Odsonne Edouard

To be fair part of management is about making unpopular decisions from time-to-time.

If we had a competent recruitment department we'd have been able to sell and bring in the next Eddie.

Sure it would've been unpopular but most fans were reserved to the probability of him leaving before Covid hit, such was his form.

Instead we had Hammond in place, who turned out to be a turkey. Strachan's son as chief European scout who looks like another nepotistic appointment.

With the benefit of hindsight selling Eddie for £30m+ and paying the £10m for Toney would've been the best thing to do.

 

Disagree. He would’ve made it very clearly known he wanted away. It isn’t really a binary thing though, you can want away if the right offer comes in but we willing to stay otherwise. There’s lots of different levels of someone wanting away.

 

Not giving his all is completely different from just downing tools. Personally I think getting Covid had a big impact on him as well.

 

Apparently the move that was on the table was Inter Milan, initially on loan.

 

You’re right if we had let Edouard go last season and signed Toney everyone would have been raging with the board had we probably lost the league, he was blatantly obvious he wasn’t the same player from the previous can dress it up all you want with his goals- a lot of which were penalties and against mainly lower opposition, elyounoussi missed a lot of games and was a substitute a lot and still managed 15 goals and quite a few assists but still doesn’t take away a lot of the time he was very poor and anonymous and most Celtic fans aren’t too fussed if he doesn’t play again

That said with the performance s from the other players over the season we could have had haaland or mbappe as our main striker and still lost the league

 

Not really IMO. Anyone giving any less than 100% for us, while still happy to take thousands of £s out the club, is a scab in my opinion. Totally disrespectful to the support.

We've all seen how good a player he could be last season. Pressing, working hard for the team, releasing at the right moment, sublime finishes, passion.

This season all of the above has went missing. A player of Eddie's ability should be tearing up this League given the standard of it. The only reason he hasn't is down to his application.

I think it's clear he was geared up for a move last summer (maybe even verbally promised) and when it fell through he's spat the dummy. Instead of accepting and knuckling down, he's been getting by with putting in half-arsed efforts due to the lack of competition behind him.

 

But it would've been the right decision..

It's obvious now that Toney would've smashed it for us and quickly settled..

Our model is to find gems and make a profit on them. This would've been no different....despite some initial uproar..

 

We would of went mental if we sold eddy and lost the ten

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. There is nothing to suggest Toney wouldn't have fallen victim like the rest of the squad this season.

 

Think this is pretty much spot on.

The management team, especially Peter Lawell, all make a ridiculous amount of money and part of their job is to make these decisions that many of the fans won’t like.

Just look at rb Salzburg...

2014 they sell Sadio Mane and sign Takumi Minamino
2015 they sign Hee-Chan Hwang
2016 they sell Jonathon Soriano and sign Munas Dabbur
2017 they sign Patson Daka
2018 they sign Erling Haaland
2019 they sell Erling Haaland, Munas Dabbur, Takumi Minamino and sign Sekou Koita
2020 they sell Hee-Chan Hwang

They’ll probably lose Patson Daka this summer and have Sekoi Koita as main striker and sign someone else if they haven’t already.

That’s just there forwards, actually pretty incredible tbh. But if we had a proper succession plan we’d already have Edouard’s replacement and he’d have played a lot this season or last as we should have sold him last summer. Just like when we had Dembele and signed Edouard, a ready made replacement.

It can be done it’s just having excellent recruitment in place and we could and should definitely do that.

 

RB’s scouting system has at least 5/6 players for each position that they have scouted and evaluated before someone leaves.

What they have in place is impressive and it’s implemented in each country they have a team in as well.

I just don’t get why our club has not implemented a similar model due to the fact we have to work under tight budgets compared to our big leagues.

We should have a proper network in place that can assist each time someone is either sold or asks to leave so we have the replacement lined up already with the back room staff knowing they can have someone in the door.

 

The right decision would have been to buy Toney not Ajeti for me and have the two of them for a season.

 

Exactly.

Teams like Salzburg, Benfica, Porto, Ajax etc are masters at it. For the most part.

They sell a player when their stock is high and, more often than not, replace them with another quality player.

 

They often have players ready to replace them. When they buy projects they give them game time rather than play it safe. For years Brown, McGregor, Forrest and Eddy undropable and usually played 90 minutes. Nobody there to step in when sales or injuries happen.
We should have brought in another young striker with a loan to buy when Dembele left. If they failed we could have got another in and with good time left on Eddy's contract. Instead we brought in Bayo and Klimala.

 

Players should be out the door as soon as they wont sign an extension. Was it Boruc who signed a new contract then was off to Fiorentina about a week later so we could get decent money ?

 

Petrov did the same - signed an extension and then signed for Aston Villa, tried to say it was so we could get more money for him.

 

Would've still been the same Edouard this season..

So, wrong decision..

 

It was, Petrov did us a turn. We got £7m for him.

Others like Maloney had no loyalty to the club and used their expiring contracts for their own gain.

 

Players owe the club nothing. We have been lucky over the years to have had players who wanted to play for Celtic. For the majority of them, its a job. I have switched employers more than once, even when I've quite liked my colleagues but went to what I thought was a better or more suitable opportunity. Footballers are no different, other than the amount of money they earn and that they are traded in the market place. I doubt that anyone was going to pay a "transfer" fee for me. We should appreciate good players while we have them, some do become fans of our club but for some, we are only a line on their CV.