Jota - Welcome Home!

* knows but Carl Mikael Lustig is number one for this bear. hh

 

Said it at the time Ryan I expected a right few to leave

 

CCV and hatate for me would be the biggest loss, Jota on his game was a class player in the spl no doubt about it, but he was anonymous in quite a few games aswell, Saudi Arabia just becoming like USA in the 70s signing great players that are past their best for their brand and their name, New York cosmos and a few other American teams tried that in mid 70s with guys like pele, beckenbauer , Carlos Alberto, Johan neeskens and the likes when they were basically finished, it was aw push razzamataz that went * up after about 5 or 6 years

 

Ange said from the start, don't get attached to players, this is how our transfer model has to work, the 'ajax' model people have been saying for years we adopt. And we saw it in full effect with JJ and GG leaving and being quickly replaced.

I really don't understand the surprise over Jota leaving, he's been a standout for two years and realistically won eveything he can here, if it wasn't for mad saudi wages, I'd have expected a team from england, spain or germany to be in for him.

 

Fs dolph lundgren replacement for the next rocky 12 movie

 

Absolute ride tbf

 

Maybe sporting integrity means more to some people or morals about their human rights too? Anyway that'll be his career done at the top level in my opinion. Thanks for the memories

 

Yeah dont think he'll be the last but hopefully the money we've got for him will make us less inclined to sell others and it sets benchmark for starting price for others.

Think Hatate will go too given his comments about achieving his goals here

 

NAIVETY is never a good look in a politician. And UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin is beginning to look like a man cursed by poor judgment.


The most powerful figure in European football agreed to act as godfather to the daughter of Andrea Agnelli.


Next thing he knew, the Juventus chief was hatching a doomed European Super League plan in 2021, constructed by 12 clubs under a cloak of alleged duplicity, and the Slovenian was describing Agnelli as ‘a snake’.


Ceferin is now placing his faith in the power of Europe to repel the vast wealth of Saudi Arabia. And the signs are he’s wrong on that as well.


Dismissing the oil sloshing around the Middle Eastern kingdom as fool’s gold, he laughed off the notion of the Saudis posing a threat to football’s established order.


‘No, no, no,’ said Ceferin. ‘Players want to win top competitions — and the top competitions are in Europe.’

Cristiano Ronaldo, it turns out, was the axe in the soil. And, like the oil uncovered in Saudi by American petroleum geologist Max Steineke in 1938, the trickle is becoming a gushing torrent.

Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante and Kalidou Koulibaly have accepted eye-watering sums to move there. And, while Ceferin lectures the Saudis on the folly of investing in players at the wrong end of their careers, younger names are also succumbing to the life-changing money on offer.

Mail Sport confirmed the rumours on Thursday night of 24-year-old Celtic winger Jota holding talks over a £10million per annum tax-free deal to join Al-Ittihad. Last week Ruben Neves, 26, left Wolves for Al-Hilal in a £47m transfer.



Former Liverpool striker Roberto Firmino, meanwhile, has reached an agreement to join up with former Chelsea goalkeeper Edouard Mendy at Al-Ahli, while Barcelona have admitted defeat in their quest to sign Inter Milan’s Marcelo Brozovic after the Croatian international accepted a £100m contract with Al-Nassr instead.

Fans react to these moves with bewilderment and disbelief. For many, a move to the Pro-League is tantamount to retirement. It betrays a criminal lack of ambition. In reality, ambition doesn’t count for much when Saudi Arabia starts waving around a blank cheque book.

The strains of Zadok the Priest in the UEFA Champions League suddenly become less melodious. The lustre and importance of playing and winning trophies in one of the big five leagues wanes rapidly.

And the abysmal human rights record in the Kingdom? That’s for politicians, not footballers.

Celtic supporters peering through green-and-white spectacles find it hard to see beyond the horizons of Parkhead Cross.

Myopic in their love of the club, some can’t comprehend why Jota would want to play his football in Saudi Arabia while turning a blind eye to the draconian laws governing the country.

While a supporter’s love for a football club is a part-time hobby, players are pursuing a career. And the decisions they make are based on the same judgments we all make in working life. Pay, job satisfaction and ambition.

