Megabucks Celtic star hits the goal trail while out on loan – could this be a Silent Mike gem that got away?

Over the weekend, Michel-Ange Balikwisha scored a goal.

Yes, that Michel-Ange Balikwisha.

The same £5.5 million winger we signed last season and who then did precisely nothing for us.

While out on loan at KAA Gent, he netted at the back post in stoppage time against Zulte Waregem to make it 2-0.

It was his first goal in 14 months, and his first since he was at Antwerp, before he joined Celtic in 2025.

Now, you can probably guess what happens next.

Certain other sites will run with this story as proof that we lost out big time on his talents.

I’m not joking.

Give it a day or two and somebody will have written the “one that got away” piece, complete with a picture of him celebrating in a Gent jersey.

Here is how it was reported by Celtic Way:

Celtic winger Michel-Ange Balikwisha ended his 14-month goal drought as he netted for KAA Gent on loan.

Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Another would be that a footballer finally did what footballers are paid to do, and somebody thought it was news.

Eagle-eyed Silent Mike must have seen something in him that nobody else did

Because let’s be honest, nobody else did.

Balikwisha contributed very little to the Celtic cause during his time at the club.

We didn’t get much of a return on the £5.5 million we spent on him last season, after Kairat Almaty knocked us out of the Champions League.

Not that I’m sure he’d have been much good to us before that disaster.

But who knows?

Maybe Silent Mike sat through hours of Belgian footage and spotted a gem the rest of us were too daft to see.

And who am I to judge?

I’m only the guy who has watched the club for decades, while he’s the man who signs the cheques.

Maybe that’s the model working exactly as designed – sign them, park them, and wait 14 months for a goal against Zulte Waregem.

Then again, Gent are top of the league with 22 points from their opening eight games.

So perhaps the boy just needed to be somewhere that didn’t have a Silent Mike in it.

His last outing for Celtic was against Auchinleck Talbot, and even they weren’t troubled

Auchinleck Talbot are a fifth tier side.

That was the Scottish Cup, and that was the stage on which the £5.5 million man was supposed to show us what we’d been missing.

He couldn’t make an impression.

Not against a fifth tier outfit.

Let that sink in for a second.

Now, I’ll grant you that cup ties against part-timers are never easy, and plenty of better players have had a quiet afternoon against teams like Auchinleck.

But we’re not talking about a kid fresh out of the academy here.

We’re talking about a player the club paid £5.5 million for.

Surely that buys you more than a shrug?

Auchinleck’s back four had an easier afternoon than most of ours do watching the board’s transfer plan unfold.

And I say that as someone who has lived through some right nights in the stand.

The real story isn’t the goal, it’s what the board does with a £5.5 million mistake

Because this is where it stops being funny.

A player arrives for £5.5 million, scores none, and is shipped out on loan before the season is a month old.

Nobody explains it.

Nobody apologises for it.

And nobody in the boardroom has been asked, in public, who signed off on it and why.

I’d love to say that’s a one-off, but you know as well as I do that it isn’t.

The books get balanced, the spin gets spun, and the support is told to trust the process.

Meanwhile the process is a winger who needed Gent and a stoppage-time tap-in to remember where the goal was.

Make no mistake, if one of us got something that wrong at work, we’d be having a very awkward conversation with HR.

At Celtic, you get a loan and an option to buy.

Balikwisha goes down with Scheidt and Berkovic in the hall of expensive flops

For the realists amongst the support, there’s only one category for this one.

Rafael Scheidt and Eyal Berkovic.

We paid a lot of money, and we got very little in return.

All told, that’s nearly £15 million spent on those flops over the years.

Although to be fair to the board, Scheidt and Berkovic were signed in 1999, so their fees would be worth £20 million in today’s money.

By that measure Balikwisha is practically a bargain.

You’ve got to admire the consistency.

He will be fondly remembered for contributing the square root of f*** all to Celtic’s cause in the 2025/26 season.

And God forbid anybody would be held accountable for that particular error of judgment…

Nobody ever is, are they?

But hey, he’s back scoring goals in Belgium, so that must count for something?

It even came against a former Ibrox side manager, with Michael Beale now in charge of Zulte Waregem.

So there’s that.

Of course, I’m sure the SMSM will find a way to make that part of the story too.

Gent also hold an option to make the move permanent in the summer.

Which means the only real risk is that they decide they’d rather not.

What’s the bets he’ll be back at Celtic next season?

Keep your eyes on the board…

Jesus wept.

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