Challenging the narrative that ‘expensive’ trio have been a poor investment | OneFootball

In recent weeks all of the Scottish media talk surrounding Celtic has focused on the transfer market. That Celtic have had several low bids knocked back by various clubs has been one point raised and an argument has been made, by the likes of Martin O’Neill and even the Clyde Superscoreboard panel, that Celtic wasted almost £30m last summer on the signings of Austin Trusty, Adam Idah and Arne Engels. In my opinion, there are four aspects of those signings which I would use to push back against such comments.

The first point I’d make is simply that transfers are not guarantees. Celtic have signed a number of failures in the lower end of the market (£1m-£5m and loans) before. The likes of Scepovic, Lassad, Miku, Brozek , Cole, Shved , Allan , Ciftci , Compper et al came from that level of the market and all sat on the bench. So by the logic that some players haven’t lived up to their price tag, we should never sign any player for that low price again either. Despite the fact that Kyogo, Maeda, Hatate and O’Riley etc are success stories from that section of the market. It just proves that some deals work and others don’t, not that the first sign of failure leads to a loss of ambition, or that three failures means there’ll never be a success.

The end of the previous paragraph provides a segway into my second point. What makes these players failures? Arne Engels was steady last season. Austin Trusty the same. From the way people have spoken about them you’d think they stunk the place out and were dreadful. In the case of the former, Engels is a young man with bags of potential. There’s every chance he will improve and come good to live up to their price tag – just as Kuhn did after a settling in period. Meanwhile, Trusty was similar to Liam Scales in performance and Scales is a player who is worth probably £4m or so in today’s money. Again, hardly a disaster. As for Adam Idah, he scored 20 goals last season. That’s an acceptable return for a guy who played second fiddle to Kyogo and indeed Idah would be very good as a back up striker for Celtic. The real issue in that department is not the signing of Idah, but the departure of Kyogo and lack of replacement. We should be looking to have a top striker with Idah a 20 goal a season back up option. He’s not worth £9m but that’s Celtic’s fault for dithering in the transfer window instead of securing him for almost half the price – then when time was running out there was a price hike and we overpaid.

It should be noted that Idah, Trusty and Engels all featured prominently in the Champions League. Would we have drawn away at Atalanta without them? Would we have beaten Young Boys? Could we have gone toe to toe with Bayern Munich over two legs? It was our most successful European campaign in years. Idah’s two goals at Aston Villa earned several hundred thousand pounds. His forcing of the goal against Young Boys to secure progression to the knockout phase instantly recouped his transfer fee with the monstrous prize money on offer. Indeed, Celtic earned approximately £50m from the Champions League, which is almost double their outlay on those three signings. In addition to that prize money they played a role in winning, it’s a good bet that when the three depart in the future, Celtic will recoup the £30m spent and if there’s improvement in them over the next year or two then they’ll make a considerable profit.

Finally, talk of the fees is somewhat disingenuous when you consider that the sale of Matt O’Riley alone funded those three deals. So in effect, Celtic spent nothing on them. Steven Naismith remarked that if Celtic make another £30m worth of mistakes again then they’d be in trouble. Would they? Having sold Kyogo and Kuhn for a combined £26m I doubt that. Even more so when one considers that the club has around £100m in the bank and a great chance to earn tens of millions more in the Champions League.

In a nutshell, the fact that these three didn’t instantly get themselves in the running for player of the year doesn’t mean that Celtic should give up on the idea of a player at their price tags. Ambition is required for progression – whether that be a player for £1m or £15m. It is the quality of the player that counts, not the price tag.