Virgil van Dijk

This . I can completely understand any footballer wanting to go and earn big money in another league . A couple of big contracts in England or Spain could have him and his family set up for life.( For generations) It's a short career - stay at Celtic for ten years and earn 10 million quid or go to the Premiership for ten years and earn 30-40 million .

 

Really?! I've never seen him play for Dortmund, but thought he looked terrible, slow and clumsy in the WC for Germany. Like Loovens or Majstorovic standard.

Obviously I'm wrong if Man Utd are buying him, but that was genuinely my impression.

 

.. What? :smiley-laughing002:

 

Jesus christ mate

He's phenomenal, absolute quality player. My favourite defender in the world behind Thiago Silva at the moment.

 

Only a few days ago, you said we should be keeping hold of him and letting him run down his contract.

 

If it's better for us to do that then yes, we should. I'd rather qualify for the next two years CL than sell Van Dijk for £10m.

Having Van Dijk here would go a long way towards that.

 

We don't have a crystal ball though, so how would we know if we are going to qualify with him. He was in the team this year and we failed to qualify, what's to say it wouldn't happen again for the next 2 years, and then we lose him for nothing. If we get offered £10m or more, then I reckon it's a done deal. It's how we reinvest that I'm more concerned about.

 

My crystal ball answer to that is we won't re-invest it.

I know what you're saying but I still think we should give ourselves the best chance of getting into the Champions League. Do you feel our best chance is with or without Van Dijk?

 

If we aren't going to re-invest it, then I would agree with you. Of course we have a better chance of qualifying with Van Dijk, but it's not a guarantee that we will make it to the group stages is it? We would have had a better chance of doing something in last year's group phase, and this year's qualifying rounds if we had kept Wanyama as well. Should we have kept him too? Even though his heart was set on a move, and we got £12.5m for him. Going by this theory, should we just let all our best players run down their contracts, as it gives us a better chance of qualifying for the Champions League?

 

So we're agreed then that Hummels is the best centre back in the Bundesliga and the second best defender in the world?

\0/ - that's not what you said, but i could easily spin out what you're saying into something completely different.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see who wins the English Premiership and the Champions' League next season to see if Man Utd can do that with Hummels in defense.

The point i was making, that English teams are now going and buying the most expensive players they can find, doesn't necessarily make them successful.

Kevin Wimmer to Spurs for £4.3million looks like a better deal to me. There is no danger of there being £33million difference between the two centre backs.

 

Champions League is the be all and end all for me, we need to establish ourselves as a Champions League team to have any chance of further improving as a club.

Regarding Wanyama and Gary Hooper as well, with hindsight, yes we should have kept them. We got £20m odd in transfers that season and spent about £7m all in. We'd qualified for the last 16.

It wasn't re-invested, it was of no benefit to our team at all. Saying that, we still qualified for the CL as a poorer team. So worked out well in the end but still, Champions League is the only way we grow. If we lose out on a couple of million from player sales then do be it, the benefits it brings is something that we couldn't hope to achieve otherwise.

 

Went a bit off topic, so back on track.

Some players will leave on a free, but Van Dijk is our most valuable player.

Some players are easy to sell some not so. The price will be what the price will be. Doesn't mean we would struggle to beat any team in the qualifiers.

At the same time Van Dijk wants the deal, teams want to sign him so it is easy enoguh to fix. Not replacing Van Dijk, but getting the fee.

 

Risky business model to simply put all your eggs in the Champions League basket though isn't it? Especially when there are no guarantees that we will qualify. What happens if we fail to qualify and lose our top players for noting in the process?

 

Not much really, we'll not have as much money but we don't really spend the money we bring in anyway. It's not like we're in any danger of * ourselves over if we don't sell these players, if we were that'd be riskier.

Like I said, Champions League is the be all and end all. It's the only way to grow as a club, so the question for me is do we want to grow or do we want to exist as we currently are?

Of course if we did re-invest the money we brought in it'd be a different story but sticking with our current model I'd rather we didn't sell them.

 

So you don't think anything would change if we fail to bring in Champions League money, and lose our players for nothing. Would that not suggest we should be sitting on a goldmine at present then?

 

If Peter Lawwell is to be believed smiley-laughing002 then no, it shouldn't.

 

Yeah, my judgement's not what it once was. I know that. I was just expressing surprise as that had genuinely been my impression in the 2 games I saw him play in Brazil. Comparing him fo Maj and Glenda was too far; but I thought Boateng was far the better defender to be 100% honest.

Again, I'm not even arguing here: I know I'm wrong. The less football I watch, the worse my judgment gets, sadly. You may not believe me but back in the 90's I could spot a good team/player. E.g. Correctly predicted the success of Bulgaria in 94 and The Czech Rep in 96 after watching both lose their opening games. Nowadays I only really watch Celtic and occasionally Scotland or a WC game.

 

Getting old mate :icon_mrgreen:

 

I'm the texact same,apart from the hoops I watch Scottish league games land World Cup,don't watch the EPL *.

I hope we get the qualifiers out of Virgil,if he does move on,hopefully Ronny talks him round

 

There is a workable plan for sustainable growth where the worst case scenario is we break even. Cutting costs is another way to do that, hence why we want to get the squad numbers down.

Infinite growth with finite resources can lead to collapse as other teams have found out. You can't ignore that.

In England the more they get, the more they spend and the quality of football cannot get infinitely better simply because you spend £70 Million on one player.

For me the interesting thing is working within a sustainable model. It takes longer to rebuild a team, costly mistakes knock us back a season or two, but we can come back from that.

It honestly wouldn't take much for Celtic to end up in a lot of debt, it would be easy to do. This is why i think we're ahead of the curve and setting a good example other teams in Scotland are following, which should really lead the to the quality improving, albeit slowly, with less resources, from the grass roots level up.

Even though we didn't spend much last season, the quality of football has improved. It could be better when you see the attacking qualities we have on the bench, reserved for a pretty mean defensive record.

It's more of a challenge.

If you take Man Utd, they want the best players, the top, top players and they seem to be able to afford that.

It actually puts a team like Celtic in a unique position where we have Champions' League football to look forward to and lots of players being disregarded.

Losing Van Dijk is challenging, but not a disaster.

A team pay a huge fee, that can be bad, it can also be good. It's not ideal to lose your best player and it's also a bad idea to be going and spending all the money at once.

People should know by now how we'll go about signings in the Summer. For sure it's going to be a cost cutting exercise. Nobody would argue against it.

We may get a surprise when someone buys Van Dijk and for me it's interesting to see what Ronny can do with that.

The rebuilding has been going on for some time and we find ourselves often taking a step backwards to go forwards.

One challenge could be taking a fee of £12million for Van Dijk and saying, right lets make this money last for three transfer windows. If the scouting system picks up on a player for £2million we can do that.

It is also the nature of operating this way the defense might be weaker than last season, but this is just the nature of having two central defenders with a combined value of somewhere between £15-20million. It's not every season we'll have that.
But Ronny has an eye for a player so it's gonna be interesting to see who comes in.

If we were operating in the higher casinos of the transfer market, we probably wouldn't have signed them in the first place.