Jack Hendry certainly isn’t daft. As we discussed on here over the summer he was in a great position to insert a sell-on clause into any contract that he signed with Oostende should he decide that his time at Celtic was up. The Scotland defender, who was named Player of the Year in Belgium’s Jupiter Pro-League last season, was the subject of interest from various clubs anxious to sign the centre half with many huge fees being mentioned.
Hendry knew that Celtic were looking for their money back from the transfer fee paid to Dundee by Brendan Rodgers in the January 2018 transfer window. That transfer fee, of around £1.75m was, again as we had argued, as much as Celtic could expect from a player who the club had already discarded and written off as a viable first team starter.
However Hendry would have been naive in the extreme to allow Oostende to sign him from Celtic only to flip a huge profit in the space of their summer wheeling dealing and so the canny Scotsman insisted on a sell-on clause that was obviously well know to Belgian Champions Club Brugge who this week completed the signing of the former Celtic man from Oostende.
The initial figure reported on transfer deadline day was £6m and that was later revised to upwards of £8.5m but those estimates turned out to be inaccurate and the true situation has now been revealed by the Oostende technical director, Gauthier Ganay.
“When we activated the purchase option clause to buy Jack from Celtic, we also had to reach personal agreement with the player,” Ganey explained, as reported by Scottish Sun. “Jack put in a clause that he could leave for a fixed price. If we didn’t agree to that, he wouldn’t have signed for us.
Welcome in Bruges, Jack Hendry! 🤩 🔵⚫️
🔗 | https://t.co/18cetOyPiU pic.twitter.com/qrszoLBort
— Club Brugge KV (@ClubBrugge) August 31, 2021
“Club Brugge were willing to meet that transfer clause and Jack’s express wish was that he could sign for a club who were playing in the Champions League. Normally, the fee we would have been looking for would have been around £8m.
“It’s unfortunate that it happened on transfer deadline day, but a contract is there to be respected and we don’t want to get in the way of the wish of a player who has always given 100 per cent here.”
The bargain price paid by Brugge will have left plenty more on the table for Jack Hendry to negotiate his own personal terms and with the Belgian Champions in a Champions League Group stages alongside Paris Saint Germain, Manchester City and RB Leipzig, he might have ended up be earning – whisper it – more that any of the Celtic Want Aways who ended up at Championship sides Bournemouth (Ryan Christie), Swansea City (Olivier Ntcham) and the Premier League sides Crystal Palace (Odsonne Edouard) and Brentford (Kristoffer Ajer).
All four Want Aways will be watching the Champions League and indeed the other European competitions on the television while Jack Hendry is taking on Messi & Co. Well played, Jack. well played, son.
