Neil Lennon confirms Celtic star has been heavily sanctioned

Neil Lennon has confirmed that the Celtic star has been heavily sanctioned as expected for his actions earlier in the season.

In a season in which Celtic will be aiming to win a history-making tenth straight Scottish league title, the early portion has been strangely dominated by negative news surrounding the club.

Yes, they might be already out of the Champions League qualifiers but the biggest to the club came even before that when Boli Bolingoli decided to travel to Spain without telling anybody and then returned to feature against Kilmarnock when he should have been quarantining.

As expected it raised a huge uproar in the media and perhaps rightfully so. Celtic’s next two league games were postponed while the government threatened that the league season could be called off altogether if such mistakes continued to happen. The fact that the Bolingoli incident had taken place days after 8 Aberdeen players had gone out to a pub after their game against the Rangers had certainly not helped matters.

For his actions, Bolingoli was handed a five-game ban although realistically it is unlikely that he will ever feature in a Celtic shirt again. So the ban probably does not make much of a difference to his chances.

It has been confirmed by Neil Lennon though that the club have handed the Belgian left-back, punishment on their own part as well. And according to him, it is the ‘maximum sanction’ that he could have been handed although it has not been made clear what exactly the sanction is.

As reported by Sky Sports, the Celtic manager said:

"“He’s been heavily sanctioned by the club, the maximum sanction we could give him really.“He’s not back in training and I think his representatives are looking at options for him elsewhere.”"

The fact that Bolingoli is not back in training suggests that his representatives might be looking to secure him a move away from the club. And if recent reports are to be believed then he is being followed by Italian giants AS Roma.