It’s obscene.. £198m for a footballer? You would get 40 Olivier Ntchams for that money – and we might need 40!
Rodgers minds the gap as he digests Celts’ Euro challenge
THE price of Neymar is worth 40 Olivier Ntchams and Brendan Rodgers joked he might need all of them to compete with his Champions League rivals.
But behind his smile is a serious concern of an ever-widening financial gap that reaches far beyond the outer limits of Celtic Park.
Obscene was the word Rodgers used to describe the £198million splurged by PSG’s Qatari owners to make Neymar the most expensive player in the world.
That Kylian Mbappe is set to follow in a £138m deal from Monaco only makes the sums being spent even more staggering for the Celtic boss who believes UEFA must tighten up their financial fair play regulations.
That’s a debate for another day, however, as Rodgers’s mind was consumed by how he goes about convincing his players they can compete with PSG and fellow Group B rivals Bayern Munich where it matters most. On grass, not balance sheets.
Rodgers said: “It’s obscene now. I’ve always believed you pay for quality and go that extra mile to get that quality in – but £198m for a football player?
“You would get 40 Olivier Ntchams for that. And we might need 40!
“It’s important that there’s a realisation of the level we’re at and certainly against those two teams, Bayern and PSG, it’s night and day of a difference. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be competitive.
“Of course it’s a big challenge for us but you can still make it very difficult for them. You have to be aggressive in these games. It doesn’t matter how good someone is – it’s how good they are once you are touch-tight with them.
“If we were given four or five yards of space then we could all play in the Premiership and earn decent money.
“But it doesn’t matter if somebody earns £200,000 per week – what are they like when you get touch-tight to them?
“If they can still get past you once or twice then okay, they’ve earned their money. In which case you stick with them and try to stop them again and that’s the mindset we always try to have. They might have reputations but let’s see if they’re good players.
“We are no standard bearers but we have a way we want to play, particularly at home. We’re excited by it and 12 months on we feel better prepared for it after the experience of last year.”
While he joked about needing 40 Ntchams to handle PSG, Rodgers is deadly serious when he insists he’ll settle for just 11 “heroes” with hearts
as big as Nir Bitton. The boss hit out at the flak the Israeli midfielder has copped in the wake of the 4-3 defeat in Astana which made their passage to the group stage more stressful than expected. That a guy playing through the pain barrier and being brave enough to fill an unfamiliar central-defensive role to cover an injury crisis should be lambasted rather than lauded stunned Rodgers. And he insisted his heroic performer should be thanked not mocked for his part in a disjointed defensive display. He said: “The stuff that has been said about Nir has been absolutely incredible. I hear and I read and I see the guy getting absolutely killed which I find unbelievable. We had three of our main central defenders injured and I do not have magic in a wand to just spring up a centre-half.
“People are talking about a £30m risk – well we might not be here for £30m if it wasn’t for him. No one talked about when he stepped in and made the pass to Leigh Griffiths for the goal.
“After Kilmarnock Nir was in a boot for two days. He took it off just before he went into the training session the night before the game. He was suffering.
“His leg was sore. But he put himself out there for the team and did the best he possibly could in that situation. He is still in pain but this is a guy who shows the spirit of the team and so I feel the need to defend him.
“Guys like him, James Forrest and Tom Rogic playing as strikers, all because of injuries we have. I didn’t see too many solutions being proposed when you have a crisis like we had. So we had to find a way to get through.
“Look at Rosenborg scoring four against Ajax, who were in the Europa League Final last season. We went there and controlled the game, dominated the game, because of guys like Nir Bitton.”