17th December 2025; Tannadice Park, Dundee, Scotland; Scottish Premiership Football, Dundee United versus Celtic; The Celtic board
Anthony Joseph has opened up on the shambles of summer 2025 recruitment at Celtic.
In January and July Kyogo Furuhashi and Nicolas Kuhn were sold with no replacements brought in. As August developed with the deadline approaching the issues were coming to the boil.
Adding to the drama of the final week of transfer business Celtic faced trips to Kairat Almaty and Ibrox. Both matches ended goal-less. Celtic went out of the Champions League and failed to beat a team managed by Russell Martin. Shin Yamada was on the pitch at the end of both matches.
Fans have tried to piece together the various strands of what went on. The logic, the thought process involved.
Fair to say that the final days of August 2025 will be held up as a model of how not to do business. Or how to make an ambitious manager extremely disillusioned.
In a wide ranging discussion on Celtic’s transfer failings Joseph really opened up on the disastrous dealing in the summer of 2025.
I mean, I could write a book about deadline day last summer. Honestly, the amount of… everything that could have gone wrong last summer went wrong. As in summer 2025 on deadline day, you had the Adam Idah situation. You had Yang in a hotel in Birmingham.
You had Manuel Benson driving up the road from Burnley. You had Dolberg collapsing. You had Tounekti signed for £5.2m when negotiations were starting around £2m.
David Datro Fafana, they were bidding for him and he he ends up turning down Celtic to go to Charlton and then that (the Charlton move) fell through as well.
So it was an absolute disaster and you’d have thought and you’d have thought it can’t get any worse. To be fair, it probably wasn’t. So, I wouldn’t say it was worse this summer, but it was still a shambolic.
There was more to the window than the detail above.
THE HORRORS OF CELTIC RECRUITMENT IN 2025
Hayato Inamura and Shin Yamada were signed on the back of Paul Tisdale’s scouting trips to Japan. Rodgers had rejected Yamada in January as a replacement for Kyogo, by summer time he had less say in the issue. He did leave Inamura and Yamada out of Celtic’s Europa League squad.
Before squandering £5.2m on Tounekti Celtic paid a similar fee for Michel-Ange Balikwisha. Recently Balikwisha admitted that he wanted substituted 20 minutes into his debut at Ibrox.
We also discovered that Daizen Maeda had a move to Wolfsburg all lined up. Apparently he had cleared out his locker at Lennoxtown. That deal also fell through at the last minute.
Away to Kairat Celtic were negotiating deals to sell Idah, Yang and Maeda. Not good for morale or preparing for a Champions League Play Off.
Head of Football Operations Tisdale left Celtic on January 5 with Wilfried Nancy.
Michael Nicholson and Chris McKay remain on the payroll, rewarded with a combined £1.5m for last seasons efforts.
