Nicolas Kuhn suffers a major injury setback during his Monchengladbach debut. He’s had no luck since leaving Celtic…

Yesterday, we found out that Nicolas Kuhn has torn a muscle in his leg on his Borussia Monchengladbach debut.

Twenty one minutes of football, and he’s out for up to six weeks.

Twenty one minutes.

That’s the kind of luck the boy has had since the day he left Celtic Park.

And I don’t think anybody who watched him in the hoops takes any pleasure in it.

The Daily Record carried the story, along with the club’s reaction to it.

Here is what Gladbach sporting director Rouven Schroder had to say:

“This is extremely unfortunate for Nicolas and for us as well.

“Now the focus is on providing him with the best possible support during his rehabilitation and gradually reintegrating him into team training.”

Extremely unfortunate is one way of putting it.

Cursed is another.

Kuhn never got close to the player he could have been at Celtic, and that is the bit that still nags at me.

There were flashes of it, of course there were.

Games where he’d get at a full back and you’d think, right, here we go.

Then there were the games where he drifted, and the end product just wasn’t there.

Eighteen months of promise, and the promise never quite hardened into the finished article.

But here’s the thing – he was 24 and he was getting better.

Which is exactly when a proper football club keeps hold of a player.

And which is exactly when ours does the opposite.

Como came in with £18 million and the board bit their hand off.

Because that’s what they do.

A decent number lands on Silent Mike’s desk and the football side of the argument doesn’t even get a hearing.

Since when did a spreadsheet know a football decision?

Nobody in that boardroom asked whether the lad was ready for Italy.

Nobody asked what he’d be worth in two years either.

Kuhn wasn’t ready for that move, and I’d argue another year or two at Celtic would have got him the move he actually wanted.

Six league starts in his first full season in Serie A.

Six.

At a club managed by Cesc Fabregas that finished in the top four and qualified for the Champions League for the first time in its history.

He should have been in the middle of that.

Instead he was surplus to requirements before he’d properly unpacked.

And now he’s back in Germany on a season long loan at a club that finished last season scrapping, and he’s picked up a torn muscle in his first game.

That’s not a career progressing.

That’s a career stalling.

Does anybody at Celtic Park still want to call that progress?

Give him another eighteen months of Champions League nights at Celtic Park and the offer that came in for him might have been double what Como paid.

Instead everybody lost.

Kuhn lost the move he wanted, and we lost the player.

And he isn’t the only one.

Maik Nawrocki has picked up a bad one in the last fortnight too, which makes two former Celtic players crocked inside a couple of weeks.

Neither of them are our problem any more, and I know that.

But I’d rather they were.

Because when I look at what we had on the books eighteen months ago and what we’ve got now, the pattern is the same one it always is.

Sell the asset, bank the profit, replace him with a project.

Then tell the support it was a brilliant piece of business, and put the number in the accounts to prove it.

We all know how it goes by now.

If Celtic had held on to Nicolas Kuhn, we might not be watching Europa League football this season.

Think back to Kairat Almaty.

A tie we had no business losing, going into it with the goals stripped out of the team.

Now put a fit, in form Kuhn on that right hand side.

Does that tie go the same way?

I don’t think it does.

Maybe I’m wrong, and who knows, maybe he’d have had one of his quiet nights.

But you’d fancy him to produce something on a pitch like that, wouldn’t you?

We’ll never know, because the board had already cashed him in.

That’s the bit that sticks with me – we didn’t lose that tie on the pitch, we lost it in an office months earlier.

And they did the same thing again this summer with Arne Engels, right before another qualifier we needed to win.

Sell the best players, then act surprised when the team that’s left can’t get over the line.

Make no mistake, that isn’t bad luck.

That’s a business model.

Nicolas Kuhn is a story of what could have been at Celtic, and we’ve got a fair few of those now.

I hope the boy gets his six weeks behind him and gets a run of games in the Bundesliga.

I genuinely do.

Because none of this was his doing – he did what any 24 year old would do when a big club and a big wage come calling.

The people who should have known better were the ones sitting in the boardroom at Celtic Park.

They saw £18 million and they saw a net profit.

The rest of us saw a winger we’d never properly get to see.

Get well soon, Nicolas.

You deserved better than this, and so did we…

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