Why Anthony Joseph’s Sorensen comments should terrify Celtic fans…

Yesterday evening, I wrote about the nine loan signings Celtic have made over the last two windows.

Today, I’ve been watching Anthony Joseph on the Transfer Show on Celtic Fans TV, and I’m even more worried than I was then.

Because what he said about Oliver Sorensen tells you everything you need to know about how recruitment works at our club.

Sorensen was a bizarre signing recommended by an agent to fill in a gap.

Here is how Joseph described it, in the Celtic Fans TV video:

Sorensen was a bizarre signing recommended by an agent to sort of fill in a gap in midfield.

Read that again.

An agent.

Not a scout, not a head of recruitment, not a technical director.

An agent, with a player to shift, picked up the phone to Celtic and offered him to us.

And Celtic said yes.

That isn’t a recruitment strategy.

That is a club taking whatever is put in front of it.

Joseph went on to say that Sorensen was meant to be a more attacking midfielder.

But every time he has watched him, he honestly doesn’t know what he does.

He doesn’t want to be disrespectful to the lad, and neither do I, but he can’t see what type of player he is.

And Sorensen has played plenty of games already.

So it isn’t as if he hasn’t been given the chance to show us.

Celtic don’t go out and find players, the players are flogged to us.

This is the bit that should bother you.

When a club is properly run, the club identifies its targets early and goes after them.

At Celtic, it seems to work the other way round.

The agents come to us, and the more desperate we get, the better the deal they can sell.

And we know when the desperation sets in.

Deadline day.

It is no coincidence that these arrive when the clock is ticking and the shortlist has run dry.

Because by the time Celtic actually start looking for players, the options are very limited.

The ones they wanted are gone, the prices have gone up, and what is left is whatever somebody’s agent is willing to offer.

Joseph said it himself – the likes of Sorensen came in because they knew they weren’t going to get the midfielder they were after.

Which is why a player like Sorensen ends up in a Celtic shirt.

Not because we wanted him.

Because we needed somebody, anybody, and he was available.

The recruitment never happens early, it’s always a last minute scramble.

It doesn’t matter if it is January or the summer.

The pattern is exactly the same every single time.

The deals drag on over half a million quid here or there.

Then the panic button gets pushed in the final days, and we overpay for players who were never in that price bracket.

That point was made on the show too, and it is a fair one.

Look at what that approach has left us with.

A goalkeeper who is a fourth choice at his parent club.

Two lads on loan from Chelsea who had never played senior football.

And Sorensen, who is playing but who nobody can work out.

I said yesterday that we have spent almost £8 million on our last nine loan signings.

Only one of them gave us any serious return on that money, and that was Julian Araujo.

One in nine.

You wouldn’t take that to the bookies, never mind use it to run a football club.

Of course, the board will say it is all part of the plan.

But as was put on the show – are they really saying this was the plan all along?

Because the fans can see it with their own eyes.

Joseph also pointed out that Celtic stopped spending once they went out of the Champions League.

Make no mistake, that says a lot about how they view their strategy.

The club say the Champions League exit didn’t affect the budget.

Well, that doesn’t add up.

Because Joseph said they were still chasing one target for £10 million, with other deals lined up that would have taken the total to about £25 million.

And then it all went quiet.

Funny, that.

He reckons he could write a book about deadline day last summer, and he wasn’t joking.

If that is the plan, I’d hate to see what chaos looks like.

Are the walls finally starting to close in on the Celtic board?

I think they are.

Every week, there is another story that shows the cracks.

No head of football operations since January.

No head of recruitment at all since the last one left.

An interim chairman who has been in the chair for a year now.

And now we find out that agents are ringing up to offer us players to fill gaps.

Their amateur ways are being exposed from every angle.

Martin O’Neill has taken responsibility for how short-term last January was, and put it down to not knowing if he would still be here.

Fast forward twelve months, and Celtic are in exactly the same position.

Still no head of recruitment, still an interim chairman, still no plan.

The board have told supporters they will spend in January.

Well, we have heard that before.

And if the same people are doing the same job in the same way, why on earth would we expect a different result?

That is what terrifies me about January.

Not that Celtic won’t spend money.

Because they will, if Joseph is right.

It’s that they’ll spend it on whoever is sold to them in the last few days of the window.

And we’ll be having this same conversation again in the summer…

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