Celtic’s top 10 most expensive transfers of all-time

Looking at Celtic’s all-time top-10 most expensive transfer fees is a real eye opener to look at in more detail beyond just the names.

The list was compiled by Celtic by numbers, which is well worth a look for great numerical analysis and their tweet below shows the top-10 most expensive Celtic transfers in the history of the club. Let’s take a look at the purchase list and then what that tells us.

Before we take a look on a hit or miss basis and assess value for money on the players listed, let’s consider some of the sums involved.

It’s amazing to look back and see how much we spent on players around the millennium period, almost £22 million to support Martin O’Neill with four players alone, Chris Sutton, John Hartson, Neil Lennon and Joos Valgaeran. Irrespective of how the football transfer market has soared since, those are remarkable sums when you think of what we might pay currently for players.

It’s even more astonishing when you see Eyal Berkovic and Rafael Scheidt on there as John Barnes/Kenny Dalglish signings for around £10 million in total just a matter of months beforehand. Especially when those were serious flops and hefty losses when moved on. Those were all definitely way beyond biscuit tin budget signings!

You’d expect a club like Celtic to have gone well past those £6 million fees from 2000/2001 in the subsequent almost 20 years. But it’s all the way up to very recent times before we get anywhere near. In fact the Hoops do break that record by paying out £9 million and £7 million for Odsonne Edouard and Christopher Jullien respectively. A record fee for such a young player in Edouard breaks the pattern over those two decades.

It’s a bit of a mind blower that these are huge signings for the team, hefty fees compared to recent history,  but yet even then they are only just above those O’Neill signings in monetary terms. That all says a lot about where we are in the market place, our strategy for finding players for much smaller fees with talent and also selling on potential for significant profit. Virgil Van Dijk, Victor Wanyama and others come to mind in that respect.

We also see a contrast with our current midfield players on the list. Skipper Scott Brown in at around £4 million 13 years ago and Olivier N’tcham just slightly above that sum in 2017. Many of us wouldn’t have realised N’tcham was in eighth place on an all times fee basis, his £4.5 million fee perhaps didn’t grab our attention as significantly high in that context.

And then there is Marc-Antoine Fortune, Tony Mowbray’s big purchase for that tricky period. Again a sizeable sum when you consider the context alongside the sums paid for these other players.

And that’s probably a great point to consider whether we got value for money on all these signings.

Let’s just say Fortune should probably have been named Costa. 32 appearances and 10 goals as a forward isn’t what you need from your 10th-most expensive player ever, it’s not what you need from even a bargain price forward. He’s a miss.

For the rest, there are no doubts on Martin O’Neill’s quartet of Sutton, Hartson, Lennon and Valgaeran. Joos Valgaeran maybe wasn’t as obviously outstanding as the others, but they were all definite value for money and enormous hits. Especially with Lennon now laying down a different history with the club.

Scott Brown is worth the money for almost any one or two of the seasons he’s played, never mind them all. Another absolute hit and he might yet do a Lennon and lead the club as manager in the future.

Edouard and Jullien. It may be slightly early for Jullien but he seems to get the club, grabbed some great goals in important games and winning us the League Cup and he gets the whole Celtic family approach. He’s well on the way to be a hit. Odsonne Edouard? Who wants to be like him with talent, potential, style, assists, goals and more. Yeah, we all want to be Edouard! Another huge hit.

Berkovic and Scheidt. The jokes too easy, let’s move past it and declare as obvious flops, two undeniable misses.

And that just leaves N’tcham. He’s definitely not a miss. But he’s nowhere near the same huge hits category as the others above. N’tcham is a slight oddity on here by virtue of the rise in transfer fees generally and his was a reasonable price for a decent player. To be fair if he stays he’ll continue to add value to the team. If he moves on, then hopefully it’ll be for much more than we paid. So let’s call him a hit in that context.

That’s seven hits out of ten and as the original tweet indicates that feels like a pretty good success rate. It’s perhaps slightly balanced by how bad the three misses were!

It’s been interesting to look back over that list and reflect on it. It’ll be interesting to see whether any new signings can break into the list over the next window.