WE have looked this morning at the alleged £50million Manchester Utd bid for Aston Villa’s one-time Celtic target John McGinn and mentioned Scott Allan’s complaints, made shortly after receiving his final salary payment from Celtic, about being caught up in the boardroom feud between Celtic and Hibs.
Predictably Allan blames Celtic and not Hibs but didn’t tell us if Hibs made a move to take him to Easter Road in January after agreeing a pre-contract deal with him that allowed him to join the Easter Road club at the end of the season. Maybe Hibs didn’t want to spend any money on Allan, or pay his wages for the the final months of his Celtic contract?
Anyway the final twist in that McGinn signing saga – which we have reviewed this morning HERE – happened over in Austria yesterday.
Having failed to sign McGinn and with the clock ticking towards the closure of the summer 2018 transfer window – a dreadful window for Celtic (and if any Zombies are dipping into The Celtic Star this morning, last season was your BIG chance to stop the Ten and you blew it), Brendan Rodgers brought in the free agent Youssouf Mulumbu who had impressed in a few performances against Celtic in the previous season while at Kilmarnock.
Rodgers signed him on a two year deal just as the window was closing but he looked far from comfortable in a Celtic shirt, particularly in the European games in the Group stages of the Europa League. He disappeared from the team sheets after a particularly poor substitute’s appearance against RB Leipzig and was then loaned out to re-join Steve Clarke at Kilmarnock.
And on the day John McGinn got linked to Manchester Utd in a £50million transfer, Neil Lennon confirmed in Austria that Mulumbu’s contract had been terminated and that he had left the club.
Celtic, apparently had a break clause in the Congolese international’s two year deal, allowing the club to terminate after one season and that has been exercised.
Mulumbu is at the moment over in Egypt representing his country at the Africa Cup of Nations. And he’ll now be looking for a new club after Celtic ended the 32 year old’s contract.
“Mulumbu is a free,” Neil Lennon told the media, as reported in Daily Mail. “He is away, so there is not a future here for him.”
Much of this takes us back to the unhappy summer we had to endure last year, which started with the attempts to talk up the sale of Kieran Tierney to Everton, had the entire summer months taken up with the McGinn signing saga, there was the fall-out behind the scenes between Peter Lawwell and Rodgers and then the sale of Moussa Dembele. Boyata had refused to play in the Champions League, and then Rodgers refused to sanction a big money deal to sell him to Fulham, despite the player’s refusal to sign a new contract and then we ended up with Mulumbu on deadline day.
This led to the inevitable happening in February when Rodgers jumped ship, leaving Celtic in the lurch and with both the league and Scottish Cup under serious threat. Yet we still won another Treble.
And this summer is very different indeed.
Good luck to Mulumbu, hopefully he’ll find himself a decent club, maybe back at Kilmarnock.
For Celtic it’s the end of an error. Thankfully one that the Rangers failed to exploit.
