For the first time since 2011 there will be no Champions League campaign for Celtic this season and this has led to some serious questions being asked of the board and the manager. Much of the criticism is undoubtedly justified but as long as Celtic plays in the SPFL, can Champions League qualification ever be guaranteed, or even expected, every year?
The main complaint levelled at the board is that no money is being spent on buying established players, ready to take a starting spot right away and immediately improve the first team.
Celtic has taken in huge amounts of money from transfer fees and Champions League qualification in the past four years, starting with the sale of Aiden McGeady to Spartak Moscow in 2010, but income does not equal money to spend on buying players. The club has running costs to meet and bills to pay before money can be spent on players. The actual amount Celtic can afford to spend on transfer fees and wages for players is a lot less than many supporters seem to think.
The club has actually spent a lot of money in the past three years on transfer fees but another common complaint is that too many mediocre players in the £2-2.5m range have been signed. I agree wholeheartedly with this point, but the fault here lies with the scouting and management staff rather than the board. Quality can be had in this price range, Virgil van Dijk being the perfect example, but too many average players have been bought too.
There is an argument that the club should buy one £5m player, guaranteeing quality, instead of two £2.5m players. The problem with this argument is threefold.
First of all, a £5m price tag is no guarantee of quality, witness Shane Long signing for Southampton for £12m - a striker who has scored just 67 league goals in 274 appearances since 2005. After signing for Hull City in January this year, he managed just four league goals before joining Southampton this month. Despite this, I suspect more than a few Celtic fans would have been delighted if we'd matched the £4.5m West Bromwich Albion shelled out for this goal-every-four-games striker in 2011 when we were reportedly interested.
Secondly, if a player is bought for £5m, he will demand wages of at least double those paid to a £2.5m player. A transfer fee of £5m could easily commit the club to spending £12m overall on a player over the duration of a 3-4 year contract.
Thirdly, spending £5m on a single player, even if it does turn out to be a successful signing, will be no guarantee of either Champions League qualification or progression. In Champions League terms, £5m is chicken feed. We'd be breaking the bank for a return realistically limited to reaching the Last 16, which we have proven ourselves capable of three times already since the big-spending Martin O'Neill era ended. An era when despite the huge amounts spent on building a team, we never qualified for the Last 16.
The biggest problem Celtic faces is a structural one, largely outside of the control of the board.
Our income is dwarfed by that of even the lowliest EPL club. Southampton is now a more attractive proposition for footballers than Celtic; even for players who have experienced first hand how special a place Celtic Park is on Champions League nights.
We have to be realistic about this. It has to be faced and understood. When we want to sign anyone, if Southampton want him, we cannot compete with them. We will lose out on that player because Southampton can pay a far higher transfer fee, far higher wages, and offer a far more exciting professional challenge week in week out.
On those occasions when we do manage to spot talent before it comes to the attention of any EPL clubs (Wanyama, Hooper, van Dijk), the most we can hope for is two, possibly three seasons from them before the EPL clubs come calling as they WILL do given the exposure the players will get from playing for Celtic.
What this means, whether we like it or not, is that for the foreseeable future Celtic's business has to be spotting unnoticed talent, developing it, and selling on at as big a profit as possible. The alternative is to lose it for nothing at the end of the contract.
We are going to find it incredibly hard to build a team capable of challenging for a Last 16 spot in the Champions League, or some years, even just getting there. We cannot hold on to our best players for long enough to do that. So what can Celtic do?
We can do what we appear to be trying to do with Ronny Deila - implement a system from the lowest age groups to the first team to that relies on a well-drilled unit composed of incredibly fit players, playing a high-intensity game that allows a great degree of interchangeability in personnel. This will take time to achieve.
Our only hope of holding on to good players is to have a good number of Scottish and/or Irish players who have some form of emotional attachment to the club. Even then there will be more Charlie Nicholases than Paul McStays, more Lou Macaris than Danny McGrains. We're hoping for Kenny Dalglishes at best, in the sense that they'll give us a good six or seven years before heading off to test themselves in England.
Don't look on Henrik Larsson as an example of a foreign player who stayed at Celtic out of a love of the club. He hung around for seven years because we paid him top dollar to do so, at a time when Celtic was a far more attractive proposition in comparison to lower level EPL clubs. The consequence of that was seeing him leave for Barcelona for nothing in 2004. We have neither the financial muscle nor the football environment to repeat that.
So we have a problem. Any top class foreign youngsters we sign will have no emotional attachment to the club and will leave at the first opportunity. Scots/Irish youngsters *might* hang around longer, but Scotland simply does not produce talent in the numbers we once did and Ireland is heavily scouted by EPL clubs. You'll find the vast majority of Irish youngsters will regard Celtic affectionately as a second club who play in a second-rate league. They'll mostly support Manchester United/Liverpool/Arsenal or even, God help us, Chelsea. Most will sign for an EPL club given the chance.
Celtic unavoidably is a holding operation at present. Not until the Ibrox tribute act "returns" to the Premiership (I know!), but until the financial situation changes, whether that means a move to another league, or a transformational financial recovery for Scottish football.
We cannot afford to spend any more than £2-3m on a single player, and even if we could, those players don't want to play in Scotland if an EPL club is interested.
Top class players can be had for £2-3m, but we cannot hold on to them for more than a season or two because they will be off as soon as an EPL team come sniffing around. It makes no sense at all to not sell these players for a profit, because the alternative is to lose them for nothing once they unhappily see out their contracts.
So how can the likes of Maribor qualify for the Champions League with a far smaller budget than ours? Well that's a failing on the part of our scouting and coaching staff, not the board. It's actually an argument against spending more, because as we have seen, you don't have to spend tens of millions of pounds to get there. But Maribor very rarely qualify for the Champions League, and Legia have never been there.
Celtic is caught between two extremes. Nowhere near wealthy enough to guarantee Champions League football every year, but unable to regularly make our financial advantage over the minnows of European football count due to our close proximity to a financial giant.
Our best hope at the moment is to ensure the money we do spend is spent wisely. We need more Wanyamas and fewer Baldes. Above all, we need to get behind the Ronny Deila project which is a long-term one, the benefits of which will not become apparent for a year or more. We need to accept that we will not qualify for the Champions League every year in the current climate, and we need to hope that our football environment changes for the better sooner rather than later.
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