CQN names ‘Brendan’s’ remaining transfer budget

Celtic Quick News has claimed that there is over £30m available for Brendan Rodgers to spend in the transfer market.

In the naughties CQN was well informed of Celtic’s business plans, with many more outlets now to choose from their status has diminished but their adulation for the boardroom and the Balance Sheet has if anything grown stronger.

Precise details are never published but at Season Ticket renewal time some favoured outlets will big up expected transfer activity just to ensure that anyone wavering gets their ticket/s renewed.

With Brendan Rodgers returning as manager there was every reason to believe that the pre-2021 attitudes had been banished but two months after the Irishman rolled into a media conference the mood is very different.

Last summer a net £20m was spent on Camerob Carter-Vickers, Jota, Alexandro Bernabei and Sead Haksabanovic, this summer a budget of £30m was regularly being mentioned.

Four project/development signings plus two central defenders to replace Carl Starfelt wasn’t what fans anticipated.

Without doubt the squad is seriously weaker than the one that ended last season, killing off the famous Peter Lawwell motto of finishing the window in a stronger place although that usually overlooked getting knocked out of the Champions League by a club with less than half of Celtic’s budget.

In an unusually lengthy report today CQN claims:

So, how much is in the Celtic kitty for Rodgers to spend to revitalise a tired and unimaginative unit that were alarmingly off the pace as their interest in the first trophy up for grabs was ended so abruptly?

The actual figure will be between the manager and the club hierarchy, but a ballpark figure of £30million was mentioned in the summer. Since then, the champions have sold Filipe Jota and Carl Starfelt.

The fee for the Portuguese maverick was reported as £25million, but as CQN revealed in June, the Hoops’ share of the deal would be £12.5million after deductions had been made such as Benfica’s 30 per cent of the profit of the transfer after the initial selling fee of £6.5million the previous summer.

The reported figure for Starfelt following his switch to La Liga club Celta Vigo was £5million.

There will be alterations to the final figure, but an educated guess on both transfers would be that something in the region of £16million had been added to the club’s transfer war chest.

Six players have been brought to the club over the past two months. It’s a reasonable school of thought that at least five of those signings had been earmarked before Rodgers took over.

Mark Lawwell and his prolific recruitment team are more than likely to have been behind the arrivals of Marco Tilio (£2m), Odin Holm (£2.25m), Yang Hyun-jun (£2.1m), Kwon Hyeon-kyu (£850,000) and Gustaf Lagerbiekle (£3m).

Rodgers had prior knowledge of Maik Nawrocki after the centre-back played for Legia Warsaw against his former club Leicester City in European competition in 2021. The German-born Polish Under-21 international cost in the region of £4.3million.

The outlay, with these transfer fees recorded at the time of the transactions, comes to £14.5million.

Subtract that figure from the money that has been paid in and it shows a surplus of £1.5million in the club’s favour.

For reasons only known to himself Paul67 seems to want to repay the £6.5m paid to Benfica a year ago for Jota to decrease this summer’s transfer surplus.

That, to Celtic365 arithmetic works out at £38m sitting gathering interest while the quality of the ‘product’ on the park plunges.

Unless a number of big deals are all teed up and ready to be rubber stamped it looks highly unlikely that more than two permanent signings will be made before September 1, rushed loan deals in the final day of the window to cover failings looks more likelY.

The deals for Nawrocki and Lagerbielke both took around one week to be announced after they were first announced in Poland and Sweden.