Maeda wants Celtic to drop his transfer price, according to Mark Pirie of the Record. Anybody have the faintest idea what the asking price actually is??
Pirie writes an article about dropping the transfer price, yet neglects to tell anyone what it actually is...
Eric Knott Daizen Maeda wants Celtic to drop his asking price.
That’s the big exclusive from Mark Pirie of the Daily Record.
There’s just one tiny problem with Mark’s scoop.
Nowhere in the entire article does he tell us what Maeda’s asking price actually is.
Not once.
Read it top to bottom, and see if you can find a number in there.
An entire article about dropping a price, and the price is nowhere to be found.
How does a man ask for a number to be dropped when nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever been told the number in the first place?
Is it £20 million?
£25 million?
£30 million?
Answers on a postcard, because Mark isn’t telling.
He’s built us a whole article around a figure he can’t be bothered to print.
Give me a f*****g break.
The Stenography Corps at their absolute finest.
Fed a line, transcribe the line, hit publish, collect the wage.
Whatever you do, don’t ask the obvious question that any ten-year-old reading it would ask.
Which is: drop it from what, exactly?
Because at Celtic, there are two magic numbers.
£3 million to buy a player, and £25 million to sell one.
Those are the figures scribbled on the back of a beermat in Barbados.
And I’d bet my last pound the absent meddling golfer has Maeda pencilled in at the top end of that sell number.
Which is where all of this gets gloriously ironic.
Because for once, it isn’t a Norwegian minnow telling us to stop insulting them and get real.
It’s our own player.
Daizen Maeda himself, publicly, on Japanese television, begging his own club to be reasonable about his valuation.
Maeda is now doing the board’s negotiating for them, and they still won’t listen.
Here’s what he actually said to a Japanese TV show called PUSH Sports.
“I wish it would go down even more. If it goes down, it will be easier for me to transfer teams. So I don’t want it to go up.”
Read that again.
The player is telling us the value is too high.
The player is telling us to lower it so a deal can happen.
And this is a board that has spent two summers lowballing every selling club in Europe into oblivion.
The one time a valuation could actually come down and get a deal over the line, they’ll dig their heels in like a petulant child.
Make no mistake, this is a board that has never once let a bit of hypocrisy stand in the way of a “principle.”
Funny how the concept of a fair price only exists at Celtic when we’re the ones doing the buying, isn’t it?
The shoe’s on the other foot, and suddenly £25 million is sacred.
The Tractor Boys are pushing, and we’re doing what we always do.
Nothing.
Ipswich Town, Premier League new boys, want him at Portman Road, and Record Sport tells us they’re “keen to wrap up a deal quickly.”
Quickly.
At Celtic.
The two words have never once appeared in the same sentence and meant anything.
Ipswich will be told to email Barbados, wait for the golfer to finish his back nine, and then get an answer sometime around September 3rd.
By which point Maeda will have emptied his Lennoxtown locker again.
Because we’ve all seen this film before, haven’t we?
Last summer he had one foot in Wolfsburg, the locker was cleared, deadline day came, and then Adam Idah walked out the door and left us without a recognised striker.
So the move died on its feet, and the board got to keep their asset while pretending it was some grand masterplan.
It wasn’t a masterplan.
It was the usual chaos, dressed up after the fact.
And here’s the part that should worry you.
Maeda came back from that mess, put his head down, and scored in six games on the bounce.
Title deciders. The Scottish Cup final against Dunfermline. The lot.
Then he went to a World Cup and reminded everyone what he is.
His value went up.
And now the man himself is standing there asking us to bring it back down so he can chase his dream, and we’re going to fumble it anyway.
Not because we can’t do the deal.
But because Silent Mike will be waiting on an email that the absent golfer is in no rush to send.
World class dealings from a world class board.
Meanwhile Mark Pirie writes 400 words about a price tag and never once tells us the price.
Which, when you think about it, is the perfect metaphor for this whole club.
A lot of words.
A lot of noise.
And a number nobody will actually put on the table.
Get it sorted.
Or don’t, and just watch Ipswich walk him for a song at midnight on deadline day, off the back of another Champions League failure and £40 million pissed down the drain.
Such is a Celtic fan’s lot.
Jesus wept.
Key Takeaways
- Daizen Maeda wants Celtic to reduce his asking price, but his price is never stated in the article.
- This article highlights the irony of a player asking for a lower value while the club remains unresponsive.
- Celtic’s board continues to be criticized for their inconsistent negotiation strategies and failure to act quickly on transfers.
- Despite Maeda’s value increasing, he asks for a reduction to facilitate his transfer, showcasing the club’s approach as dysfunctional.
- Fans fear missing out on a deal, reminiscent of past transfer blunders where the club failed to capitalize on opportunities.
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Phillip Cooney 
Bhoycie 
We can be the masters of our own fate, or masters of our destruction, the solution has always been in our hands , we don’t need to try and guess who’s going and who’s coming in we know the answer everybody and anybody is going, and no one is coming in ,so stop torturing yourselves and make a plan of action and the answer will get easier and easier as the club declines through asset stripping then less fans will pay anything ,the solution has always been money ,stop giving them your money or you are complicit in the destruction of our club
All typed up from Pirie between chocolate doughnuts and biscuits on a bleak Tuesday morning as nothing significant is happening out of Ibroxland . And as we all know that the clumpany which finished a lame third last season in the league has and always will have priority from the daily Record ‘sport ‘ desk …..perpetually !
He has 12 months left on his contract, WTF are they asking FFS? Would do well to get anywhere near £10m, just let him go, after last summer he downed tools for 6 months, a non trying player is the last thing we need next season.
If we sell him for £5/8m along with the £2.5 from Nawrocki sale that would be enough for Hogh. I’m wondering if the tache every attended business school, or was the “send heavies in” school!!!!!