Daizen Maeda

Why?
I know there's a theoretical upper limit for any player sold out of Scotland but if we recruit well, we'll still make decent profit on the majority and as we do better in Europe the ceiling will raise also.

But much more importantly - we'd have a much better team on the pitch....
and isn't that the whole point?

 

If we spend 80% of our biggest transfer fees on the replacement, we'll make a massive loss on player registration trading. For a club like us that doesn't get a huge amount from TV or worldwide merchandising, that would probably be enough to push us into a loss overall.

 

I don't get it - spending less than we get in surely can't be risking FFP or other rules?
Celtic must be 10 million miles away from FFP issues?

Happy to be educated otherwise!

 

Look, I'm no expert and I don't want to invest the time it would take me to look into it in detail. I'm just going on what to me looks like common sense. Feel free to correct me on any of this, but FWIW, the following seems right to me:

Firstly, there have to be costs associated with any transfer: agents' fees, medical fees, administration fees, that kind of thing. Bureaucracies are amazingly good at extracting both legitimate service fees and rents at every stage .

Secondly, the profits from successful trades have to cover the costs of the signings where we make a loss.

Thirdly, there are overheads to cover, the cost of the scouting network, the data analytics, flights, etc. Note that our succesful transfers where we make a profit have to cover the overheads and the fees of the unsuccessful ones and not only their own. Just think of all those project signings!

Then there will be sell on clauses to deal with. Of course, we have them too (e.g. Frimpong); but it's the nature of these things that at the moment when we sell, the sell-on clauses of previous clubs are activated and they get their cut, whereas any sell-on clauses we add are still potential and dependent on the player doing well enough to earn a bigger move, avoiding major injury, etc.

Finally, it's worse than that, as football "inflation" has masked some of our failures; but we can't rely on that always continuing. So we need to take into account that our success rate is not as good as it might look if we just naively look at fees and adjust for CPI inflation.