Gordon Strachan has delivered an illuminating insight into Celtic’s transfer needs.
The former Celtic and Scotland boss has unique contacts inside the club with one son on Ange Postecoglou’s coaching team and another involved with UK and European scouting.
Celtic have been slow to get business underway with Liel Abada the only new face in the side that drew with Midtjylland last night.
Carl Starfelt and Kyogo Furuhashi could be available for the SPFL opener against Hearts on July 31 but anything between six and 10 new faces are required to allow Ange Postecoglou to put his stamp on the squad.
Covering an interview with Betfair, The Sun reports Strachan saying:
There’s indecision in the transfer market and a couple of players would like to move on – Odsonne Edouard and Kristoffer Ajer. They were short at centre-back anyway, so they’ll have to work on that.
They’ll probably lose Edouard – he may move on. Leigh Griffiths looks like he’s counted himself out for the foreseeable future, so there’s a big rebuilding job at Celtic in terms of players.
They need centre-halves, right-backs and strikers – not easy to get, especially when you see strikers going for £30m and £40m in England who fail quite badly at that level.
Celtic haven’t got that money so it has to be a bit of a gamble with the wage structure. There’s a lot of work to do with recruitment, that’s for sure.
Since the interview took place Ajer has signed for Brentford, Edouard, Ryan Christie and Oliver Ntcham could also be on their way out with Celtic already banking around £30m from transfers this season.
While he casts an eye over recruitment Postecoglou has a week to put together a formation capable of winning in Denmark to take Celtic into the third qualifying round for the Champions League.
