ANDREJ BACANIN CELTIC MOVE: YET ANOTHER DAILY RECORD FAIL
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
There’s going to be a fair bit of debunking to do on The ACSOM Blog today, given some of the utter mince that’s been spat out by our tabloid press overnight.
Let’s start with the case of Serbian holding midfielder Andrej Bacanin. The 18-year-old has been linked with a move to Celtic, according to this morning’s Daily Record.
I’ll confidently predict now, it won’t happen. Apart from the fact that an Andrej Bacanin Celtic move doesn't make sense for the player or indeed the club at this time, the reasons why should be immediately obvious to anyone with a basic intuition as to how football’s transfer market operates.
The Only Person Claiming an Andrej Bacanin Celtic Link is The Owner of His Current Club!
So, with this apparent “bombshell” of a story (The Daily Record’s words, not mine), you’d think they’d have a pretty water tight source for the story, wouldn’t you?
As usual, the Record never fails to disappoint when it comes to basic journalistic competence.
No, the only source for this story is the owner of Bacanin’s current club Cukaricki, a gentleman by the name of Vladimir Matijašević.
Call me cynical, but when the only person telling you that a deal is imminent is the person who stands to benefit the most from that deal going through, I get just slightly suspicious about the validity of that information.
Now, as I’m sure you’re all aware, it’s generally regarded as bad form for a club to officially comment on a transfer while, negotiations are supposedly ongoing. You certainly don’t expect the owner to come out and directly say “these clubs want to sign our player.”
Unless of course, the aim of your claim was to drum up interest in the player, rather than actually confirm any imminent deal.
We saw Cluj try a similar maneuver last week with their striker Louis Munteanu. Several media outlets (myself included), ran reports that Celtic had apparently made an offer of 6.9 million for the Romanian striker.
It turns out these reports were not true. It was, in the end, mischief making from The Cluj board, with probably a little bit of encouragement from Fiorentina, who also retain a 50% share in the player’s registration.
The aim of the game wasn’t to push through a move to Celtic, though no doubt the Record and The S*n gleefully embraced the opportunity to run another “Celtic lowballing again” headline.
It seems Mr Matijašević pays attention to the reactionary nature of Glasgow’s media bubble, and also that of certain journalists elsewhere in Europe too. His statement that claims “Celtic, Rangers, Ajax and Udinese” are all in for the player seems nonsensical.
It’s as if he’s just done a Google search for teams commonly linked with Eastern European players and picked out 4 names at random. Though let’s be honest, that’s probably not far off how the Daily Record newsroom operates these days either.
Now Bacanin sounds like a talented player, and from what I’ve read he has done really well this year, especially for one so young. But he doesn’t fit Celtic’s profile of player at all.
This one is just another in all too long line of pre-season make-believe stories being pushed by our incompetent media.