Ghedjemis, An £8m Rival Bid, And The Photograph That Should Terrify The Celtic Board

Transfer windows run on leverage.

Not always the player's.

Sometimes the agent's.

Sky Sports report that Frosinone have rejected an £8m bid for Fares Ghedjemis – from across the city, days after our own £6m approach was turned down.

Two Glasgow clubs.

One winger.

One Serie A side sitting back and thoroughly enjoying itself.

And if the timing of all this doesn't make you slightly suspicious, it probably should.

Two Days Ago I Said Walk Away

I'll own that one.

On Sunday I argued Celtic should thank Ghedjemis for his time and move on immediately.

Once is unfortunate. Twice is a pattern.

I still think that principle holds.

But there's a difference between a player messing us about and a market being deliberately warmed up around him.

And this is starting to look a lot like the second one.

This Is Simply What An Agent's Job Looks Like

Consider the sequence.

Celtic bid £6m.

Rejected.

Martin O'Neill then goes public: "We have a very, very strong interest in him." "We are genuinely making really good progress."

And days later, a rival arrives with £8m.

Frosinone, meanwhile, want somewhere around €15-20m.

Funny how that number keeps edging closer.

I'm not suggesting anything improper here. Quite the opposite.

This is the job.

An agent exists to manufacture competition, and we handed him the raw material. Our interest was the gift. O'Neill confirming it out loud was the receipt.

Everything since has been leverage.

We Keep Creating The Auction We Then Complain About

This is where the frustration actually sits for me.

Because we've watched the same cycle all summer.

Preparing an offer.

Weighing up a bid.

Expected to make contact.

It's the other half of the sell-before-we-buy habit I've written about before.

Move slowly enough and you don't just risk losing the player.

You build the bidding war yourself.

Now Picture The Photograph

Here's the part that should genuinely worry people inside Celtic Park.

Picture Ghedjemis being unveiled in a blue shirt.

Picture the Adams Family holding up a winger our own manager only recently said he was making "really good progress" with.

Then picture the board explaining that one.

Not to the media.

To a support that has spent this entire summer being told to be patient.

That isn't a football problem.

That's a PR catastrophe.

Supporters can accept losing a target. Every club in Europe loses targets.

What they will not accept is losing him to that lot, for a fee we could have covered a fortnight ago.

Pay It Or Say It

There are two honest positions available now.

Decide he's worth £13-17m and go and finish it.

Or decide he isn't, say so plainly, and spend that money on somebody desperate to come.

Both are perfectly defensible.

What isn't defensible is the third option. The one we always seem to land on.

Hovering.

Bidding just underneath.

Letting somebody else set the price.

Because if this ends with Ghedjemis across the city, nobody is going to remember that Frosinone were greedy, or that an agent did his job well.

They'll remember that Celtic were interested first.

And that the board hesitated.

The problem was never really the valuation.

It's that we keep negotiating like we've got all summer.

We haven't.