Yeah don’t disagree with any of that.
Too depressed to write off Janko just now but I agree on your assessment of him so far. He has the athletic ability but that’s about it. Maybe the rest will come but hard to see it.
Fisher joined St Johnstone on loan for the season today.
Speaks volumes for Man Uniteds academy.
Youth is what I was referring to. Taking senior LOI players is pointless. How many lads have gone to the likes of Blackburn and failed that could have thrived in a proper academy in an ‘Irish’ club? Do they take many Irish youths these days?
That and the delusions of grandeur. They are more deluded than Limerick hurling supporters.
Even if Celtic had theoretical access to the kind of talent that Ajax or Porto have, those players would be unlikely to come to Scotland.
Even in a hypothetical scenario where Celtic actually had the type of talent on their books that Ajax or Porto get, those players would be out the gate in an instant for peanuts.
Football economics has dictated that the highest level Celtic can possibly attain from now on is to qualify an odd time for the group stages of the CL and put up some kind of half respectable showing before bowing out, maybe, maybe, if they have a brilliant manager and get very lucky, qualifying for the last 16 before being thrashed. And that will be on average a once a decade occurrence at best.
And that’s it. That’s as high as they can possibly go, forever.
Hamsters on a wheel that’s spinning far faster than they can keep up with.
the issue is that a Celtic team which cost 24 million got pumped out of the CL by a team that cost 2m
Not really. Just a realist. Seen a fair few false dawns. Great run from the 21s, hope they don’t fuck it up now.
Why would a player from Surinam or Brazil be reluctant to come to Celtic? A chance of a career in Europe, plenty would take it.
And most would be sold on but it’s revenue generating. Expecting to buy a player from Holland or Belgium for €2m and sell him for £10m is naive. It won’t keep repeating. If you had a cheaper source of players you could acquire more and sell them for less spectacular profits and still keep as compeititve as Celtic are now.
Which is not competitive at all.
Agreed. And yet how much more competitive are Ajax?
It’s more sustainable. I think there’s a danger that Celtic don’t stagnate at this pre-CL level. There’s a danger they regress and fall behind clubs spending money in Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan etc.
Not very much. They’re stagnating into a perpetual making up the numbers in the group stages scenario at best.
Which, with the advantages they have in terms of having a world class academy tradition, being able to attract talent from cheap markets, being situated in one of Europe’s most attractive cities and being one of the greatest clubs in Europe, doesn’t say much for Celtic’s hopes of being able to improve.
Trouble is, you can pay for decent players, but a season in the spl as it currently stands, will drag them down to mediocrity.
I agree.
But I don’t think being also-rans in the CL group stages is a miserable existence. I’d rather that to being also-rans in mid-table in the EPL. You’ll have more money but to what end? Ultimately, only a handful of teams can be successful. Soccer has a serious problem in that it’s looking more and more likely that those clubs will remain much the same for years and years unless they do something drastic about it. But aiming to be a CL team isn’t a ridiculous aspiration and sport would be very boring if the only teams with any sense of purpose or enjoyment were those who won the league.
And as preposterous as the idea sounded and as ridiculed as it was, the obvious answer is to have a league for top teams in Holland/Portugal/Scotland/Begium etc. And maybe Malmo. And if Ajax and Celtic and Benfica and Porto and Anderlecht etc etc all push for it properly then they’ll get it. And they might still be second fiddle but they’ll have competition, they’ll have prestige and they should still be able to keep their domestic CL routes open until it all becomes franchises anyway.
Rather than an Atlantic league, a slightly less preposterous solution would be to organise football in Europe on a regional basis. ie a British Isles league, Spain and Portugal combine, Holland and Belgium go in with France, Austria and Switzerland with Germany etc.
None of this will happen in my lifetime though.
Would celtic have any decent links with the super clubs around europe?
Yeah I don’t think you need a fully fledged league.
You run the SPL and Eredivisie until March. Then you take the top 2 teams in each country or whatever and you have
Celtic, Anderlecht, Brugges, Ajax, PSV, Porto, Benfica, Malmo, etc in a competition.
And you have a “Europa League” level alternative for the teams coming 3rd and 4th.
Those competitions can be home and away groups with semi-final and final. CL qualification can still be based on domestic leagues which just finish earlier. If those domestic leagues are finished then you don’t have the problem of conflict of interest and it’s easier to get buy-in for new competition at the start. Sell the rights to Sky and you’re sorted. A player coming to Celtic now gets a shot at CL qualification, a chance to win a domestic title and a chance to win a multi-nation title.
Won’t happen in your lifetime though. And won’t happen if the clubs don’t insist on it, instead of just suggesting it.
They have reasonable links with Man City. They’re new and mostly based on a family connection at executive level.
Or FC Zurich’s academy where he was up until September 2013
I told you bhoys that Johansen was a useless headless chicken. Sell the cunt.