Will We Ever Spend £5 Million Or More On One Player Again?

Who knows what the future holds. As it stands now, no..

5 mill plus then wages, that's a top top player for us (unless we're unlucky enough to find another scheidt player), more than likely. And at the present time, top, top players, for those figures, don't want to play here..

 

Heard on radio Scotland a few months ago a story about us and finbo. They asked 5m for him and the word was that Park said he was worth 4 but not 5. So the move broke down. If Park had said he was then we would've paid the money. Turned out he was right. Might all be bs mind.

 

When you take a closer look at our transfer dealings from around 2000 onward it's actually pretty galling the money we've spent and the players we've brought in.

After the big summer when O'Neill came in and won the treble after buying Sutton, Lennon, Valgaeren and Thompson (which was party aided by the £6 million sale of Viduka to Middlesbrough and the offloading of some big earners like Rafael and Berkovic) our transfer spending is pretty low.

 

Harsh. Scored 20+ goals in 4 of his 5 seasons.

 

After 2001, MON probably spent less than £10m, heck maybe not even £5m over the 4 seasons before he left. He was probably frustrated like *.

But aye overall our expenditure has always been very low. It works sometimes, other times it doesn't. Frustrating as a supporter at times - you just have to keep the faith though.

 

Hartson is the last man to hit a century. How he was not a good investment is mental. Some of our supporters are obsessed with treating players as assets. They only judge them on what money we get for them. This is also mental. A players value is what he does on the park and sometimes spending money on quality is investment in itself. The return is what we get on the park not about what gos into the bank.

 

Thing is, if you take a look back at our transfer dealings over the past ten years or so it's not worked as much as we sometimes may think. There are a shitload of duds that I'd forgotten about! :smiley-laughing002:

 

I know. He was good, however he was only really good - a top, top player, for about 2 seasons with us.

 

Something quite funny as well, people always go on about the money Martin O'Neill got to spend, then forgetting that he soent that money very, very well.

In amongst our top tendearest signings ever are Raphael Schiedt, Eyal Berkovic, Marc Antoine Fortune.

Top 3 are all what I'd say are some of our greats from the last 30 years, Hartson, Sutton and Lenny.

 

No chance. Those days are long gone, Scottish football will never be what it once was unless we either get some kind of drastic investment, be it some mental billionaires who don't mind * money about just because they can.

The 5 million quid fee alone would be far too much, never mind the wages which would then unsettle the whole team if one guy was on 70k a week and our captain etc was on 25k. The only huge signing we might see in that respect will be a loanee.

 

Aye, it seems as if he more than paid for it thereafter aswell, not just in success but in the fact he was given pennies until he left.

 

Bullshit. We could spend the VVD money on 2 players and pay them 30k a week easily.

 

Again, there's an element of risk attached to all football transfers, isn't there? If I remember correctly Raphael was considered a pretty decent player when we signed him from Gremio, wasn't he? He simply didn't settle into life in Scotland.

Berkovic was 27 when we signed him, and he'd been a regular for West Ham, but he just wasn't an O'Neill style of player, was he? He left us and went on to be voted Man City player of the season by the fans in 2002/03, and he did not too badly for Portsmouth either.

Fortune was a bust, he simply didn't work out.

 

I think we're workimg towards being able to shell out those sorts of fees at the moment, although it is still a wee bit further down the road. We've been selling for high fees and wanting to get into the Champions League consistently. If we do so, with the £20m it gaurentees then we will have a bigger chance of being able to soend higher fees.

We need to get into the Champions League proper and continue selling p,ayers for high fees for the next 3/4/5 years for us to be able to do so though.

It's not outwith the realms of possibility with the stranglehold we have on Scottish Football just now.

 

we will eventually but i think its a bit of an obsession from some fans about these big money moves that Celtic "should" be spending. Think about the quality players we have had for less money. Its about picking the right players. It seems that people automatically think players that cost more money are better.

It is frustrating but Celtic will always buy 2players for 2.5mil rather than 1player for 5mil. It does annoy me as well but I can see it makes sense.

We are similar to Arsenal business wise. They could afford £50-60mil but choose to spend 20-40mil most of the time. Its only reckless or sugar daddy teams that go for the max price of their budget.

 

I was hoping that we were progressing to the stage you are talking about. However the last few years indicates that we will not be pushing on but keeping the status quo. I hope to be proven wrong on this point but I dont think I will be, sadly

 

I like Fortune. I think he didn't work out because we tried to pair him with Samaras, never had a proper striker up front. Would be excellent for our current formation come to think of it.

Berkovic was decent really, he came in under Barnes and that season was a right off. O'Neill wanted to take the team in a different direction.

Schiedt was an average Brazillian defender whose proce got bumped up due to a Brazil cap. This was around the time they capped about 100 odd players, I'm sure it got investigated at some point the amount they were capping actually.

Risk is always involved, just good to point our money doesn't always equal success.

 

Massive difference in what we could do and what we actually do. Say we get 10 million for Van Dijk, do you think we will spend 5 million on two guys and give them 30k each? Did we do that when we sold Wanyama? Forster? Absolutely no chance. We will sell Van Dijk for about 10 million, sign a few guys for 1.5 and 2.5 million and then repeat the whole process all over again.

Desmond is worth a billion quid, he could easily sign a 50 million quid player and give him 200k a week wages, will he? Will he * :bbpd:

 

We've also been paying down our debts. Once that is done we can build up a er.... war chest

 

We're miles off Porto and such. I had a look. Since about 2004 (definitely) they have been selling players for mega bucks. Since about 2007, they have been shelling out £6m/£7m on a player or even a couple of players, then supplementing that with £3m/£4m players. Spending about £25m a season on average.

They have the luxury of naming any price they want for a player, whereas we have a ceiling obviously. These players then more than make up for any mistakes they have made. A fair few £6m-£7m buys have been utter duds for them, however when they get £30m+ for player after player, it doesn't even matter.

What is worse is that they are regularly buying 50%/60% of player rights' etc so in effect they are really getting players worth £15m.

Depressing.