Exactly, and they can afford to compete with Celtic despite having a much smaller budget because they are in a part of the continent where there is much less money in football.
Those players you listed are fair enough and Lennon not giving them a chance is probably a fair point in some cases but I’m moreso talking about the Scottish players that are there and there for a long time such as Brown, Forrest, Christie. If these lads were at Ferencvaros they wouldn’t be that sought after by clubs who could double or triple their wages. Whereas in Celtic’s case if they had a similar wage bill to Ferencvaros they wouldn’t hold onto these players and they would get snapped up by championship clubs on triple the wages.
Celtic should be blowing them out of the water. They were atrocious tonight, did you watch the game?
The problem for Celtic wasn’t a lack of quality tonight, it was the fact that the manager is out of his depth. Celtic should have won that game 6-0 or thereabouts.
Forrest would struggle to get a game at Airdrie at the minute. Christie would be the star player in that Ferencvaros team and would be snapped up for a bargain fee in no length - he is hardly earning mega bucks at Celtic, he was signed for £300k.
I wasn’t making the point about this specific game. I remember last year on here Celtic’s wage bill came up on here and it was a lot higher than most of their European peers. Just explaining why that is the case and it doesn’t necessarily mean that Celtic underperform against those clubs, even if they do in some cases
I don’t think there’s a player at Celtic earning more than 30k a week.
The main problem would be that Celtic seems to be one of the only clubs in world football where an executive earns more than 95% of the first team squad.
30k a week is unheard of for most of Celtic’s peers in Europe but then a Championship club will happily pay 30k a week for a player who can help them get promoted which is what Celtic are up against compared to their peers
The problem is Celtic have a very poor manager and a board who do not invest in the playing team and consistently flog their best players.
Celtic don’t compete with Championship clubs for players generally. They look at the European market - they sign players from Israel, Scotland, Poland, Greece etc.
If you look at the Celtic first team squad - only Ntcham, Griffiths, Ajeti and Frimpong came from English clubs.
Edouard and Jullien came from France.
Soro, Bitton and Elhamed came from Israel.
Bolingoli came from Austria
Ajer from Norway
Klimala from Poland
Rogic from Australia
Barkas from Greece
And the rest are either products of the youth system or other players who have arrived from Scottish teams.
They try not to compete with English clubs for players because they won’t rather than can’t match their salaries.
You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. The player doesn’t have to come directly from England. The majority of the time when Celtic sign a player they are trying to compete with what English clubs are paying. Say Celtic had Scott Brown on 5 grand a week for the last 10 years, someone in the championship would have came in and gave him 20 or 30 grand no bother at some stage. In order to keep hold of their own homegrown or other Scottish players, and not even elite ones like Tierney they have to pay a price that is comparitive with English clubs and this then drives the wages of everybody up
Celtic are not competing with English clubs for players.
They didn’t compete with English clubs for Barkas or Bayo or Klimala or Elhamed or Bolingoli or Soro or Frimpong or Ntcham or the vast majority of their recent signings.
You’re point is that Celtic pay above and beyond what they should have in player wages because they are competing with English clubs?
This point is complete nonsense as Celtic primarily shop in markets where English clubs don’t, they look for obscure prospects in the likes of the Polish, Israeli, Austrian, Belgian, Norwegian, Greek leagues etc and get these guys in for fairly low fees and wages and also target the domestic league in Scotland where players generally go for pretty low fees as well.
I think the issue with the point you are trying to make is that it is fundamentally incorrect.
I don’t think any wage bills have been released for Celtic for last season. Brendan Rodgers and Scott Sinclair both came off the Celtic wage bill last season and would have been the two highest paid players. Celtic have a better playing squad and much more youthful playing squad than Copenhagen but they happen to have a halfwit for a manager.
Sporting Lisbon and Villarreal are hardly pulling up any trees. I’d be really dubious about Villarreal as they have quite a few big names there who would be on big money.
Rennes finished bottom of Celtic’s group last season in the EL.
So I don’t see much logic there.
And there’s also the fact that a suit pocketed £5m in his salary and bonus in Celtic’s last set of published accounts.