After reading the comments to my last article I saw that a few of you have mentioned lack of money as being a contributing factor to our current struggles. After watching the derby match on Sunday, it is clear we are missing a big no nonsense experienced centre back. We knew during the second half of last season that Glenn Loovens and Daniel Majstorovic are not good enough. Money should have been invested.
Not much has changed financially for Celtic in the last ten years and that is a problem. We earn more money playing friendly games in the summer than we do domestically and our TV deal is nothing short of a joke. I would think we are probably paying less wages than than a decade ago but not by a huge amount. So nothing has changed for us.
What has changed since then is that the EPL has money to burn. A team like Bolton earn about £50m in TV deals and prize money each year. We earn about £5m. After two years they have £100m, we have £10m, and so on. The gap increases every year and we cannot compete with their spending power. That should not stop us spending the same as we were ten years ago.
There was an opportunity missed in the summer. In the last decade Celtic have been averaging about £10m spent every year on players. This amount should have been made available again with at least one £5m player coming in.
At the end of last season we had the nucleus of a good team with Kelvin Wilson coming in to strengthen the defence. Singing Mohamed Bangura and Victor Wanyama cost £3m which is fine but we should have signed someone with experience and is already proven, someone who would start in the team. This summer should have been about quality not quantity.
Someone like Richard Dunne may have cost about £5m but I’m sure the wages saved from Andreas Hinkel and Shaun Maloney could cover his wages. I am just using Dunne as an example but I am know for that kind of money we could get an experienced defender that would walk onto our team.
We knew that the winners of the league this year will almost certainly go straight into the Champions League group stages and we also knew that if we qualified for the Europa League group stages we would bring in about £4m. With one or two quality signings added to this team, I think we would have done both.
Granted we were able to get a higher quality player ten years ago. The likes of Chris Sutton, John Hartson, Paul Lambert, Neil Lennon and Alan Thompson were signed for decent money. Lambert had won the European Cup and Sutton had won a Premier League and all of them were in their prime and could have played for a host of Premier League sides but they chose us.
If they were in their prime today and had that choice to make again, not one of them would have appeared in the Hoops. We could offer competitive wages and Champions League football, now we have neither. Still I believe we can start competing again but it will take a few financial risks to get there.
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I simply would not shop in England…inflated wages for over hyped players. Quite clearly we can get much better value elsewhere so I don’t think lack of spending is the problem.
With diddies like Loovens, Mastorovic, O’Dea, Hooiveld still on the books – the question should be who is recommending these clowns.
We still have Newcastle’s 3rd choice keeper – that will ne the same Newcastle who have won hee haw for donkey’s years…is he the very best we can get (On loan even !!)
We have known our budgets for years, wages are far higher than clubs like Utrecht & Braga who both easily accounted for us in recent years.
We are NOT making full use of our resources, poor management from the top down.