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Aiden McGeady’s sliding doors moment and Celtic regret

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Aiden McGeady has discussed his mixed emotions over not returning to Celtic. 

In 2010 Celtic banked a club record transfer fee when the Academy bhoy was sold to Spartak Moscow for £12m. 

It was a leap into the unknown for the player but that fee allowed Neil Lennon to rebuild his squad with Gary Hooper, Tony Stokes, Kris Commons, Beram Kayal, Emilio Izaguirre and Fraser Forster creating a dynamic that launched Celtic towards nine successive titles. 

McGeady stayed in Moscow for three and a half years before joining Everton, while at Goodison the opportunity came up to rejoin Celtic but in his late twenties he wanted to prove himself in the EPL. 

In an interview with BBC Scotland the winger revealed: 

When I was at Everton, I had the chance to go back. At the time, I was probably being fed things by the manager that I was eventually going to play more often, plus I did think ‘if I go back now, that’s me almost turning my back on England’. I still thought deep down ‘I can play here’. 

The circumstances just weren’t quite right. Ronnie Deila was the manager, I was looking at the team and the way they were playing and I thought ‘I’m not really sure I want to go back just yet’. 

Obviously I would have loved to have gone back at another time, when it was right for everybody, but that opportunity never came up again. I regret that it meant I didn’t get to play for Celtic again, but at the time, no. 

Celtic under Deila were very much a club in transition with a largely untested coach trying to impose his ideas on a squad that was very much that of his predecessor. 

In his first season the arrivals of Gary Mackay-Steven and Stuart Armstrong gave the side a lift but losing to Malmo in the Champions League qualifiers in his second season was a blow that he never recovered from. 

What impact McGeady would have made on that squad will never be established but at the age of 36 a return to Celtic can virtually be dismissed.  

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