Under contract until 2026, Jota earns a sum in the region of £28k a week at Celtic. He could stick around the SPFL for another three seasons and bank £4million in total and, for most fans in their 20s, that’s staggering money. In Saudi Arabia, it takes just four months to earn that much.

In 2023, the wage of the average UK worker is £31,772 a year. In Saudi Arabia, Jota will surpass that sum after one training session.



It’s easy to overlook Jota’s circumstances before he moved to Glasgow. A Benfica fringe player standing at the crossroads, he was shipped out to Parkhead in search of first-team football and a chance to prove himself. Two years later, he’s in the money.

His good fortune owes much to a Portuguese passport. Like so many of the players heading for Jeddah, the winger is a client of super agent Jorge Mendes.

Along with good contacts, however, talent and personality also go a long way towards a player making his own luck. And, if Jota said no to the figures banging on his door with bags of cash now, you’d be entitled to question his sanity.

Anyone who has ever worked in the Middle East knows it’s a shock to the system. Back in 1996, this writer’s move to Sharjah in the UAE to take up a tax-free role with an English-language newspaper seemed like a great idea. Right up until the point when the aeroplane door opened and reality dawned.

In Saudi Arabia, alcohol is banned, holding hands in public is a no-go, gambling is prohibited, single males are advised against entering the family sections of cafes and restaurants. Freedom of speech is an alien concept.

Even if all that proves too much and Jota lasts no more than one season in an unforgiving climate, he will still spend 12 months playing with current Ballon d’Or Benzema before heading back to Europe with a bank balance boasting plenty of zeros at the end.

One man’s lack of ambition has always been another man’s dream.

Al-Ittihad are the current champions of Saudi Arabia. They play in a stadium with more seats than Celtic Park in a league featuring some of the world’s best players and have an Asian Champions League campaign to plan for. All this while offering a 24-year-old a salary of £10m a year without a penny in tax. If that’s a lack of ambition, there’s much to be said for it.




An equally good deal for Celtic, a fee close to the record £25m paid by Arsenal for Kieran Tierney represents a decent profit on a player signed a year ago for £7m.

For players like Jota, Celtic will only ever be a step on the road to unimaginable wealth. While the club could have held him to his contract, denying him the right to earn eight times as much somewhere else would not only have forced them to bump up his wage to an amount they simply couldn’t afford, it would have sent a terrible message to future transfer targets.

Saudi Arabia, like China before them, are tearing up the natural order. When Barcelona can’t keep players like Brozovic from their clutches, the champions of Scotland have no chance.

If nothing else, the Green Brigade might start living up to their name now. The loss of Jota to a state bolstered on the profits of fossil fuels will inevitably convert some Celtic fans to the ‘Just Stop Oil’ cause.

Regrettably, there’s no orange dust which can blind Saudi Arabia to its final goal. There’s nothing Aleksander Ceferin can say which will stop the nation’s sovereign wealth fund polluting the eco-system of football, golf and motor-racing in the quest for soft power and influence.

The oil is well and truly out of the well. And there’s no way now of shutting it down.

 

Integrity goes out the window when you’re being paid 200k a week tax free, he’s also young enough that a couple seasons out there he’ll comfortably get a good move back to Europe.

For context I doubt there’s even 10 players in the EPL who are earning that sort of money once they’ve paid their tax.

 

About right then tbh. I'd still rather see him stay but at least we're getting decent money for once.

 

Stating the obvious but, that's a pile of *, it just means you have less integrity.

Anything else is an oxymoron.

 

It's also a complete nonsense people talking about footballers, morals and human rights, we had all this in the build to qatar world cup, going tonto on social media, on our smartphones built by modern slave labour, wearing clothes made in sweatshops by people on pennies an hour.

We ignore it when it suits us, because we don't see it every day living our lives.

 

True, but going for a few weeks, to something you have aspired to be part of since a kid, and you might never have an opportunity again to do, and going to the same country to live and promote for many years purely for the cash is different.

Jota, if he signs, is doing the latter.