Celtic Transfer Analysis: Evaluating the Quality of the Board's Final Deals

While doing the weekly shop, I turned into my second-favourite aisle in the supermarket: the biscuit aisle. You'll know this to be true by the size of my arse. I did this just as I was contemplating our final day of transfer activity before the European deadline slams shut. It started to make me think that maybe, for once, we were bringing in quality biscuits rather than the bags of broken ones the club purchased last January.

As you will all know, any packet of quality, dunkable delights tends not to have many inside. With that in mind, will we end up light on numbers by the close of the transfer window? Martin O'Neill himself said we were going for quality in this window rather than quantity. That did make me think he considered the previous window to be good on numbers but poor on ability.

But back to the biscuits.

Hobnobs are expensive. There's a reason for that - they are a quality munch. In my humble opinion, they are the king of the biscuit aisle because they have a bit of everything. Players who have a bit of everything are usually on the pricey side, so the reported fee for Duran feels like finding a double packet of the aforementioned chocolate Hobnobs in the "reduced to clear" section.

Kasper Høgh was a signing that we should and could have made in January. But Celtic, being Celtic, decided it made much better sense to jeopardise our chances of winning the league just to pay a few million more in the summer. The Temu school of business strikes again.

Høgh is a Tunnock's Real Caramel Wafer of a player. He is solid, does exactly what it says on the wrapper, and you can see the sheer quality in him. He's maybe not going to get onto the scoresheet every game, but his arrival gave everyone a lift. Watching and listening to his appearances on the absolute dirge of post-match mainstream media interviews, you can't help but like the guy.

A Wibele is a small, traditional sweet biscuit from Baden-Württemberg in Germany, famous for its figure-eight shape. Mika Baur hails from that area and shares many of the same characteristics. We pestered Paderborn into accepting our bid, and I really like the look of this fella. I reckon he'll get tastier as time goes on.

From what we saw of Haissen Hassam at the World Cup for Egypt, he is just an absolute sugar rush of a player. Once he gets up to speed, he'll disappear past defences quicker than a packet of Oreo biscuits at a kids' birthday party.

Now, we've paid pretty big money for these biscuits - ahem, I mean players, of course. Between the guys we've already got in the building and those rumoured to be jetting in, we will have spent a fair penny. Amazingly, though, after the dust has settled, we will very likely be showing a substantial net profit.

How do our bargain-basement board do it? What stars they are. Enjoy having these corporate giants at our club while you can, lads and lasses, as I'm quite sure they will be tempted away by some multinational corporation very soon. Boardrooms across the world live in perpetual fear of Michael “The Shrug” Nicholson entering the business world. Personally, I’d love for him to enter it while he was actually at Celtic.

He might also want to turn his gargantuan intellect towards why our own branded biscuit production line appears to have halted. We have a clutch of them in the squad - Tierney, Calmac, Ralston, Forrest, Murray, and Donovan - but sadly, there don't appear to be many more on the horizon. We all know that a homemade biscuit tastes much better than anything you can buy.

Maybe next year we'll risk it for a biscuit and go shopping before we start our European qualifiers. The likelihood, however, is that we'll again start the quest for some sort of progress in Europe under-prepared, underfunded, and crumbling in the qualifying round like a digestive in a hot cup of coffee.

Are you happy with the way we've gone about our transfer business? Drop a comment or hit us up on the socials.

Anyway, I'd best be off. All this biscuit talk has made me hungry.