their overall wage bill.

Over the summer, having cancelled the contract of low wage earner Nadir Ciftci and seeing medium wage earners  Erik Sviatchenko leaving to return to Scandinavia and Stuart Armstrong to Southampton to further reduce the wage bill, the apparent sale of high earner Dembele represents a healthy but incredibly demoralising saving in the current overall wage bill.

Even taking onto account the new increased contracts offered to players like Kristoffer Ajer and Tom Rogic, the overall trend is of a lessening of wages, squad depth and overall quality.

Only one Celtic player was bought and brought in this transfer window, a talented player that we already had the previous season on loan. On top of this, our “best” defender celebrated his winning goal last weekend with all the enthusiasm of a corpse after a bitter, all too familiar power struggle with the powers that be.

With a not quite resurgent but on the rise Rangers next, we seem to have gifted our rivals a huge psychological advantage that may turn out to be significant until at least the next transfer window opens in January.

Seven players brought in, three of who were already there or had previously been a Celt (in the case of Izaguirre) and the Compper-like disappearance of bright young thing Lewis Morgan represents a disastrous window that has left a club that has won every domestic trophy over the last two years in the doldrums.

In the (grudgingly) effective way our noisy neighbours seemed to have rebuilt a whole team, it is unfair to suggest that our board have gone a long way this window towards dismantling one?

Brian Fegan

Did you watch the TIGHT GIT video last night, with added Celtic Transfer window lyrics provided? If not, please do – see HERE.

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