Manager of the Year Ange Postecoglou reckons that there will be significant interest in his Celtic stars this summer with several big-money bids expected to arrive, but even if some of his top stars do leave the club the Celtic manager still expects to achieve his objective for every transfer window and that is to come out of it stronger than we went in.
This season is far from done with three league matches to come over the next ten days, two at Celtic Park against St Mirren and Aberdeen with a midweek trip to Easter Road sandwiched in the middle and those games will be followed by the Scottish Cup final against Championship side Inverness Caley Thistle as Ange Postecoglou looks to make it 5/6 trophies won since arriving in Scotland and in doing so complete his first Treble and the club’s record breaking eighth.
David Friel in the Scottish Sun reports on Ange’s thoughts on all of this with the transfer update of particular interest to the Celtic support. “Part of the challenge is the more success you have, the more likely it is that some of your players move on,” the Celtic manager said.
“They get the attention of other clubs. We have to be ready to fill those gaps with players who have the ability to take us to another level altogether.
“So there are always those challenges there. You go into any window knowing there’s going to be some uncertainty. But in every one since I’ve been here we’ve come out stronger in terms of squad depth, or having a better quality of player than we had going in.
“That is what we will try and do.”
Ange Postecoglou also confirmed that he will once again have a hands-on role in the recruitment process this summer, as indeed he has done since the day he walked through the door at Celtic Park for the first time.
“I’ve always felt recruitment was an important part of my role, particularly with the nature of the task I had,” Ange explained. “It wasn’t like I was picking up an established or core group. It was a team needing rebuilding.
“I knew our best chance of success with that was if I had a massive influence over who came in, both players and staff. I knew what I wanted. The club were really good in trusting me with that process.
“We obviously had success fairly early in terms of our recruiting and I think I gained the trust of people at the club through that. Since then, it has worked really well. They have faith the players I bring in are going to enhance our club,” Ange said.
“Every year, and I’ve obviously been doing this for quite a while, there’s always a different challenge. Last year was about building a team, some belief, some trust and faith in me and what we were doing.
“Then within that context trying to have some success after a year where the club I was representing went trophy-less. I knew I couldn’t do another season like that. This year was more about, ‘Well, we’ve had success, how was I going to push them on to another level?’. We couldn’t stand still.
“It was different this year, it was about showing the players that what we did last year was about building a foundation and we could improve a lot more in the way we play. Once the players embraced that from the start of pre-season they quickly put to bed what happened last year and saw this year as a new challenge.”
There was a time when Celtic supporters would be much more concerned about the thought of losing top stars because seldom, if ever was the replacements near the same level of the players we sold. The classic example of that was the sale of Kenny Dalglish to Liverpool back in 1977. That for supporters of a certain vintage still hurts and it destroyed Celtic’s season going from double winners to Rangers winning the Treble.
Now that with Ange Postecoglou in control there’s a more relaxed feeling about transfer window dramas. The only criticism that you could possibly make, and remember we don’t get to see the ins nd outs of these deals, is the the transfer fees received on January for Josip Juranovic, who was a huge success at the World Cup on Qatar for Croatia, and also Giorgos Giakoumakis with seemed to be on the low side.
If any of our top stars are sold this summer Celtic should be looking for record breaking transfer fees, especially if it’s English clubs looking to sign our Bhoys.
